Just a few months shy of its deadline, the city finally has a comprehensive plan.
The Common Council voted unanimously Monday night to approve the plan, which is essentially the city's handbook for the next 20 years or so on issues of development, growth and management of its resources.
Comprehensive plans were essentially required by the state's Smart Growth legislation, first enacted in 2000. All municipalities - cities, towns and even counties - must have one on file by Jan. 1, 2010, or risk having their decisions contested as invalid.
The plan as Verona approved it is several hundred pages long - about 500, plus a variety of appendices, maps and references to other documents - and took almost two years to put together. A committee of nine people - the mayor, one alder and seven citizen representatives with a broad range of interests - made most of the decisions on what to include, what to change and what to remove. They took not only their own experiences and personal interactions with other Veronans but also drew input from four city-sponsored public forums and responses from interested parties who had been directly mailed various pieces of the plan.
The committee received more than 500 suggestions and comments on the plan.
The Plan Commission also requested some minor changes last week after getting public comments from two people at its formal public hearing.
The plan includes nine chapters, as mandated by law. They are:
• Issues and opportunities (current situations in Verona and challenges, such as high growth and a relatively high proportion of residential property)
• Housing (including the city's policy on limiting it)
• Transportation (including future roadways and a recommendation to support public transport)
• Utilities and community facilities (such as the library, parks and plans for future infrastructure)
• Agricultural, natural and cultural resources (including the city's policies on farmland preservation and stormwater management and a limited nod to historical preservation)
• Economic development and agriculture (including plans for promoting business and agriculture and using room tax revenues)
• Intergovernmental cooperation (with neighbors and regional entities, as well as the local school district)
• Land use (directing growth inward and outward, including the downtown)
"It doesn't get overly prescriptive," city planner Bruce Sylvester responsed to an alder's question Monday. "It does lay out very broad goals."
Because of the cumbersome size of the full document (available at ci.verona.wi.us and at City Center and the Verona Public Library), the city will print summary brochures for each of the nine chapters. These will be available to anyone upon request, as will electronic copies of the entire plan on disc.
The plan becomes effective after copies are sent to a variety of governmental bodies and representatives for the non-metallic mining industry, as provided by statute. Sylvester said that would take about a month.
