The city of Auburn will present its new Comprehensive Plan 2030 to the City Council in a public hearing in April.
Until then, citizens can learn more about the plan and participate by giving their input at public meetings.
"Cities don't just happen," said Kevin Cowper, assistant city manager. "They have to be planned."
Cowper said one of the things people enjoy about Auburn is the quality of life. The new plan, he said, will enable taken-for-granted functions of the city, like traffic, economics and utilities, to be improved.
"The comprehensive plan is the long-range planning document for the city," said Forrest Cotten, Auburn's planning director. "It's a guide for future growth and future good growth."
The plan, which is designed to provide guidelines on controlling and organizing land use and development, has been in the developmental stage for approximately two years.
"What you're seeing now over this last stretch is really the culmination of all of that work," Cotten said.
Cotten said it is unlikely that there will be any problems getting the plan approved by the Council.
"Effectively, what will happen is the plan will get adopted, and then we begin a fairly involved process, probably an 18- to 24-month effort where we actually amend the zoning ordinance to correspond with the future land-use plan."
The 2030 plan is not the first developed by the city. The 2000 and 2020 plans did not emphasize land-use planning.
"The plan that we had in place previously was a little general, maybe a little bit too general to be practically applied," Cotten said.
Cotten said one of the primary benefits of the 2030 plan is that it will give people a feeling of predictability about future developments in the city.
Cotten said the 2030 plan is a working plan, which the city will monitor and update every five years after it is passed.
"It's sort of a rolling stone," said Warren McCord, a member of the planning commission.
McCord is a former Auburn faculty member and a part of the nine-member commission appointed by the Council to develop the plan.
"Basically, you're supposed to look at planning issues on a nonpolitical basis," McCord said.
The commission has worked for months with the city's planning department to refine and modify the plan.
"We've had about 10 work sessions with the planning commission dating back to May," Cotten said.
In addition, public hearings have been held to gain citizen input.
"Anybody who's a resident of the city of Auburn, I think, has a vested interest in not only knowing what Auburn's like today, but how we as a government are saying Auburn is going to be like 20 years from now," Cotten said.
McCord said one difficulty in the development of a comprehensive plan is that everyone has a stake in the results and different ideas on how things should be done.
"Planning is something that is difficult to do in detail without some emotion," McCord said. "It's a complex, fascinating civic process."
McCord said the plan, if implemented correctly, would have many beneficial effects on the quality of Auburn as a city. If done wrong, he said, it could have some negative results.
McCord said cities either change for the better or the worse.
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