The comprehensive plan the city will develop this year intends to be its planning lodestar, guiding the next two decades of land use in Hot Springs.
The city has not formulated a long-term plan since 2010, when it put together its 2030 plan. Public involvement will be more prominent in the 2040 plan the Hot Springs Board of Directors contracted Design Workshop Inc. of Denver to produce, Planning and Development Director Kathy Sellman said.
The $113,050 for community engagement is the biggest line item in the $274,870 contract the board awarded earlier this week.
"Things have really changed in the last 10 years in the way we look at public engagement," Sellman said. "We'd have a meeting and whoever showed up is how we involved the public. Now there are so many more ways of getting the public to know what's going on.
"There are web-based things that can be used, surveys people can take on their phones. People don't have to be able to drop everything and go to a meeting, which is hard with work schedules. Now we can get more points of view on things."
Sellman said the city's elected officials and the administrators who answer to them will determine how much of the 2040 plan is implemented. Many ideas presented in the 2030 plan became city policy, including controversial measures such as enclave annexation and utility connection and extension restrictions in the unincorporated area of the city's regional water and wastewater systems.
Sellman said input from Garland County government elected officials will be solicited, giving the 2040 plan more of a regional focus than its predecessor.
Many of the more specialized plans adopted since the 2030 plan can be incorporated into the 2040 plan, Sellman said. Data collected during the development of strategies such as the city's parking and pedestrian and downtown economic development plans can be integrated into the 2040 strategy.
"The single-purpose plans that have been done are still relevant," Sellman said. "They dive into a topic, but (the 2040 plan) will take what those plans have done and try to make sense of all of it. It will be a coherent document that involves the community in saying what's important and how do we get to where we want to go."
One of the city's first long-range plans was developed in 1997, but Sellman said city planners have been extolling the merits of an overarching strategy for almost a century. Many states require cities to have comprehensive plans. They are not mandatory in Arkansas, but Sellman said planning on an ad hoc basis has its limits.
"To avoid spending money and not getting the experience or facility you were looking for, you need to make a plan," Sellman, using the analogy of a poorly planned vacation to describe the perils of operating without a long-term strategy, said. "As a city, we have to make decisions as decisions come up. That's OK if you're making decisions about unanticipated circumstances. But if it's something you could've planned for, you're probably going to spend more money than you need to. There's lots of reasons to plan."
City Manager Bill Burrough thanked the board for making the 2040 plan a 2019 budget priority.
"Each year Kathy has tried to bring this comprehensive plan forward, and we haven't been able to prioritize that into the budget scheme the last few years," he said. "This year we were able to. It's something we've needed for a long time."
City staff from the engineering, finance and planning departments gave Design Workshop's statement of qualifications the highest score of the three companies that responded to the city's solicitation. It outscored Halff Associates of Texas and SCJ Alliance of Lacey, Wash.
Local on 05/26/2019