By Liz Moomey

liz.moomey@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — The Forward 2040 Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee has a question to answer: Where does the city see itself going?

Members of the committee, some newly appointed and some who worked on the previous comprehensive plan known as “Salisbury Vision 2020,” took first steps toward drafting the city’s vision for the future Thursday night.

“It’s important to plan because things are going to change,” said Planning Director Hannah Jacobson.

Jacobson said the city is becoming an older and more diverse community. It is likely there will be housing challenges as the senior population grows, she said. And as technology advances, the retail business will continue to change for brick-and-mortar stores. The city may see an increase need in warehouses. Market preferences may change as baby boomers and millennials want to live in more walkable communities.

Figuring out the direction of Salisbury is important to the city to continue to provide public services, Jacobson said.

By the end of the year, the committee will have completed visioning, policy framework and drafting of Forward 2040, which will go to the City Council for adoption. It then will be implemented. 

Committee members started with looking at other North Carolina municipalities to decide how they wanted the plan to be laid out, including what data and themes should be used.

Member Dan Mikkelson said community values and visions likely haven’t changed in 20 years.

Member Bill Burgin agreed, saying previous items can be reordered and some will need to be refined.

Education should be included in Forward 2040, member John Schaffer said. It is important to the community and supports other topics included in the comprehensive plan, Schaffer said.

When the committee began work with the plan in 2016, it had a strong opinion that education should be added in Forward 2040, Mikkelson said. The city consultants, though, omitted the desire to include education in the compressive plan when they presented a draft.

Senior City Planner Catherine Garner said staff are grappling how to deal with education being an item in the comprehensive plan because it is not a city system. The consultants and the city do know the importance of education, Garner said.

“It’s a critical piece into quality of life, economic development — we know all that,” she said. “We’re trying to figure out how to find its place.”

Burgin said education is essential and that it could at least be a sentence in Forward 2040. Things like solving crime are important for the community but the plan won’t have solutions. He said the committee should “man up” and figure out how to do this.

“Those could be essential to us to have a comprehensive plan that makes a difference,” Burgin said.

Member Bill Wagoner offered to have themes instead of topics — to group together education and jobs into economic wellbeing, for example.

Wagoner said the city’s land use plan and Land Development Ordinance can be tools to have areas for education or transportation. 

The committee will meet once a month but was given several tasks to work on before February’s meeting. Jacobson said the members should be ambassadors of the plan and get more input from the community.

Members will host “meeting in a box” to get input from others about what citizens priorities are and what areas in the city should stay the same or change. Members will also have “pop-up community visioning” to speak to citizens about what they want to see in Salisbury’s future.