General Information on Comprehensive Planning

The Comprehensive Plan is an official planning document or a set of related documents adopted by the authorized body of a jurisdiction to be used as a guide for short-term and long-term land and economic development as well as public facility and service provision. In Missouri, the enabling legislation gives the power of adopting a local comprehensive plan to the jurisdication's planning commission.

The Comprehensive Plan is just one of many tools that a local jurisdication uses to regulate and manage local land use, development and growth. Combined together, these tools form a development and growth planning and management framework. Some of these tools are regulatory in nature whereas other are administrative. Another set of important tools are of implementation tools provide assurance that the established goals and objectives are met.

The diagram below helps understand the nature and the relationships of the different tools discussed above.

The comprehensive Plan is generally developed through an established comprehensive planning process. The comprehensive planning process is a public process in which the public plays a key role in determining the results of the planning effort. Community leaders, stakeholders and the elected officials should all be the major participants of the process. The diagram below depicts the major steps of a typical comprehensive plan development or amendment process and how and when the key players get involved.

A typical comprehensive plan addresses the physical side of community development, such as types of land use, patterns of land use distribution, locations and capacity of roads, sewer lines, waterlines, parks, community centers, etc. It has become more common for a comprehensive plan to address economic development issues, housing issues, environmental issues and human services. However, the comprehensive plan typically has a focus on land use development and public infrastruction provision. For that reason, Lee's Summit Comprehensive Plan combines various types of plans and studies as one planning document. These plans, though have a different focus standalone, are connected in many ways and one affects the other in one way or another. When readers read the information provided on this website on the comprehensive plan should keep this in mind.