Fostering Fiscal Predictability: Improving a Communities Fiscal Health from Comprehensive Plan to Development Code

The City of Fate in 2021 adopted their new Forward Fate Comprehensive Plan, proactively looking at their community’s future growth patterns and charting a fiscally responsible path forward. Communities across the country have welcomed growth with little thought about the long-term fiscal implications of maintaining the associated infrastructure that comes with growth over time. City leaders in Fate however had long sought to approach community development in a more fiscally responsible manner. A primary directive of the Forward Fate Comprehensive Plan was to weave the notion of fiscal responsibility throughout the process and within the ultimate recommendations and implementation actions of the plan.

Incorporating a “Fiscal Lens” into the planning process, the comprehensive plan was built on educating the community on fiscal health by mapping and visualizing where the most financially successful parts of the community are today; and learning how to produce more development that grows wealth and prosperity. Through scenario planning, future growth patterns for the city were generated and evaluated based on the expected financial costs to provide infrastructure and expected revenues from sales and property taxes. The preferred growth scenario took a progressive approach to future land development by concentrating on infill and higher density development, while preserving rural land away from the urban core. For the city to grow in a fiscally responsible manner, a system of checks and balances was needed to ensue policy and land use decisions are made through a fiscal lens. The city’s existing “fiscal checklist” was updated and enhanced through the planning process and utilized as a tool to ensure that fiscal responsibility is at the forefront of all development recommendations considered by the community.

Upon adoption of their new comprehensive plan, city leaders and planning staff pivoted towards updating their Unified Development Ordinance to incorporate the plans fiscal responsibility lens into their development regulations. Using data-driven metrics the city was able to evaluate their existing development regulations and calibrate their new standards to foster more “fiscal predictability” as new developments are proposed for the community. Analyzing and fiscally mapping proposed development standards allowed the community to make educated decisions on future development patterns of the community and to ensure new developments met or exceeded their preferred growth scenario public to private development ratio.

This session will educate participants about the underlying relationship between revenue and cost of a community, and how utilizing data-driven metrics and analysis a community’s comprehensive plan and development regulations can be calibrated to foster fiscal predictability and assist in making more informed land use decisions for the future of a city’s growth.