{"id":1232,"date":"2011-12-04T21:56:57","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T02:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/how-to-read-comprehensive-plan-documents.html"},"modified":"2011-12-04T21:56:57","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T02:56:57","slug":"how-to-read-comprehensive-plan-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/12\/how-to-read-comprehensive-plan-documents.html","title":{"rendered":"How to read Comprehensive Plan documents"},"content":{"rendered":"I’m always getting a civics lesson, learning more and more about\nhow our local and state governments work. Most recently, I had\nthe opportunity to have explained two documents related to the\nLowndes County Comprehensive Plan: the Short Term Work Projects (STWP)\nand the Report of Accomplishments (ROA).\nIn the spirit of information exchange, I share what I learned with you.\n

\nThe state of Georgia requires a Comprehensive Plan\nand collects and approves them through the\n\nDepartment of Community Affairs (DCA)<\/a>.\nThe current plans for all of Georgia are available at the\n\nDCA Planning Site<\/a>.\n

\n\n<\/a>\nThe current STWP documents that are being reviewed locally are the projects\nthat the local governments and agencies expect to actively work on in\nthe next five years.\nThe ROA documents report on what was done in the past five years:\nwhat was completed, or will no longer be pursued.\nMany municipalities and counties file separate reports.\nLocally, because there is significant cooperation among the cities and Lowndes\nCounty there is one document with all the projects included and a place that\nindicates which agency is participating in the project.\nHowever, their input documents are filed separately, and LAKE\nhas collected them \non the LAKE web pages.<\/a>\nAlso, each local municipality holds its own public hearings.\n

\nReading the STWP and ROA can be a bit tricky but once I understood the format,\nthe process became much easier. The overall topics are prescribed by the\nstate and are in general categories like\n“Population”, “Economic Development”, “Housing” and “Land Use”.\nThere are sub-categories in each of the ten major categories, like\n“Secure High-Wage Jobs” and “Address Workforce Adequacy” in the\n“Economic Development” major category.\nThen, under each of these items are one or more specific projects\nthat will be done in the next five years to help achieve each goal.\n

\nOne reason the draft STWP is complex is that it redlines projects that were\nperformed in the previous five years and are now being removed or modified\nfor a variety of reasons.\nMany projects were completed, some moved from one stage\n(investigate) to another (implement or market), and still others\nsimply lacked the staff or funding resources to continue being pursued.\n

\nThe ROA document is in a similar format but the focus of it is to report the\nstatus of the STWP for the previous five years.\nAn Explanation Column gives details on the status of each previous project.\nFor example, it says that the “Feed the Elderly Senior\nCitizen Nutrition Program” has been discontinued because “Budgetary\nconstraints have limited Lowndes County’s role in this supporting action.”.\n

\nThe STWP and ROA documents are meant to be read as a pair,\ngiving the reader an understanding of\nwhere we have been, where we are going and\nhow we are going to get there as a community.\n

\n-gretchen\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I’m always getting a civics lesson, learning more and more about how our local and state governments work. Most recently, I had the opportunity to have explained two documents related to the Lowndes County Comprehensive Plan: the Short Term Work Projects (STWP) and the Report of Accomplishments (ROA). In the spirit of information exchange, I […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,40,552,601,14,15,321,686,8,2,602,11,603,88,21,604,3,54],"tags":[3317,8777,8790,3314,3313,8701,10,8791,7,8793,3316,3265,3315,3264,6],"class_list":["post-1232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-community","category-comprehensive-plan","category-dasher","category-economy","category-education","category-food-and-drink","category-gadca","category-georgia","category-government","category-hahira","category-lake","category-lake-park","category-lowndes-county-commission","category-planning","category-remerton","category-transparency","category-valdosta-city-council","tag-civics","tag-comprehensive-plan","tag-dasher","tag-dca","tag-department-of-community-affairs","tag-georgia","tag-gretchen-quarterman","tag-hahira","tag-lowndes-county","tag-remerton","tag-report-of-accomplishments","tag-roa","tag-short-term-work-project","tag-stwp","tag-valdosta"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-jS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}