Plano's New Comprehensive Plan Needs YOUR Feedback!

This has been a long time in coming, but it’s finally here. The new Comprehensive Plan for the city has been under development for nearly two years, and is now open for public feedback. To leap ahead to review the plan and provide your feedback, click here. For the explanation and backstory, read on. For the Comprehensive Plan Townhall, check this link and tune in to PlanoTV.org at 7:00 PM next Thursday, October 14.

A comprehensive plan is meant to provide a 20-30 year guide for the development, re-development, growth, and change for a city.

You may remember the saga of the Plano Tomorrow Plan, passed in 2015, immediately subjected to a citizen referendum petition, and tied up in the courts for five years until we repealed it last year. That whole episode created considerable consternation and division in our city. Many of the concerns at issue are detailed in my previous article here.

However, we didn’t wait for that chapter to end before we set about creating a new comprehensive plan, lovingly dubbed the Plano United 2050 Plan. Our aim was both to create a comprehensive plan that “the overwhelming majority of our citizens can get behind” and to begin to heal the division.

To that end, and at the recommendation of City Manager Israelson and City Attorney Mims, the city council created a sixteen-member Comprehensive Plan Review Committee (CPRC), made up of two appointees by each council member. At that time, after the 2019 Plano election, council was relatively split in terms of the comprehensive plan. One of my campaign promises that year was to act on the citizen petition (check).

But we didn’t simply each appoint a couple of people. We set a high bar of a 75 percent threshold for the CPRC to pass anything. This supermajority vote requirement would ensure nothing was passed through on a bare majority vote, but that real consensus would need to be reached. Anything passed by the CPRC would then need to be passed by a majority of the Planning & Zoning Commission.

Given the way the members of the CPRC were appointed, the reality was that the CPRC was engaged in a proxy war on behalf of the city council. It was dicey whether anything would get anywhere near the 75% voting requirement, but after a long, arduous process, the plan received six unanimous votes.

A seventh vote was fractured after the Planning & Zoning Commission removed a recommendation that the city council pass a requirement to raise the bar on passing zoning requests which don’t conform to the comprehensive plan, but we on council recently passed an ordinance ourselves requiring the Planning & Zoning Commission and City Council, if either were to pass such a zoning request not in conformance with the comprehensive plan, to make specific findings explaining why. After that, the CPRC voted unanimously once more, to ratify P&Z’s unanimous vote, and now the plan comes to you.

This plan is incredibly well thought-out, and is agreed upon by both some of the most ardent supporters and critics of the Plano Tomorrow Plan. While no one got absolutely everything they wanted, due to the 75 percent supermajority vote requirement, the resulting compromise is one which everyone on the CPRC is genuinely pleased with.

But now it’s your turn to evaluate the plan and provide your feedback. Any changes based on this feedback will be made by the city council when it comes before us. This is a huge deal, and a fantastic time in our city’s history.

My sincere thanks to all who served on the Comprehensive Plan Review Committee: