What is a Comprehensive Plan?
A comprehensive plan establishes a community’s long-term vision, goals, strategies, and policies for guiding future decisions, changes, and investments. It includes background information on the City’s past, along with an analysis of current issues and trends. The Plan is intended to serve as a guide for the City’s future growth, revitalization, preservation, and resilience over the next 10-20 years. While it will primarily provide guidance for area within the City’s boundary, it will also address key community issues that require collaboration with other state, county, and local agencies.
What is PlanAberdeen?
PlanAberdeen updates the City’s last Comprehensive Plan, adopted in 2011. It will express the vision of what the City wants to become over the next 10 to 20 years and the steps needed to make that vision a reality. It serves as the policy guide and framework for future growth and development, infrastructure and capital improvements, and natural and historic resource conservation. The Plan encompasses the City and its Growth Areas and includes information on topics that impact growth and development such as land use, transportation, economic development, community facilities, and the environment.
How is the Comprehensive Plan used?
The Comprehensive Plan is the guiding document that City decision makers, agencies, residents, employers, developers, and other stakeholders use to ensure that the City of Aberdeen evolves in line with the community’s collective vision for the future. As one example, the City’s Planning and Community Development Department uses the Plan to evaluate projects and developers use the Plan to guide their proposals. Having a forward thinking and up-to-date comprehensive plan is critical to the City’s long-term success.
Why update the Comprehensive Plan now?
The current plan helped to guide City decisions and policies since it was adopted in 2011. The City is required to update its comprehensive plan on a periodic basis to address changing conditions, new socio-economic circumstances, or other changes in policy. The State of Maryland also requires that municipalities update their plans at least once every ten years.
Wallace Montgomery, a multidisciplinary consulting firm with offices in Maryland and Delaware, has been contracted to update the Comprehensive Plan. Working with City staff, boards, and commissions, the update will reflect current demographic, development, and preservation conditions in the City of Aberdeen, identify future trends and opportunities, and provide goals and recommendations for a number of topic areas.
What will the Plan address?
The Plan will address the following topics as mandated by the State: Goals and Objectives, Land Use, Housing, Community Facilities, Transportation, Water Resources, Sensitive Areas, Areas of Critical State Concern, and Development Regulations.
Major components of the Plan will include a community vision and implementation plan, community profile, existing conditions studies, and land use analysis. Based on the community’s input and updated data being collected and analyzed, a future land use map will be generated to help guide future growth, development, and preservation.
Who can be involved?
Anyone and everyone! The City encourages all members of the City of Aberdeen community to join in and let their voice be heard. If you live, work, own property, visit, or utilize services in Aberdeen, we want your feedback!
How can I get involved?
It is important to get involved in the Comprehensive Plan activities, from data collection to community visioning and mapping, to the creation of goals and objectives. The Get Involved page of this website describes all current opportunities available to give your input, as well as summaries of events that have already occurred. This page will also list all public meeting dates and times throughout the process as they are scheduled. Use the Comments page to sign up for future updates and to ask questions and provide feedback regarding the comprehensive plan.
What is visioning?
Visioning is a planning process through which a community creates a shared vision for its future – and plans to achieve it. Think of the vision as the community’s preferred ‘destination’ – a place where it would like to be in the future. Think of the implementation plan as a vision ‘roadmap’ – how the community intends to get there over time.
We already have other plans and strategies – what will happen to those?
Existing plans and strategies are an important part of the comprehensive planning process. These plans will inform the planning process and, in some cases, will be incorporated into the Comprehensive Plan if the goals and vision are still consistent with the community’s aspirations.
How can I get the latest information on this planning process?
Keep visiting this project website or sign up for updates on our Get Involved page!