Elgin kicks off comprehensive plan process

Elgin officials hope residents and business people in town will participate in the creation of the city’s new comprehensive plan, a process that started last week and is expected to last at least a year.

Consultants from Chicago-based Houseal Lavigne Associates kicked off the “Envision Elgin” planning process by conducting 20 to 30 interviews with individuals and groups, launching online surveys, and hosting community workshops for residents and business owners last week.

The surveys — one for residents and one for business owners — ask people to rate a variety of aspects of living in Elgin, from public services to housing, educational programs and more. They can be found at http://www.hlplanning.com/portals/elgin.

A Spanish-language community workshop will be held at a yet-to-be-determined date, Elgin senior planner Dave Waden said.

Also, the online questionnaire will be available in Spanish “fairly shortly,” he said.

The plan will serve to guide the city’s land use and development decisions for the next 15 to 20 years. Elgin’s last comprehensive plan was adopted in 2005.

“We’re just excited as heck to get this thing off,” Waden said. “Almost all sections of the plan are going to be looked at and revised. It really needs to be revamped.”

For example, the current plan calls for big homes on big lots, but these days homebuilders are more interested building smaller, he said.

John A. Houseal, principal of Houseal Lavigne, said about 15 business owners and 50 residents attended the workshops, whose goal was to get feedback. Future workshops will focus on what people envision for the future, he said.

“A lot of people thought Elgin was in need of a renewed effort to market and brand itself,” he said. “This is something we’ll often hear from a business community.”

Business owners also talked about the need to fill vacant commercial space.

“They want to try to get a real vibrant mix of uses in the downtown, so that it’s active into the evening, not just into the business hours,” he said.

Residents said they want the city to diversify its businesses and revamp its commercial corridors, he said. “As people drive (the corridors) into town, they want to make them visually represent the community a little bit better.”

They also pointed to the need to strengthen Elgin’s workforce by creating new employment opportunities, he said.

The new plan will pave the way for an update of Elgin’s land development regulations, including zoning ordinances and subdivision regulations.

Working on the plan is especially timely now that Elgin sees an uptick in construction with developers coming in to finish building existing subdivisions, Waden said.