Comprehensive Planning is an organized way of determining community needs and setting goals and objectives to address those needs in order to plan for a community’s future.   Strong communities, in which people want to live and work, are built through Comprehensive Planning.

NCICG can assist your community in creating a Comprehensive Plan to help guide its future.  NCICG produces plans that include, but are not limited to, the following elements:

• Issues and Opportunities: creates a vision for the community and identifies goals to help achieve that vision.
• Land Use: translates the vision into physical terms by assessing the existing land use and planning for the general pattern for the location, distribution, and characteristics of future land uses over a 20-year period.
• Transportation: considers all the relevant modes of transportation and establishes a framework for acquisition, preservation, and protection of existing and future rights-of-way.  
• Community Facilities: inventories existing community facilities, establishes a level of service, and plans for facilities to maintain those levels of service into the future.
• Telecommunications Infrastructure: encourages investment into the most advanced technologies and establishes a framework for providing reasonable access to public rights-of-way. 
• Housing: assesses the current housing stock and needs; identifies a wide range of housing options to meet those needs. 
• Economic Development: coordinates local economic development incentives with those of the State; identifies and builds on assets of the community and region
• Natural Resources:  identifies, protects, and leverages local and regional natural resources.  
• Public Participation: educates and involves the public in the consensus building process.
• Other sub-areas of the plan may include historic preservation, downtown development/redevelopment, human services, natural hazards, and community design.

Planners at NCICG will attend preliminary project informational meetings and submit a detailed project proposal upon request.  If approved, our planners will coordinate with the identified working group (applicable committee, commission, or otherwise appointed group) at regularly scheduled time periods, until the plan is complete.  Council staff will also conduct key person interviews, community visioning events, and other public input meetings to ensure community involvement.  NCICG will supplement the plan with GIS (Geographic Information System) based maps, research data, and technical information as agreed upon in the detailed proposal.  Upon completion, NCICG will present the plan to your Board or Council for approval and adoption.

Please see the links below for some examples of the Comprehensive Plans that NCICG has created: