New Growth Plan To Have More "Teeth?"

Fairhope, Alabama 

 

 

RESTORE grant project.

ENGINEERS SELECTED FOR REDO

The city council selected the Neel-Schaffer civil engineering firm (click) for a revised community-driven comprehensive growth plan to manage future growth in the city "with an emphasis on environmental stewardship ... and legal foundations for implementing."

Scope of the project: "Planning Services for Fairhope Area Community-Based Comprehensive Land Use Plan. The Scope of Services will include, but may not be limited to, project organization and coordination, community engagement, data collection, development of the land use plan, action plan for goals and prioritizations, community code reviews and updates, and final approval and adoptions, to deliver a complete: Fairhope Area Community-Based Comprehensive Land Use Plan."

(A more detailed description is at bottom.)

FUNDED BY BP GRANT   

Funding is from federal EPA environmental fines on British Petroleum for its 2010 oil spill in the Gulf.

Other engineering firms applying were Dewberry, Planning Next, and Design Workshop.

Thompson Engineering and Gould, Evans, Goodman Associates who engineered the city's current version, the Village Comprehensive Plan, apparently were not in the running this time.

A "selection committee" made a recommendation to the city council for Neel-Schaffer over the others.

The city's current  plan has been criticized by both former mayors Kant and Wilson (and others) for not having adequate enforcement authority (aka teeth); it was last-updated in 2016. 

TIMELINE UNCERTAIN

Councilman Burrell said he was one of those on the selection committee for the engineering firm, but said he did not know the timeline for the process yet; community engagement is an important part of the process (ie. town hall meetings). 

Burrell: "This plan is not an update; it will be a revision of the complete plan. It is possible that we will keep some of the existing documents to build off of, but that will be public driven. There will be public engagement throughout the process. This project also has a GIS component, and also will update some of the zoning documents. All zoning updates will follow City procedures."

Once begun, previous estimates were the process could take 18 months to complete.

Detailed project description.