Danville, a city experiencing rapid growth, outpaced its existing comprehensive plan and undertook the process of updating it several years early. After a two-year process driven by community input, a draft is finalized and on its way to adoption.
The Danville Planning Commission will review the plan at its regular Tuesday meeting at 2 p.m.
The city council already reviewed the plan during a Nov. 7 work session, and Danville’s Utility Commission unanimously approved the plan’s infrastructure recommendations at its Oct. 28 meeting.
The planning commission will make a recommendation to the city council to approve or deny the adoption of the comprehensive plan, and council will make the final vote.
City staff suggest that the commission recommend approval of the document, according to a staff report in the meeting agenda packet.
A special meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday, and if the commission has additional concerns or questions, a vote can be postponed until this meeting, the report says.
“This comprehensive plan update was carried out with the intention of being the most community-involved process to date,” the report says. “This effort involved significant community outreach to pinpoint community members’ top priorities and outline capital improvement objectives for the next 20 years.”
The community-input process was organized through a group called PLAN Danville, which had a storefront in the River District where residents could go to offer their input about the plan.
Over two years, the city held 75 events through PLAN Danville and received over 1,200 survey responses. Over 13,000 people were engaged in this conversation, the report says.
The staff report calls the updated plan “a roadmap for the city’s future, a long-range policy document that offers guidance on various topics.”
These topics include eight focus areas:
- Community
- Land use
- Transportation
- Infrastructure
- Housing
- Economy
- Environment
- Culture
A draft of the plan was made available for public comment on Oct. 15. You can find that draft here.
Also meeting the week of Nov. 11
More meetings: Danville-Pittsylvania Regional Industrial Facility Authority, which focuses on economic development in the region; the Danville Industrial Development Authority; and the Pittsylvania County Board of Zoning Appeals.
RIFA will meet at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research in Danville.
The Danville IDA will meet at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at City Hall, and the county board of zoning appeals will meet at 6 p.m. Thursday at the school board office.
The Danville River District Design Commission for Thursday is canceled due to lack of cases filed.
The full agenda packet for the planning commission meeting can be found here.
