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Consultant presents draft Coldwater master plan, sets 63-day public comment window
Summary
A consultant for the City of Coldwater presented a draft 20-year master plan to the Planning Commission, outlining seven goals including housing, downtown vitality and mobility, and proposing zoning and implementation steps. The plan will enter a state-mandated 63-day public comment period if the commission forwards it to city council.
Julie, a consultant from Progressive, presented the draft Coldwater master plan to the Planning Commission and described the next steps for public review. "This is still a draft," she said, adding that state law "mandates that there's 63 days" for public comment before final adoption is considered.
The draft frames a 20-year land-use strategy and pairs goals and objectives with a future-land-use map and an implementation matrix. Julie said the draft contains seven high-level goals and 21 objectives, supported by 52 action items that identify partners and time frames. Key priorities she cited included expanding housing options, supporting downtown vitality, and improving multimodal transportation and recreation access.
Julie summarized the outreach that informed the plan: in-person pop-ups (including Hops on Monroe and Apple Fest), two open houses, and online surveys that—combined with a student survey—garnered more than 600 responses. She said the plan's analysis shows local population growth outpacing county and state trends and a gap between housing demand and recent housing construction.
On housing, Julie noted demand both for more single-family units and for "missing middle" housing (duplexes, townhomes, accessory dwelling units). She said roughly half of Coldwater's housing is single-family and that about 70% of survey respondents favored more single-family houses, while smaller-scale multifamily and middle-housing types also showed measurable demand.
Julie described proposed future-land-use categories (single-family, mixed residential/missing-middle, multifamily, neighborhood mixed-use, downtown mixed-use, commercial and industrial, and institutional) and showed a draft non-motorized network for improved sidewalks and bike facilities. She said draft zoning changes and test-fit concepts are intended to support the goals without immediate adoption of new rules.
Next steps: commissioners have several weeks to provide comments to staff; the commission could vote at its July 6 meeting to forward the draft to city council. If council opens the public comment period at its July 13 meeting, the 63-day window would run through Sept. 14, with potential further revisions and a possible October consideration for final action.
The commission did not vote on the draft during the meeting; commissioners were invited to submit written feedback to staff ahead of the July 6 agenda.
