West Franklinton Plan — Rendering via The City of Columbus.

The City of Columbus is developing a new approach to how it works with residents and community groups to update neighborhood plans. As part of that process, it will be adopting a new set of standardized policies meant to guide development citywide.

The new initiative – called the Columbus Citywide Planning Policies (or C2P2 for short) – marks the first major change in the city’s planning process since 1992, when the city adopted a Comprehensive Plan and subsequently established a pattern of crafting distinct plans for individual neighborhoods.

Those plans document the priorities of a community and are used to guide future decisions on rezoning or variance requests (if a developer wants to build a commercial building on a lot that is zoned for residential, for example, the plan will be consulted before a recommendation is made or the rezoning is granted).

There are now over 40 different area and neighborhood plans in Columbus, and – since it can take the Planning Division up to 18 months of work with a community to update a single plan – many are outdated.

Jackie Yeoman, a Senior Planner at the city who is leading the C2P2 effort, described it as formalizing and simplifying a process that has evolved over the past 25 years or so.

“Twenty years ago every plan was different; some plans included stuff about lifelong learning, some about traffic,” she explained. “Then, eventually our plans (started to) focus mostly on land use and design, and a good portion of the plans were standardized, so the new policies are based on those same guiding principles.”

Those more general principles and guidelines have been incorporated into a new set of policies that will serve as a reference point for new development happening just about anywhere in the city (the one exception is historic districts and neighborhoods with design review boards, where such guidelines are already laid out in city code).

“These are not brand new policies,” explained Yeoman, “these are really best practices that have been developed over the past ten to twenty years.”

Neighborhoods will still get a chance to weigh in and develop a land use plan for their specific areas – that document will include text about important sites as well as a map with land use recommendations for each parcel.

“Essentially, a community is still getting all of the same elements that they always got with our area plans, it’s just the updates are happening differently,” said Yeoman, explaining that once an area commission or civic association agrees to adopt the new citywide policies, they can start applying them to new development proposals (and when the citywide policies are updated in the future, the updates will be automatically applied to every neighborhood).

The city has used three recent plan updates to test out the new system; the Greater Southeast Area Plan, the Far East Area Plan and the South Linden Neighborhood Plan. The new plans, which all feature the updated citywide policies as well as individually tailored land use maps and policies, will be brought before the Development Commission for approval this month. City Council will then weigh in on those plans and also sign off on the new planning framework moving forward.

The Planning Division has held multiple events and meetings to educate residents, neighborhood groups and the development community about C2P2, and will continue that outreach through the end of this year. Next year will see a broader effort to solicit feedback on the citywide policies and to update them based on that feedback. After that is done, land use plans will be developed for every neighborhood in Columbus.

City staff has also offered an “early adoption” option for those neighborhoods that want to be able to apply the new design guidelines and general land use policies to development proposals in their area sooner rather than later.

“We didn’t want to tell people about our new approach and then say, ‘we’ll see you in a couple of years,’ we wanted to give them tools now,” said Kevin Wheeler, the city’s Planning Administrator.

Although there’s been some confusion about the different steps in the process, the general response from neighborhood groups has been positive, according to Yeoman. And, although some people have expressed concern that the new system will leave residents out of the planning process, she has worked to assure them that there will still be plenty of outreach via public meetings, online surveys and other methods.

Wheeler said that he’s not aware of another city that has taken this type of approach, and he’s excited to see how it works as C2P2 is rolled out.

“Having forty different plans, in which each is different in some way – maybe similar to some plans but very different from others – that’s difficult to keep track of,” he said. “We feel that there’s a real benefit in having support from city leadership for the guiding principles, and in having a more consistent set of policies that people can work with.”

Wheeler added that with the growth predicted for the Columbus region in the next 30 years – up to a million new people by 2050, according to some estimates – having clear policies to guide new development will be crucial.

“Design guidelines are an important tool for working with proposals and applicants…that’s been a really important part of what we do,” he said, “and I think that as the city continues to grow, and infill development is all the more prevalent, design becomes even more important.”

For more information on the new Columbus Citywide Planning Policies, see www.columbus.gov.