October, 2021
Lincoln — Last week the Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Commission voted unanimously to adopt a 2050 Comprehensive Plan. It goes next to the City Council for approval.
The chairwoman of the commission described the plan as an "excellent forward-looking vision."
Looking at parts of it, that is certainly the case. Looking at other parts of it puts that judgment in doubt.
The new plan did not start out auspiciously, but as a business-as-usual, more-of-the same version of the 2040 Comprehensive Plan, with little to suggest full recognition that climate and other crises are looming. Some of the plan's language on environmental planning was actually two decades old. The same could be said for housing, with reliance on developers to take initiatives despite the city's own studies that show they are not addressing housing needs adequately. Food security planning remained marginal.
Eleventh-hour recommendations from a coalition of citizen experts and advocates made many improvements in the final document. It is to the credit of the Planning Department that it took many of the recommendations to infuse old platitudes with new language and new action items more attuned to the urgent needs of the times.
Among those late additions were major improvements in addressing local food production and distribution issues, which had been badly neglected in previous planning iterations. Natural resources planning also got a boost with new language to take into account carbon sequestration and habitat conservation. This put more teeth into draft language on conservation design and the role of easements.
But when invited to make climate-smart development a guiding principle of the new plan, the authors demurred by offering lesser formulations. And so it was with suggestions for bolder action on energy, transportation, re-cycling, the workforce, and sustaining the natural world. When experts and advocates noted the total absence of attention to the alarming disappearance of insects, and suggested local planning action measures to cut pesticide drift and nighttime light pollution, all the plan's drafters could muster in response was a reference to a Mayors' Monarch Pledge, a hortatory effort started elsewhere several years ago and badly mismatched with the realities of the insect world collapse.
To the credit of the plan authors, however, several issues were not dismissed but acknowledged as worthy of further discussion. This counterbalances non-sequitur responses and too-frequent examples of carelessness that shaped the document approved by the commission. Unfortunately, a rush to approval precluded more give and take to get a better consensus. It all gives the impression that the new plan is not so much a forward-looking document as a defensive effort, looking over its shoulder to avoid criticism from those who want to soft-pedal the challenges.
When this plan is in place, with its mixture of vision and hesitancy, what happens when the plan's developer-driven growth maps clash with bolder expressions ventured in the plan's text? Imagine a developer's application coming before the Planning Commission to place climate-unfriendly residential housing, with voguish dark, heat-generating roofs and vast expanses of impervious concrete, intermixed with chemically dependent monoculture lawns, next to tallgrass prairies. The transportation infrastructure to support the residential housing will require roads over native prairie, destroying habitat and undoing carbon sequestration. Will the application, based on old maps unchanged from earlier plans, be approved as compliant with the 2050 Comprehensive Plan?
This is one example where more "discussion" is wholly appropriate. One could even say that it is desperately needed. Does the new plan give the Planning Commission the tools and guidance it needs to make its decision? Maybe. A few months ago, a similar proposal did not even raise an eyebrow as it went through the commission, its environmental effects totally un-noted. Fortunately, the city council blocked it after many citizen protests.
Calling this new plan "equivocal" is not necessarily a condemnation of it. At least more voices are now being heard.
