Comprehensive Planning Process Begins

A community driven effort to rewrite the City’s Comprehensive Plan is underway, giving the citizens of El Paso the opportunity to decide what the future of the City will look like. The Comprehensive Plan is the City’s guiding document to direct capital improvements, evaluate development projects, guide public policy and ensure that the City of El Paso is the city its residents want it to be. The plan identifies goals, objectives and policies that will enhance the City’s quality of life, respect its natural environs, and support complementary economic growth and development.

Comprehensive Plans are living documents which need to be maintained, updated, and periodically rewritten. The most recent Comprehensive Plan, now a decade old, no longer adequately addresses the new challenges that the City will face in the coming years. As Fort Bliss continues to expand faster than any other Army post in the country, the City is taking the appropriate steps to align its long-range planning documents with the anticipated addition of new troops, their families, and support staffto El Paso. At the same time the City continues to grow steadily with in-migration from Mexico and other places of the country that recognize El Paso as a choiceworthy place to live and do business.     

Municipalities across the country use Comprehensive Plans to establish public policy regarding transportation, utilities, land use, recreational facilities, and housing.  El Paso has a history of being at the forefront of city planning. The 1925 City Plan for El Paso, by noted planner and landscape architect George Kessler, is one of the earliest Comprehensive Plans in the country and laid out a vision for the City’s future. Much of the 1925 plan is responsible for shaping the City as we know it today, just as the new Comprehensive Plan will shape the future of El Paso for decades to come.   

Unlike the creation of the 1925 Plan the latest plan will include local charrettes. During the charrette the public works alongside professional planners, economists, transportation engineers, economists and illustrators over the course of two weeks as part of an open design studio to create the plan. The ideas generated will be discussed with local government representatives, state agencies, property owners, members of the development community and other stakeholders to gain feedback and insure that the plan is a consensus document that will be ready to be implemented upon adoption.   

 As the next chapter of El Paso’s history unfolds, the involvement of its citizens is instrumental in creating a successful new long-range plan. The upcoming two week comprehensive planning charrette will focus on the East Side and Mission Valley.    Multiple public events are designed to inform the community about the planning challenges and options, while giving the planning team insight into the El Paso of the future that citizens envision.  A second part of the Comprehensive Plan’s public involvement process is scheduled for early next year and will focus on the Fort Bliss, Northeast, Northwest, and Central areas of the City.

 The planning for the ASARCO Plant and TOD sites is the first part of a larger planning process for the City.  Two other two-week charrettes shall be scheduled to assist in the creation of a Comprehensive Plan update for the City.  The charrettes are scheduled for the Fall of 2010 and Winter of 2011 with specific dates and times to be announced.  More information on the Comprehensive Plan process shall be forthcoming.

The planning process will be led by the nationally recognized town planning firm of Dover, Kohl & Partners.  Working with a team of experts in a wide range of fields, the multi-disciplinary planning team will translate the goals and visions established during the charrette into a set of strategies for implementation of the Plan, to be adopted in late 2011.  The citizens of El Paso will be able to keep updated on the progress of the ongoing efforts on the website www.PlanElPaso.org.