Table of Contents

Built Environment and Health

The city’s comprehensive plan includes Healthy Community as one of its guiding principles. Healthy Community Policies and Strategies emphasize local food systems, healthcare access, brownfield sites, physical activity, and environmental justice.

Community Visioning

This city's comprehensive plan lays out its planning framework vision in Chapter 4 and also summarizes it early in the plan (p. 5). The plan is framed around nine vision principles — Built Environment, Quality Education, Prosperous Economy, Housing and Neighborhoods, Transportation and Mobility, Community Services, Healthy Community, Natural Resources, and Regionalism — which shape lists of policies and proposed implementation strategies. Chapter 3 describes the community visioning process.

Comprehensive Planning

This city's comprehensive plan from one of the four Illinois-Iowa "Quad Cities" on the Mississippi River was used to help refine the Sustaining Places comprehensive plan standards. An extensive public outreach component that engaged multiple stakeholder groups is documented within the plan. The planning framework for the document is based on the plan vision and nine principles:

• Built Environment
• Quality Education
• Prosperous Economy
• Housing and Neighborhoods
• Transportation and Mobility
• Community Service
• Healthy Community
• Natural Resources
• Regionalism.

Goals and strategies are listed for each principle. A future land-use plan lists policies for each land-use category. An implementation action plan matrix lists actions and identifies responsible agencies and timeframe, as well as potential funding sources where available.

Food Systems

This city's comprehensive plan includes a Healthy Communities element that addresses access to healthy, locally grown food. Policies include supporting community-based food projects, local food procurement, and promoting local farming; strategies include promoting sustainable agriculture and specialty crops to enhance the regional food system, increasing retail opportunities and access to local foods in the city, as well as encouraging local food distribution and processing business development, supporting community gardening, and exploring other ways to provide local food options in the city.

Solar Energy 

This city's comprehensive plan includes solar energy policy that aligns with community visioning results. During student vision workshops, participants identified alternative energy (solar) as an opportunity for the future (p. 88).

The community survey showed that 44% of residents thought that promoting energy efficient buildings and site design should be high priority and 22% said it should be highest priority. Comments were provided about the utilization of solar and wind power (p. 97).

A Natural Resource policy includes "support the application of renewable energy technologies such as active, passive, and PV solar energy" (Policy 9, p. 126).