2017.10.24 WS - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Community Assets & Development Department MEMORANDUM DATE: October 24, 2017 TO: Manager Lotter Mayor Members of the Council FROM: Janice Gundlach, Asst. Director of Community Assets & Development/Planning Director SUBJECT: Comprehensive Plan Update As the Council is aware, the City has been actively engaging with the public for nearly 10 months now regarding the Comprehensive Plan Update process. Those engagement activities have included: • Neighborhood Meetings at Freedom Park and Hanson Park • Social Pinpoint • Stockyard Days • Survey Monkey The above noted events have allowed the City’s consultant opportunities to understand what the community desires in the future, as well as understand what areas of the City the public is receptive to reinvestment and/or redevelopment. Collectively, these exercises allow the City to reset the vision (or reaffirm the existing vision) and meet population and housing growth projections for New Brighton. The Council was presented a Phase I Community Engagement report earlier this summer. The comments in that report helped develop more specific visions that were then presented to the community at Stockyard Days and through the Survey Monkey. The results of the second round of community engagement, Phase II Community Engagement, are provided in the attached report. The Phase II Community Engagement exercise produced comments that ranged from both negative to positive. Based on the scoring, all of the concepts are generally liked, with the Civic Area improvements ranking higher than the others. Safety, especially for bikers and pedestrians, as well as connections between parks were brought up again and again. Lastly, many of the reinvestment/redevelopment areas were liked but many were concerned about traffic. This seems to be an ongoing concern and reconciling traffic that is bypassing the interstate verses local traffic, will be something that needs to be examined more thoroughly. To conclude, nothing in the Phase II Community Engagement results suggests the City is either missing a key issue or has identified something that shouldn’t be considered as part of the update process. Thus, staff would like the Council to accept the comments and direct staff and the City’s consultant to continue to move through the update process and start revising the language in the current plan. There will