Charlotte staff outline citywide community-area plans, aim for June adoption

Planning staff told the Transportation Planning & Development Committee on June 2 that 14 community-area plans have been drafted to add local detail to the Charlotte Future 2040 comprehensive plan and to provide consistent guidance where decades-old land-use guidance varied across the city. The plans, staff said, are intended to create ‘‘complete communities’’ with clearer expectations for where growth should occur, a consistent place-type palette and assessment tables to help prioritize mobility, open-space and placemaking investments.

Catherine (Planning) said staff conducted extensive outreach prior to and after the drafts’ release—more than 400,000 contacts overall across Charlotte’s planning processes and 6,000 in-person interactions during the area-plan outreach, and that the draft plans themselves generated roughly 1,700 discrete comments. ‘‘We’ve been engaging the community with over 20 tactics both in person and online,’’ she said, and described webinars, biweekly office hours and a May 15 webinar that reached more than 100 attendees.

Staff said the comment set is mixed: they summarized roughly one-third of comments as suggestions for change, about 20% as questions and about 40% as concerns. Comments that will lead to edits include adding more clarity to maps (for example, circling areas of intended change on policy maps), relocating place-type descriptions next to maps, adding an index and glossary, inserting the technical urban-heat methodology into the appendix, and producing a ‘‘program guide’’ that defines types of specific plans (for example, station-area or environmental-justice plans) and prioritization criteria.

Kathy (Planning) placed the area plans in the city’s policy hierarchy: she said the 2040 plan provides the foundation and the area plans provide the ‘‘walls and framing’’ that will allow more specific plans—such as small-area or transit-station plans—to be developed faster and with clearer expectations. She warned that without a single, updated framework ‘‘we run the risk of having a policy map updated in some areas and not others,’’ and staff therefore recommends citywide adoption.

Councilmembers on the committee emphasized public outreach, plain-language materials, and district-level events. Councilmember Renee Johnson urged more visible, district-level webinars and suggested permitting multiple ‘‘road show’’ events to explain how to read the assessment tables and how plan guidance will be used in rezoning staff analyses. Staff said they plan an implementation road show and to integrate the new policies into rezoning analyses so staff reports are aligned with the adopted plans.

Next steps and timing: staff said they will brief full Council in action review on June 9 and return with a proposed adoption ordinance on June 23. No formal vote took place at the committee meeting; the committee discussion was informational.