City of College Station Blog

By Colin Killian, Public Communications Director

In this week’s episode of “What’s Up, College Station?” Grace Hallowell and Long Range Planning Administrator Christine Leal discuss the five-year update to the City’s Comprehensive Plan, an essential policy document that guides our community’s growth and development.

The update process includes several opportunities for public feedback, including a survey and an open house on Tuesday, April 8, from 6-8 p.m. at City Hall.

The “What’s Up, College Station?” podcast is available weekly via Podbean, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, and Amazon/Audible. Please subscribe, rate, and recommend!

If you have a suggestion for a future topic or interview, email me at ckillian@cstx.gov.

TRANSCRIPT

Grace Hallowell:

What’s up College Station? I’m Grace Hallowell, and today I’m joined by Christine Leal, our planning and development services, long-range planning administrator.

We were here a few months ago to talk about the Northgate Small Area Plan, but today we’re here to talk about the city’s comprehensive plan. So let’s talk about what the five-year comprehensive plan encompasses and what it means.

Christine Leal:

Our comprehensive plan is one of the city’s longest-range planning documents. It really sets the policy for how and where we want to grow and develop, but it also covers things like programs, everything from how we will approach environmental stewardship to our recreation and tourism, and also just city services in general. So it’s a very comprehensive plan and a lot goes into it.

Grace Hallowell:

We value our residents’ feedback on this plan because we’re not making it for us. We’re making it for everybody who lives here and visits here. So what are some ways that people can get involved with the planning process?

Christine Leal:

We have a really great opportunity coming up. On April 8th, we have an open house at City Hall from 6 to 8 p.m. We’re looking for some fun ways to get people’s feedback on the comprehensive plan. So we have one station that we’re planning to do called mark the map. We have big giant maps that will be on the wall. People can draw on them, they can write on them and indicate what we’re looking for is areas of town that people think are strong places, so areas that they like and think should be replicated as we grow and develop, but also areas of town where maybe there’s some opportunity for improvement.

So letting us know both. We also are going to have a section called our comprehensive plan report card where we actually want people to rate us. We’ve got eight goals in the comprehensive plan, and we want to know how people think we’re doing on each of our goals. So yeah, it should be fun. We’re also going to have a DJ booth for people to tell us some songs, like what are some songs that embody College Station, the community. We want to make just a fun playlist, a bunch of different fun things to get people’s feedback on the comprehensive plan.

Grace Hallowell:

That sounds like a very fun way and more than just a meeting where you sit and you listen.

Christine Leal:

Yes, exactly. That’s what we’re going for.

Grace Hallowell:

I am very much a learn by doing rather than by listening or by writing. I learn best by doing something. And yeah, so that’s a great way to find out more about the plan because if you’re… It could be a lot of information all at once, so it’s hard to digest if you’re just reading it. And what other opportunities are there for people to get involved maybe if they can’t make the meeting?

Christine Leal:

For people that can’t come or have something else going on, we actually have a really great online resource at cstx.gov/fiveforward. On that webpage, you’ll see several tabs across the top. One of the tabs is called Provide Your Input. And so that is a survey that we’re trying to get as many people as we can to fill out that survey. The AI said it takes four minutes to fill out, so not a long survey. Very short, should be able to do it very quickly. But yeah, we need as many people to fill that out so that we can get a general idea of what the whole community thinks about how we’re doing implementing the comprehensive plan.

Also, on that same website, there’s a tab that has like a short explanation of our process for evaluating the comprehensive plan and another tab that just kind of gives a little background on it and some resources. But one of the more exciting things on there is a tab that’s called existing conditions. And so this tab is an interactive story map of about a hundred-page report that we’ve put together.

It has thousands of data points in it, hundreds of maps and charts and graphs and tables. So it’s very, very data heavy. But what’s nice about the interactive map is it kind of breaks it into small pieces that’s a little more manageable for all of us to kind of comprehend. And it just goes through like what have been the trends and the demographic changes in our community over the last five years.

So it’s one of the things we do as we prepare to evaluate the comprehensive plan as we go, well, what kind of changes are happening in the community? It’s a really cool interactive resource.

Grace Hallowell:

You mentioned the five forward, so the comprehensive plan, the five years forward, let’s kind of talk about why the five-year mark is important.

Christine Leal:

Our plan was originally adopted in 2009, and it was written into the plan that we would evaluate it every five years. It’s a best practice, but we wrote it in there to make sure that we would do it, and we knew exactly what was expected. So every five years we update it, and every 10 years we do more of a larger overhaul of the plan.

In 2021, we updated our new plan. That was our 10-year plan, but that had followed about two years of extensive input from community residents and stakeholders. So it’s a lot of public input that went into drafting that 10-year update. We called it the Next Ten. This one, we envisioned as five years from that, so five years forward. That’s where we got that from. But this one is really more of a check-in update. It’s not as big, massive look at the goals and the vision of the plan, but just generally how well have we implemented what we had set out to do five years ago.

Grace Hallowell:

So is there anything else you can share with us about the plan?

Christine Leal:

I think one of the things I really want to emphasize is this truly is the community’s vision for the future. Like I said, it was born out of the 10-year update process and even before that extensive community input every time we do these plans and evaluate these plans. In fact, the plan that was updated in 2021 actually won a state award for the plan for advancing the art and science of planning. This plan really does reflect the vision and the values of the community. For the plan to continue to be a reflection of what the community wants, we really, really need people to get involved and provide their input any way that they feel comfortable.

Grace Hallowell:

Involvement is key here because like I said before, we’re not making this for us, we’re making it for our residents and we really value that feedback that comes in. And there are many, many, many opportunities to provide that feedback. And they can even reach planning and development outside of the survey or the open house. What is the contact information?

Christine Leal:

They can email us at compplan@cstx.gov, but can also reach out to any of us on the team, myself, Christine Leal. We’ll respond to emails or phone calls. If you call the main line, they will know how to get in touch with us.

Grace Hallowell:

Okay, one more time. What is the date of the open house?

Christine Leal:

The open house is April 8th from 6 to 8 p.m. at City Hall. We’ll be in the Bush 4141 community room.

Grace Hallowell:

All right, thank you so much for joining me today.

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