Guest Column: City planning decision process is backwards

When it comes to growth and development issues, the Columbia City Council and the Planning and Zoning Commission are stumbling around in the dark. They have failed to work through the long-term, overall implications of current development decisions. As a result, plans proposed by developers that seem to work now are likely to result in inefficiencies, cross purposes and squandered opportunities down the line as development proceeds.

What is lacking is a more fully articulated, comprehensive plan for the future development of the city. The current land use plan is hardly a plan. It identifies the areas of general urban development but fails to identify future neighborhoods and neighborhood facilities and to coordinate them with major traffic arterials. As a consequence, both the Planning and Zoning Commission and the City Council are blind to the long-term, general implications of current decisions of the sort now confronting the city in its consideration of a detailed development plan for the Cross Creek development at Stadium Boulevard and Highway 63. It is as if a house is being built one room at a time with no idea of how the rooms will fit together after build-out.

The elements and context of the required process are clear. The city government forecasts a 35,000-person population growth over the next 12 years. This will require roughly seven new elementary schools, seven new neighborhood parks, several new neighborhood or convenience-scale shopping centers, several middle schools, another high school, roughly 1,000 new acres of multifamily development, a couple of fire stations and possibly a branch library. With a little foresight, we could coordinate these future facilities with current and future major arterials. The Columbia Area Transportation Study Organization (CATSO) gives lip service to the need to coordinate roads and land use. But it can’t coordinate with plans that don’t exist. The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) is currently preparing an environmental impact statement on the roads in east Columbia. But since there are no articulated plans for land use and community facilities, MoDOT must do the best it can with the plans available.

Without long-range, comprehensive and general plans to guide them, the council duplicates the Planning and Zoning Commission’s work. Both bodies concern themselves only with short-term and detailed site-planning considerations. This reverses the proper general-to-specific sequence in the review of development proposals. A site plan for the Cross Creek development cannot be properly decided without making the decision about whether the Stadium extension will turn in a northeasterly or an easterly direction.

Approval of the Cross Creek site plan in its current form appears to foreclose any easterly extension of Stadium and commits to an upgraded winding country road (WW) to run diagonally through the current assignment area of the local elementary school. The unexamined consequences include the following

1. Forcing vehicular transportation for a large number of elementary students;

2. Dumping west-bound traffic from the future developed east side into the Broadway corridor and central business district;

3. Limiting eastern access to the Lemone Industrial Park and the proposed Cross Creek to the southern arterial road, New Haven; and

4. Forgetting Kyoto—the energy saved in building construction will easily be expended in inefficient transportation.