One year in, Comp Plan shapes up

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Elected officials at a meeting between Jackson and Teton County indicated this week that the Comprehensive Plan revision process might take a bit longer than was first expected.

The move comes as Jackson Hole hits the one-year mark since the community began revising it’s Comprehensive Plan, which will outline community priorities and set future land-use patterns for future growth throughout the valley.
At Monday’s joint meeting, officials instructed planners on how to prepare for the next phase of substantive talks among elected officials, planning staff and the public. That upcoming discussion, in which officials will move forward with how to prioritize and link priorities identified by the community, is expected to deepen at a public meeting later this month.

Some elected officials on Monday reiterated their desire for staff to develop some sort of manageable synthesis or matrix of the some 1,100 public comments collected in the year since the comp plan revision broke ground.
Others, like Town Councilman Mark Obringer, said they thought the Comp Plan document should be an easy read, not a dense tome of difficult planning vernacular.

“It should be a novel and not an instruction manual,” Obringer said.
County Commissioner Ben Ellis said he wanted the new Comp Plan to contain specific “goals for measurability,” that would allow officials to quantify and gauge success. 

To cull new, more narrowed feedback in the next face of public feedback, Commissioner Hank Phibbs said a brief executive summary should drafted that is not in “plannerese.” Planning staff could then, “take that out in the street and see if they’re getting it right or not,” Phibbs said.

Noting that the meeting was quickly turning into a pileup of different –if interconnected– ideas, Chairman Andy Schwartz sought to rein in the discussion to refocus it for another meeting.

“There are too many threads working on the table at the same time,” Schwartz said. “The key thing is having staff get back to us with some kind of timeline.” He added it would be “helpful” for the town and county governing boards to have separate discussion before the two reconvene later this month.

Following the meeting, Jeff Daugherty, the county planner, said he needed a little more clarity from elected officials about what they want next.
“They were asking for a very manageable set of public comment categories, to categorize the public’s needs and summarize them,” Daugherty said, adding, “That can be dangerous ground.”

He continued, “Is the plan too complex or not complex enough? If we simplify it, you lose predictability. We’re hopeful that those questions will be addressed at the next joint meeting.”

Reached for comment following Monday’s meeting, Schwartz said he did not expect the revision process to become too protracted.
“We want to slow down the timeline a bit to get a synthesis of public comment,” Schwartz said. “And we need to get more comment from town and county [staff]. That’s very important.”

The town and county boards are scheduled to convene again in county chambers Sept. 29 at 3 p.m. PJH


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One year in, Comp Plan shapes up | Planet JH News Article: General News

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