City of Waverly Multi-Community Plan Updates & Collaborative Engagement
The City of Waverly and MSA planners elected to develop not one, not two, but four unique planning documents simultaneously — under the umbrella of one public engagement process. The four documents include an updated Comprehensive Plan, new Bike and Pedestrian Plan, new Park and Open Space Plan, and new Memorial Park Master Plan. The plans complement and overlap in ways unlikely to materialize in a more traditional single-plan approach and offer great opportunity to gain efficiencies, save on cost, amplify public participation, and introduce a new, more all-inclusive approach to community planning.
A robust public engagement campaign was a goal from the start. Outreach centered around the Planning Process Engagement Portal website — a user-friendly and easily searchable hub of content that offered full language translation capabilities. Participants could also choose to receive updates or access surveys by email, text, or both. This meant better inclusion for individuals without internet access. The portal facilitated three online surveys and included an interactive ArcGIS crowdsourcing map, a comprehensive planning FAQs guide, links to the City’s five existing plans, a planning process and projects overview, draft concepts for review, and announcements about upcoming open-house meetings, community workshops and pop-up events. MSA also conducted one-on-one interviews with public and private entities potentially impacted, met regularly with a dedicated Steering Committee and created activities geared specifically for kids to share their park visions with paper and crayons — an activity that reminded everyone of the importance of community planning and its impact on future generations.
Tying plans together ensures revisiting them together. Since comprehensive plans tend to be reviewed with more frequency, what perfect time to also review the plans developed in tandem? While many stand-alone plans find themselves collecting dust in the archives, those created in collaborative fashion with others are less likely to get lost in the shuffle. Overlapping plan development and plan review improves plans’ vitality and relevance — allowing them to remain the living, breathing documents they are intended to be.
Bundling planning efforts also allows the City to look at long-range growth, development, and land use opportunities as a cohesive whole. These things inform where new parks and trails are needed to connect residents with business districts, public services, schools, and transportation hubs. And similarly, the popularity and use of parks and trails can inform where new or different development should transpire. One informs the other, and vice versa. The plans speak each other’s language and listen to each other’s needs.
The result is four community plans working together in one coordinated, symbiotic manner to help guide future development. It is an inventive approach to a conventional practice and an excellent means to help create communities of resilience and lasting value. All four Waverly plans were formally adopted by the City Council on February 20, 2023.
The City of Waverly and planning team of MSA, Toole Design and Councilman-Hunsaker were together chosen to receive the 2023 Best Practice Award from the American Planning Association (APA) of Iowa.
Contact Project Lead
Christopher Janson, AICP
Planning Team Leader
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MoreSun Prairie Comprehensive Plan: 2019-2039
Winner of the 2020 Best Practice Planning Award from the American Planning Association Wisconsin Chapter, the Sun Prairie Comprehensive Plan 2019-2039 establishes a concise vision, set of goals, policies and action steps to guide the community successfully forward.
Sun Prairie is a well-established city of nearly 35,000 residents, located immediately northeast of Madison, Wisconsin. It has a vibrant culture and growing economy — the birthplace of artist Georgia O’Keefe and home to popular traditions such as Cornfest and unique Groundhog Day celebrations.
As one of the fastest growing communities in the state over the past two decades, this growth has yielded serious conversations within the community about how much the City should grow and what growth looks like. To address this broad question and develop a vision for the future, the City of Sun Prairie and MSA worked together to update its 2009 Sun Prairie Comprehensive Plan. The updated plan would be tethered to the city’s Vision Statement of pursuing “balanced growth, safe and healthy neighborhoods, and opportunity for all residents to pursue their dreams and live full lives.”
The City of Sun Prairie Comprehensive Plan is a working document to guide the community in achieving this vision, with tactics and resources to aid the city in making critical development decisions, assisting with capital and operational budgeting, and helping to focus and stimulate private housing, business and industrial investments over the next five, 10 and 20 years.
The comprehensive plan was developed through a robust and multi-faceted public engagement effort consisting of monthly meetings with a citizen steering committee, two series of community forums held at three separate venues, a comprehensive community survey and 17 focus group discussions with residents and organizations. The process included targeted efforts to collect input from and understand the concerns of residents that are traditionally underrepresented in planning processes, including people of color, lower-income households, and renter households. The planning effort also had more of a neighborhood focus which allowed people to comment and express concerns about the areas they live in and care most about.
The updated plan is more concise than its 2009 original, adding a more robust implementation section with over 100 actions to pursue over the next 20 years. It is organized into two volumes: Volume 1 features background information used during the planning process and available to inform future policy discussions. Volume 2 features the policy and implementation content of the plan. A 12-page Executive Summary highlights the high-priority actions and policies under each Comp Plan element.
Formally adopted in 2019, the City of Sun Prairie is now using its new comprehensive plan as a catalyst for sustainable growth and a guide toward smart development over the next 20 years and beyond.
