Plan It Pompano!

Do you live, work, play, own land or do business in Pompano Beach? If so, the City of Pompano Beach needs your input to help prepare Plan It Pompano! the latest update of our Comprehensive Plan (Comp Plan). Throughout approximately the next year or so, the City will offer several opportunities, and multiple ways, for you to participate.

Why participate? Read on to learn why the Comp Plan is important and why voicing your opinion in this process matters.

The Comp Plan is a long-range policy document that Florida State statutes require Pompano Beach (as it does all other local governments) to maintain. But the Pompano Beach Comprehensive Plan is much more than that: The Plan contains goals, objectives, and policies designed to ensure the orderly and balanced economic, social, physical, environmental and fiscal development of our City. The plan is the blueprint for the future development of our community.

The document includes many types of background data about various facets of our community, which provide a factual basis for our policies. And it includes maps to help us visualize the anticipated pattern of development, as well as tools which allow us to monitor and evaluate our progress toward our goals. You can browse the current document, most of which was adopted in 2010, on the Planning and Zoning page of the City’s website at pompanobeachfl.gov.

You may be wondering why, if the City already has a Comp Plan, do we need to update it –and why now? Well, the Comp Plan may be a long-range document, but it is also dynamic, evolving as community conditions, aspirations, opportunities and challenges change over time. And since the current plan was adopted, a lot has changed in our City. For this reason, updating the plan as we head into the next decade makes common sense. Florida statutes also recognize the wisdom of updating local comprehensive plans on a regular basis.

Here are a few of the changes that our community has experienced in the past decade, and a hint of how these important issues could influence the content of Plan It Pompano!:

• SUSTAINABILITY AND SEA LEVEL RISE Do you have a seawall? Do you live in a flood plain? Will your property be affected by rising seas that can back up into the drainage system and bubble up through catch basins in the street? Will salt water intrusion affect our drinking water supply? How is and should the City be adapting to these threats? Though the issue of sustainability, resilience and sea level rise is touched on in the currently adopted Comp Plan, the concept is intended to be added into every element of the Plan as a unifying theme. A specific climate change element is being added to the Plan. This issue will be very important to the next planning horizon as the City prepares for two feet of sea level rise by 2060 and looks at ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

Unified Southeast Florida Sea Level Rise Protection for Regional Planning Purpose. This projection uses historical information from Key West and was calculated by Kristopher Esterson from the United States Army Corps of Engineers using USACE Guidance (USACE 2009) intermediate and high curves to represent the lower and upper bound for projected sea level rise in Southeast Florida. Sea level measured in Key West over the past several decades is shown. The rate of sea level rise from Key West over the period of 1913 to 1999 is extrapolated to show how the historic rate compares to projected rates.

• POPULATION PROJECTIONS: When the current Comp Plan was prepared, the Citywas in the height of the “housing bubble” which eventually lead to the great recession. The population projections in the Comp Plan, therefore, are much higher than the growth that was actually realized. US Census Bureau estimates that Pompano Beach’s population increased by nearly 11 percent between 2010 and 2017, while the current Comp Plan had an estimate closer to 20% – almost double the rate for this planning period. The Comp Plan update will include the population projections up to the year 2040 (approximately 135,000 people up from our current estimate of approximately 113,000 people – about a 1% annual average growth rate). Where should this population growth be directed given the imminent flooding threats from sea level rise? How will the new housing, work places and City infrastructure be made more resilient to hurricanes and flooding?

• MULTI-MODAL TRANSPORTATION In 2010, there were only two community bus routes operating in the City (Green and Blue). Now, there are two additional routes in the system (Red and Orange), and Broward County opened the Northeast Transit Center – where the four routes converge with the Broward County transit routes which include Routes 20, 42, 50 and 60 which effectively cover the entire County. The City of Pompano Beach will need to be actively engaged with Broward County to ensure that the 1-cent sales tax approved in 2018 for transit and transportation improvements is wisely, equitably and strategically spent in Pompano Beach. Policies to ensure this can be included in the Comp Plan update.

Just one decade ago, there was no such thing as Brightline, Uber or Lyft and autonomous vehicles were only for science fiction. The City is actively pursuing rideshare services like Zip Car and FreeBee. During the next two decades, how should we prepare our transportation network for the continued rise of personal mobility and autonomous driving technologies? What are the implications of these and other related issues, such as the future of parking demand and the emphasis on pedestrian and transit infrastructure instead of single-person vehicle related infrastructure? How do we increase our infrastructure for electric cars which could soon to be more common that gasoline powered cars?

• HOUSING SUPPLY AND DEMAND In the past three years, 993 new residential units have been completed in projects including City Vista, Captiva Cove, Orchid Grove, Madison Place, Koi, Crystal Lake and Atlantico. While the City still has some single-family units being built, the vast majority of new units are townhomes and apartment buildings, thus broadening the offering of more urban housing types in the City. The Comp Plan update will explore the additional residential opportunities needed to serve our future population which will be ever more urban in nature. What about our existing housing stock? How do we encourage retrofitting older homes to be more resilient in ever more powerful and wetter hurricanes and from the potential of flooding from sea level rise? How do we encourage the installation of solar power infrastructure on our homes to reduce our reliance on carbon-based fuels?

If these important changes in our Comp Plan don’t quite persuade you that this process should matter to you, think about it in these terms:

In the State of Florida, all proposed development in a given community is required to be consistent with the comprehensive plan for that community. So, just like its predecessor, Plan It Pompano! will be used by City staff and by various appointed advisory committees and boards (such as the Planning and Zoning Board) to make recommendations regarding development proposals; and by our elected officials on the City Commission to make decisions based on those recommendations. In addition, the plan likely will be studied by developers and their agents; and it may be consulted by you, as well, whether acting as a property or business owner, or perhaps as a community advocate.

The Plan should be checked by anyone trying to understand the broader vision of the community’s future, and the unique vision for discrete parts of the City. For this reason alone, the vision truly needs to represent a consensus of community input. And your voice should be part of that consensus.

It is also important to consider that the Comp Plan is implemented primarily through the Zoning Code and other ordinances, which translate the Plan’s broad policies into the real world standards and regulations that all development in the City must follow.

The overarching goals, objectives and policies of the Comp Plan can also be leveraged by the City when pursuing grant funding. The Comp Plan informs the preparation of short and midrange plans, and technical studies by various City departments to address specific topics or challenges. This was the case of documents such as the City’s existing Parks Master Plan, the Stormwater Master Plan, or the Economic Development Strategy and many more, which dig deeper into policy topics identified at a high level in the 2010 Comprehensive Plan. Even the recently adopted Capital Improvement Plan FY 2019-2023 and related G.O. Pompano! process has its foundation in the Comp Plan. Similarly, Plan It Pompano! could result in recommendations for new corridor, neighborhood, or other types of master plans and studies.

Identifying the community’s priorities – your priorities — is crucial in order to align the City’s policies and actions with the Plan’s intentions. What do you, as a stakeholder in the City’s future, want to see happen over the next 20 years? If you care about, own land, live, work, play or do business in the City of Pompano Beach, then let’s Plan It Pompano!

For additional information, contact Jean Dolan, AICP, CFM Sustainability Coordinator by emailing jean.dolan@copbfl.com or call 954.786.4045.