Thomas Breen file photo
City Plan Director Laura Brown: Land uses are "bread & butter" of comp plan.
It’s time for New Haven’s comprehensive plan to get a rewrite — and for a public refresher concerning what that vaguely named document is designed to do.
Reminders about the state-mandated timeline for revising the city’s guiding land-use document, and definitions of what a comprehensive plan even is and could be, were delivered last Wednesday evening during a City Plan Department-hosted online meeting about the once-a-decade process.
City Plan Director Laura Brown, Assistant Director of Planning Anne Hartjen, and City Planning Senior Project Manager Jacob Robison led online via Zoom. Over 40 attendees joined the hour-long conversation to discuss how the city can make a broad and overarching project specific to the needs of New Haveners and the land we live on.
“It’s a really important document,” Brown said during that meeting, of which “land uses are sort of the bread and butter.”
State law requires every Connecticut municipality to adopt a new comprehensive plan every 10 years. The last time New Haven updated its Comprehensive Plan was 2015, meaning that the next one is due in 2025.
The intention behind such a plan, Brown said, is to create an interdisciplinary, systems-based approach to achieving policies and goals related to economic development, transportation, physical development, land use, neighborhood population density, growth management, housing development and diversity, elderly accommodations and coastal management.
Click here to read the city’s current 2015-adopted plan. (To get a sense of what that document reads like, here’s how the |New Haven Vision 2025” plan begins: “New Haven is growing once again with large concentration of arts, culture and entertainment facilities of local, as well as regional significance; the presence of world-class educational/medical institutions; diverse and historic residential neighborhoods; multimodal transportation systems; mixed-use commercial corridors; nearly 450 restaurants offering varied cuisines; approximately 350 retail establishments; and several public/private investments already underway or planned. The city is thus poised to become one of the best small cities in America in the near future. … [New Haven] is now one of the fastest growing cities in Connecticut. The shared community vision for the next decade is to further grow it into a sustainable, healthy, and vibrant city by building on existing strengths and opportunities.”)
Projected timeline for the development of New Haven's comprehensive plan.
Robison read a “mission statement” drafted by his department to describe the intention of the comprehensive plan. That mission statement stated: “The people of New Haven will use the Plan as a tool to create a promising shared future, focusing on the needs of the whole community and honoring voices and experiences, particularly of those who have been historically undervalued and excluded from facets of community life. The process of developing the Plan will be community-driven, representative, collaborative and transparent. In the face of upcoming uncertainties, the Plan’s concrete and actionable goals will serve as benchmarks for addressing systemic inequities and opening greater opportunities for all.”
New Haven’s plan should be officially passed in 2025. The City Plan Department has laid out a three-year, four-phased process to get the plan in place.
Currently, Robison said, the city is in the “definition phase,” the first stage of the project during which the City Plan Department is seeking to establish a steering committee of individuals and organizations interested in guiding the comprehensive plan’s development and to hire a consultant who will provide professional oversight. By 2024, the plan should be ready for review and adoption by both the City Plan Commission and the Board of Alders.
Most of the comments and questions posed during the meeting came from residents searching for specificity as the open-ended comprehensive plan drafting period begins.
Many inquired about the selection criteria the City Plan Department has compiled in their hunt for a consultant to help put the plan together.
Dixwell resident and community management team leader Crystal Gooding, for example, asked whether the consultant would be sourced from New Haven. A host of other attendees jumped on board throughout the night to press the importance of hiring someone who lives in New Haven to assist in the drafting of a new plan.
Laura Brown read from the city’s request for proposals (RFP), which puts out a plea for individuals with experience planning for cities “similar to New Haven,” particularly asking for “culturally competent” people who know how to “plan from the needs of the disadvantaged.”
Another meeting participant, Melissa Singleton, questioned who the term “disadvantaged” was meant to refer to.
“I don’t feel equipped to decide who those people should be but I agree that we should be as clear as possible in our language,” Brown responded.
East Rock resident Kevin McCarthy asked about how the city intends to integrate environmental justice into the plan, noting that climate concerns were not explicitly referenced in the overview of the comprehensive plan’s purpose.
The theme of environmental justice, Laura Brown said, should carry through the entirety of the comprehensive plan, impacting each policy statement made in a given chapter of the document. Everything, she stated, that the plan aims to tackle should be reviewed through the “filter of environmental justice and resilience.”
Others, however, questioned how the city will ensure that that intention is enacted successfully.
Fair Havener Lee Cruz, for example, suggested that the City Plan Department offer or require training in environmental justice for the government employees who will be in charge of drafting the document.
Beyond making sure that the procedural aims are clear and that individuals responsible for creating the comprehensive plan are adequately trained and informed, residents also wanted answers to how to make sure the comprehensive plan exists not just as a wordy dream of what New Haven could be, but an actionable schedule that leads to implementation of systemic changes that concretely impact and detail what the New Haven of 2025 and after will be.
East Rock Community Management Team Chair Elena Grewal, for instance, asked the meeting’s hosts how they have seen past comprehensive plans utilized and what they believe would be important to change about the upcoming plan.
Though new to the planning department, Jacob Robison said he does have “certain criticism as to how [the plan] is structured.”
The ideas put forth by the current plan, he reflected, “are open ended and vague.”
Moving forward, he said, the community and comprehensive plan steering committee should put particular “goal posts on what we want to see done by the city.”
Anyone interested in serving on the city’s steering committee or speaking to the city about the comprehensive plan should email Jacob Robison at jrobison@newhavenct.gov.