Overland Park is getting closer to adopting its first new long-range land use plan in decades, which will serve as the roadmap for development into the future.
The much-anticipated draft plan was recently handed over to city planning staff for a preliminary review, Overland Park’s Strategic Planning Division Manager Erin Ollig told the Overland Park Planning Commission earlier this month. Right now, city planners are going through some edits and revisions with the consultant.
That puts the Overland Park City Council on track to finalize the plan — dubbed FrameworkOP — in the next few months, likely early in the summer.
The city’s existing comprehensive plan is roughly 40 years old, adopted at a time when Overland Park was home to fewer people and its overall footprint was smaller.
What is a comprehensive plan?
- Local governments use comprehensive plans to forecast long-term development patterns for a city.
- These documents also tend to mull infrastructure needs and resources available in a community, among other variables.
- Comprehensive plans can guide decision-making for decades, but they are also periodically updated.
- City councils sign off on them, typically after lengthy public discussion and input from the community.
- Cities aren’t ultimately the ones who do the work of actual development, but they set out the recommendations and the rules for developers who do down the line.
What’s in Framework OP?
What exactly the draft comprehensive plan includes at this stage is unclear.
That being said, past discussions about the new land-use plan have put a big emphasis on addressing a need for more housing of all types and dealing with aging office spaces along the city’s economic backbone.
The new plan is also expected to consider more of southern Overland Park, where the bulk of the new growth and development will occur in the next few decades.
Previous public engagement forums for the plan have also proposed a new type of land-use planning approach called “character types.” Such a formula would put more of a focus on a neighborhood’s feel than a specific enumerated list of uses, Ollig has said in the past.
Overland Park’s next steps:
- At the January planning commission meeting, Ollig said the first public hearing of the draft comprehensive plan is set for Tuesday, Jan. 30, during the steering committee meeting.
- The following day, the city council and planning commission will convene a joint meeting at 6 p.m. at the Overland Park Convention Center in Courtyard Room No. 1.
Keep reading: New growth and redevelopment at heart of Overland Park’s comprehensive plan review
