SALISBURY — The Rowan County Planning Board has begun the process of creating a new land use plan. The new plan would combine all the separate plans the county has created over the years into one comprehensive plan.

The county commissioners allocated funding for the project for the fiscal year 2023-2024 budget and hired Benchmark Planning to assist in the process. During the meeting on Monday, Benchmark President Jason Epley presented the initial statistics and what timeline the company is envisioning to planning board members.

The first step in the process will be an online survey for Benchmark to receive initial feedback from the community. Epley said that the survey will be on the county website throughout all of March. After the survey results are in, Benchmark will return to the planning board and report the results and begin work on a draft plan. Once Benchmark and the planning board have a draft that they feel is ready, meetings will be held across the county for more public input, Epley said. He noted that the public meetings should occur in August and September.

Once the last round of public input has been received, the company will take the feedback from the public and the planning board and begin work on the final draft of the land use plan, which will be presented to the county commissioners once it is complete.

Currently, the county has seven total land use plans, from the areas west of Interstate 85 land use plan that was adopted in 2009 to the Long Ferry Road Corridor Study that was adopted in December of 2023. Other plans include the areas east of Interstate 85, the area near Old Beatty Ford Road and south of Interstate 85, recommendations for solar energy systems, special non-residential intensity allocations and the working agricultural lands plans.

Planning Director Ed Muire said that as part of the process of redoing the county’s land use plan, the new plan would combine all of those plans separated by area and time into one comprehensive plan.

Epley also presented the planning board members with initial statistics about what areas of the county are the most developed, where the population has grown the most and the economic demographics of Rowan County. One of the more important statistics was just how much the populations of the communities have grown. Every municipality besides Cleveland has grown since 2010 and Rowan County as a whole has experienced a 6.1 percent population growth in that time.

Planning Board member Sean Reid asked Epley if the county was becoming a “bedroom community” because people were commuting to Cabarrus or Mecklenburg counties for work. Epley said that approximately 38,000 people did commute out of the county for work, but that approximately 21,000 stayed in the county and approximately 29,000 actually commuted into Rowan for work.

During the discussion, Muire noted that the land use plan will be a long-term project and asked the members to take a close look at the statistics Epley presented and come back to the subsequent meetings with any questions they come up with.