Table of Contents

age-friendly communities

The city’s comprehensive plan stresses the importance of making sure public spaces and services serve all ages. Chapter 5 includes a provision to adjust recreational programming to meet the city’s changing demographics by conducting a survey and investing in professional development for staff (Goal 2, Strategy C). Chapter 7 includes a provision to make community schools neighborhood anchors, with programming and services for all ages (Goal 1, Strategy D).

Capital Improvements Programming

The city’s comprehensive plan includes policy recommendations to guide the development of a capital improvement program (Part V, Chapter 13, Strategy D). It lists a number of capital projects identified through the comprehensive planning project and recommends establishing a capital planning process modeled on the Government Finance Officers Association’s “best practices.”

Community Visioning

This city's comprehensive plan provides it's vison and principles in Part I, Chapter 1. These were developed from the contributions of more than 1,000 residents through an extensive public outreach program and series of community participation events. The five-part vision and list of principles, organized into categories of People, Prosperity, Place, Partnerships, and Performance, provide a guiding framework for the plan.

Comprehensive Planning

This city's comprehensive plan from a legacy city is organized around four big-picture focus areas:

• Green systems
• Neighborhoods, housing, and community renewal
• Prosperity and opportunity
• Strengthening the city systems and networks.

It offers a detailed vision statement and complete structure of goals, policies, strategies, and detailed action items; each chapter ends with a list of specified actions and responsible parties for that topic area.

Green Building

The city’s comprehensive plan includes a chapter on sustainability which encourages green building through regulations, incentives, and incorporating green building features into public buildings.  

It mentions utilizing the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification system to incorporate green building features in public buildings (Action 1.A.3) and applying green building principles to assess their lifecycle costs (Action 1.A.4).  

Strategy 3.A. outlines several approaches to encouraging green building in neighborhood design including offering regulatory and financial incentives (3.A.2) and adopting a green building code (3.A.3). It also identifies water resource conservation (3.B.3) and emissions reduction (4.A.3) as goals for promoting green building.  

The comprehensive plan also provides a list of local green building and sustainability organizations.