Plan Kalamazoo, the 2010 Master Land Use Plan, is the manifestation of current community will and a representation of the promise to come. Our consulting team, led by LSL Planning, helped us to bring all of the elements of the Plan together to create a complete, yet concise, picture of the community and a blueprint for how we move forward in the coming years.
The creation of Plan Kalamazoo was truly a community wide effort. The Steering Committee, which crafted an overall vision for the plan, was made up of community stakeholders representing major institutions in the city. The four working groups, made up of local experts in each of our topic areas: marketplace, transportation, neighborhoods, and quality of life, gave us a sense of how the bigger vision could be tied to the day to day work that’s being done and how that work could be better directed. These five groups, working in concert with the community at large who came to public meetings, and talked to us face to face, via Facebook, phone calls, email and regular mail have given us a plan of which we can be proud.
The overarching theme of Plan Kalamazoo is sustainability. Through programmatic intervention, preservation of assets, and the refinement of established community goals, the Plan seeks to keep the city moving on a progressive path while maintaining the attributes that make it great. These sentiments take shape throughout the Plan and are framed conceptually using three words: Preserve, Enhance, and Transform, the prism through which we view the policies developed herein and how we categorize our aims.
Out of our work with the steering committee, the working groups, and the community came not only the Plan, the city’s guide to responsible development and reinvestment, but our Action Plan, an extensive list of objectives that are the means to achieve the Plan’s stated goals, each with an accompanying indicator of immediate, short, mid, or long term achievability.
Community Planning and Development will work in the coming months with stakeholders to prioritize and implement the action plan.
Or, view the Master Plan by clicking the chapter headings below:
