HOW TO UPDATE YOUR
MUNICIPAL MASTER PLAN

By JOHN L. GANN, JR., AICP
President
GANN ASSOCIATES
Roselle, Illinois

Many Illinois municipalities small and large have documents called Master Plans or Comprehensive Plans. Your town may have one without your even knowing it. Many such Plans are ten or twenty years old and are rarely consulted because they are no longer very useful. But if you look on a dusty shelf or in a neglected file drawer somewhere, you'll probably find one.

There are reasons so many of these Plans fell into disuse. Because many were prepared to comply with a federal mandate and because Uncle Sam used to put up most of the cost, local officials often had little commitment to them. Many were never even formally adopted by the city council or village board.

And a lot of Plans were simply impractical. Many of them predicted population and economic growth that never materialized and recommended elaborate and costly public improvements that were financially, if not also politically, undoable. As a result, the Plan provisions were seldom carried out.

These problems resulted from the way the Plans were done. But properly prepared, municipal Plans can be useable guides to decisions on zoning, public services, capital programming, and other important municipal concerns. They can also provide information useful to the local government in developing specific projects, securing funding, and attracting economic development.

If your municipal Plan is a few years old and no longer very helpful, here are some practical, experience-based pointers to help assure that its updating will produce something more useful.

1. Pay For It Yourself
Resist the temptation to use federal or other outside funds to update your Plan. Pay for the work with your own local resources. That's a hard thing for a consultant who has helped clients win grant funds to say, but it's usually the best way to go.

No one really appreciates something he or she gets for free. Your local officials are more likely to take an interest in the Plan if it's costing them something. They'll make sure they're getting their money's worth — and a more useful, realistic Plan will result.

In addition, you will have total control over your own Plan. You'll avoid possible unwanted intervention by federal, state, regional, or county agencies that may be providing the money — and in some cases even offering to prepare your Plan themselves using the money they're "giving" you!

The Plan you do with your own money will be your Plan, not someone else's. You will be able to make your own choice of the professionals you want as your planners. And those professionals will be accountable only to you.

2. Don't Do It Yourself
Paying for the Plan yourself is a good idea; attempting to do it yourself usually isn't. This is true even if you have an in-house staff of qualified planners.

Few cities can afford a large enough professional planning staff to do a Comprehensive Plan revision entirely in-house. Those who try often find it takes much longer than everyone thought, since the local planners must give priority to immediate development

March 1987 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 9

issues. The longer it takes, the more interest in the Plan is likely to wane. By the time the Plan is done, no one may care.

In addition, it's beneficial to have an objective outside point of view from someone who isn't too close to the local situation to offer needed fresh ideas and who can explore useful options that may be politically controversial. An outside consultant may also be more familiar with how communities in other parts of the state or in other states have solved the problems you're facing.

The participation of your staff planners in the Plan update is essential. But they shouldn't have to do the whole job themselves.

3. Focus on Specific Issues
A municipal Plan should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Figure out what specific problems you want the Plan to help you solve. Don't leave this up to the consultant. Tell him or her very clearly up front what it is you want the Plan he or she prepares to accomplish for you.

In one municipality our firm worked for, the big issue was control of apartment development. In another it was an inadequate supply of park land and commercial corridor development. In a third, it was a proliferation of signs. In your town, it may be economic development, the downtown area, or historic preservation.

The more specifically you can define the issues you want the Plan to provide answers for, the more likely your Plan is to be really useful.

4. Do the Kind of Plan You Need
The textbooks and planning theorists notwithstanding, in reality there isn't just one way to prepare a municipal Plan. How your Plan is prepared should correspond to your particular needs. Don't buy an elaborate and costly package of data gathering, mapping, and miscellaneous studies unless you are convinced they're really essential to what you're trying to accomplish.

One of our clients, despite a location in a growing area, had been largely bypassed by business development and was close to becoming land-locked. We prepared a Plan that zeroed in on the remaining prime development opportunity areas. In addition, we made the Plan suitable for local officials to use to interest developers in these locations. It wasn't a traditional Plan, but it met the community's needs.

5. Use Your Plan to Set Priorities
Many municipal Plans lack a focus on priorities. They propose a vast array of improvements and programs in every area of concern without any clear indication of which should come first or which are most important.

This is a cop-out. Today resources are limited. No municipality can do everything. Trade-offs must be made. Have a Plan prepared that serves as more than just a municipal wish list.

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6. Make the Policy Decisions Yourself
The Comprehensive Plan should be the city council's or village board's Plan. Not the consultant's Plan, the staff planner's Plan, or even the plan commission's Plan.

All these other people can contribute valuable ideas. But none of them should be making the ultimate decisions on what the Plan provides. Your consultant should make an effort to understand what the elected officials' concerns and priorities are — even if they differ from his own, as they will more often than not. The Plan should show you how to accomplish your objectives.

Planners are trained and experienced in technical matters. Our background does not give us any greater wisdom or moral stature than mayors, trustees, or aldermen, although some planners like to think it does.

7. Use Unbiased Advisors
Using county or regional planners to help with your Plan may be convenient, but be aware that they are not unbiased in matters of policy. They have prepared plans for their own level of government that they naturally desire municipal plans to be consistent with. And such planners may be more oriented toward agricultural, open space, and conservation planning than toward a municipality's urban development needs.

Your Plan should be prepared with the best interests of your own citizens and taxpayers given first priority. This is something that someone employed by a higher level of government may not always be the best person to do, despite the best of intentions.

Similarly, be careful of biases or conflicts of interests in private firms. A consultant that does a large business in designing various public works or improvements, for example, may be inclined to find a "need" for such improvements as he or she develops your Plan. To ensure objective planning, you may wish to stipulate that the firm preparing your Plan will be automatically disqualified from doing any architectural or engineering work on projects included in the Plan.

For unbiased advice, hire a consultant that will have no financial or political interest in what your Plan includes or does not include.

8. Don't Forget Implementation
Many Plans tell municipal officials what to do but not how to do it. Their treatment of how to carry out the Plan consists of a few vague recommendations on a couple of pages in the back of the report.

Your Plan should give you ideas on such things as how to pay for the public improvements the Plan calls for or how to amend your local ordinances. Include a provision for substantial implementation advice in the work program when you update your Plan. Besides assuring you'll get the concrete guidance you'll need, it will also send your consultant a signal that you want your Plan to be workable. •

March 1987 / Illinois Municipal Review / Page 11