Joint meeting planned to discuss master plan

By Kevin Elliott

Birmingham City Commissioners and the Birmingham Planning Board will hold a joint meeting on Monday, April 19, to discuss revisions to the city’s 2040 Master Plan, it was determined at the city commission meeting on Monday, March 22.

The 2040 Master Plan serves as a citywide plan coordinating neighborhood area-specific plans, as well as the Triangle or Rail districts, and topic-based plans, including parking or multi-modal, and provide an opportunity to re-evaluate recommendations. The first draft of the plan included proposed future policies and actions to be undertaken by the city.

More than 300 online comments and input from nearly a dozen public meetings were incorporated into a summary and presented to city commissioners. The commission on Monday, March 22, was asked to approve the summary and revisions to the first draft of the city’s 2040 Master Plan. However, commissioners said they wanted additional information as to the specific comments that guided the revisions.

Commissioner Mark Nickita said he was perplexed because he was aware of the extensive amount of public input during the master plan process, but didn’t see specific comments in the summary.

“The summary doesn’t have any back-up information, no planning board minutes, no other information at all,” he said. “We want to make sure the second draft is as complete and informed as possible. I have a whole series of questions on the summary that I’m not clear about.”

Matthew Lambert, a planning consultant with DPZ who wrote the summary, said all of the information is available but wasn’t included in the summary as he didn’t want to overwhelm the report with too much information.

Commissioner Stuart Sherman said he expected a joint meeting as part of the summary in order to put it into context. “We don’t have enough information to review this and have any semblance of a reasonable conclusion,” he said.