Greenville County councilors push strategic growth planning, ask utilities to share data

Greenville County councilors opened a committee-of-the-whole meeting by setting priorities after a recent planning retreat, emphasizing the need to coordinate growth with infrastructure and public-safety capacity.

Council members identified transparency, strategic land-use planning, targeted economic development and fiscal stewardship as top themes and proposed concrete next steps, including a GIS-based 'heat map' to show where growth is outpacing sewer, electric and emergency services. Councilors said the map would help target infrastructure investment.

"We don't want to be putting a lot of growth in an area where we don't have the infrastructure there to support it for sure," a council member said, urging staff to gather input from the sheriff's office and EMS about stress points.

Members asked the county administrator to schedule a workshop within the next three to four weeks that would bring utilities and municipal partners together to share data and align planning. Staff said utilities have not consistently provided underlying system data to the county, and some datasets are owned by private or municipal utility providers.

Councilors also discussed revisiting the Unified Development Ordinance and ensuring local land-development regulations align with the county's comprehensive plan. Planning staff noted the county recently completed a five-year update and said the planning commission has expressed interest in further review next year.

The meeting produced several agreed action items: staff will pursue a utilities workshop, put the ordinance/comp-plan alignment on the Planning & Development (PND) agenda in early April, and return with options for a GIS approach and related staffing needs.

The committee took no formal policy votes on these items; councilors directed staff to bring back proposals for committee consideration.