07.02 - Adoption of Updated Comprehensive Plan

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2. Adoption of the Updated Comprehensive Plan, City of Pequot Lakes. As you are all aware, the City has been working for over a year on updating the Comprehensive Plan. When the City merged with Sibley Township, the City adopted the Township's plan and ordinances. Those document, while generally acceptable for the rural areas of the combined City, have been extremely difficult to work with in the urban areas. Lack of real direction has made it difficult for your staff to administer ordinances and give guidance to people looking to locate or develop in the downtown and surrounding areas. The updated Comprehensive Plan fills that void and creates a framework in which to update the Township's, now the City's, ordinances to facilitate future growth and development within the City. This was the original vision of the merger, and although we are a little behind schedule, we have covered a lot of ground in the past 16 months. The Planning Commission has reviewed the Comprehensive Plan and held three public hearings in addition to a joint meeting with the City Council. They are recommending that the Plan be adopted and that the subsequent urgent work involved in updating the Ordinance commence immediately. Five out of the seven Council members are required to vote affirmatively in order for the plan to be approved (or amended in the future). At their third public hearing, the Planning Commission received comments from Councilor Tom Ryan requesting that all references to a bypass be removed from the document and that the entire plan be redone based on widening of Highway 371 on its existing alignment. While understanding of Councilor Ryan's concerns, the Planning Commission felt the Comprehensive Plan, in its current form, thoroughly addressed any Mn/DOT construction impacts and was well suited for the proposed widening. The Planning Commission would like to suggest that, instead of delaying adoption of the Plan and subsequent updating of the Ordinances, that the Council considers forming a subcommittee that would include Councilor Ryan to go over the transportation sections and other sections Councilor Ryan would like to see reviewed. If there are amendments to be made, we can hold an additional series of public hearings and adopt the needed changes, again with a five vote Council majority. In this fashion we would not delay implementing key strategies of the plan. The Planning Commission did want to stress that not having a comprehensive plan and not having applicable ordinances limits their ability to work with people, to offer solutions to problems and to give you good advice. Many of the planning and zoning frustrations we have felt as a City are directly attributable to ordinances that simply don't work in much of the developing areas. Adoption of the Comprehensive Plan is a key step on the road to fixing this problem.