A public input meeting was held for the update to CompPlan 2030, the comprehensive plan for the City of Auburn, on Tuesday.
The meeting allowed residents of Auburn to hear updates to the plan as well as to ask questions, make comments or request changes of the plan to the city’s Planning Department.
The CompPlan 2030 was adopted in 2011 and is periodically reviewed by City staff to best determine Auburn’s growth.
The plan serves as an outline for city policy, especially land-use and transportation infrastructure, going forward.
Planning Director Forrest Cotten opened the meeting by welcoming those in attendance and encouraged community members to give his department feedback on provided comment cards and to discuss issues with staff after the meeting.
Principal Planner Thomas Weintraut gave an overview of Auburn’s changing demographics since the plan’s adoption in 2011 as well as updates to the plan, including changes to transportation, public safety, schools, the upcoming Parks and Recreation master plan and designated land-uses in the city limits.
The population of Auburn has grown by close to 10,000 since 2010, from 53,380 to an estimated 62,059 in 2015, according to figures from the U.S. Census used in the presentation.
“The CompPlan is constantly being updated, it doesn’t just sit on the shelf for five months,” Weintraut said. “As things happen, we analyze and go through and adjust them.”
Weintraut also addressed areas the Planning Department had been focusing on that are now complete, such as changes to Opelika Road, South College Street, East Samford Avenue and the expansion of Auburn’s urban core.
Cotten spoke about the Planning Department’s future focus areas for the next five years, which include changes to Harper and Glenn avenues; the Highway 280 Corridor; Cox, Wire and Dean roads and Highway 14.
“You can see all that’s been done from the planning perspective over the last five years,” Cotton said. “Now what we do is we reset the table and establish what we’re going to work to accomplish over the next five-year planning period.”
Principal Planner Tyler Caldwell spoke about the data gathered by the Planning Department that led to the CompPlan’s updates, including annexations by the city as well as changes in the supply and demand of multi-family and single-family units and stated that the city currently has approximately 6,600 acres of developable land.
“Using great data that the IT Department has that they made available to us, we took essentially the corporate limit and we isolated what we recognize as vacant land in the city,” Caldwell said.
“That developable land can be consumed by single-family, it could be consumed by institutional, it could be consumed by commercial and any number of uses available to developers in the city.”
After the presentation, Cotton invited members of the Auburn community to meet with department staff and look over updated maps of areas around town.
The complete CompPlan 2030 along with the updates and presentation is available to the public at the City of Auburn's website.
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