As city council is presented with several different planning documents, it is critical to ensure that their mandates don’t contradict each other.

Engineering Manager Devon Matkowski says there are definitely a lot of plans out there and it is a challenge to make sure they all align. “So the over arching and the big plan that the city completed was KAMPLAN or the OCP (Official Community Plan). So that’s the highest level, policy level community growth document there is. From there, that sets high level direction and each subsequent plan kind of narrows it down into specific topics.”

 

Mayor Ken Christian says it is an important conversation that council has had while considering whether to adopt any new plans. “These pieces all seem a bit disparate, but in fact they all fit together. Certainly parking is an issue that transcends a lot of these planning initiatives, but certainly the big one is transportation.”

Council adopted the new downtown plan this past December. It referred the downtown transportation choices strategy back to administration and a parking strategy is also in the works. Matkowski says it is always connects back to that higher policy document. “So while the transportation choices was on the transportation side, there is also a downtown plan where planning level document on how the downtown specifically is going to grow, that’s going on at the same time that we’re working on the how is transportation going to work in the downtown. So we’re actually doing a really good job as far as coordinating those groups.”

Council recently adopted a new downtown plan. It recently referred the downtown transportation choices strategy back to staff and a new parking plan is also in the works.