Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country | Founded 05-05-05

February 22, 2007 issue

Committee to Review Comprehensive Plan Proposals

Story by Kathleen McFadden

At their work session Monday night, the Watauga County Board of Commissioners discussed the need for a new county comprehensive plan and appointed members to a committee that will review proposals submitted last year in response to a county RFP.

Planning and Inspections Director Joe Furman told the commissioners that the current county plan was adopted in 1993. “There’s nothing wrong with the plan,” Furman said, “but things have changed since 1993.”

Furman explained that there are many approaches to developing such a plan and provided examples of both a comprehensive plan and a vision plan for the commissioners’ consideration.

“A plan is a plan, not an ordinance,” Furman emphasized, although it establishes comprehensive goals pertaining to community issues such as housing, economics, environment and public safety.

“Visioning is a different approach,” Furman said. “The strong thing about visioning is the community involvement, but I think if we did just visioning we’d want to do more.” A visioning process looks to the future, defines what a community wants to have at that point in time and identifies strategies for achieving the vision.

Furman suggested that the board consider a combination of comprehensive planning and visioning.

The board members then discussed various ways to encourage community involvement in a visioning process. Furman pointed out that all the commissioners’ suggestions—working with volunteer fire departments, civic and community groups and parent-teacher organizations—had been tried in the past and “none has worked very well so far.”

Board Chair Jim Deal said that the board members need to figure out how to get representatives from throughout the county to participate—from Mabel, Bethel, Todd, Deep Gap, Stony Fork and other areas. “As commissioners, we need to come up with names of people we know who are representative. I would try to identify people who think differently than I do,” Deal said.

“It needs to be made clear from the outset that we don’t have an agenda going in,” he continued, “and are not going to focus just on land-use issues.”

Furman estimated that the development of a new plan would take about a year and a half.

By consensus, the commissioners agreed that John Cooper and Billy Ralph Winkler will work with Furman and members of the Planning Board to review proposals, interview consultants and make a recommendation to the full board.