What is a Comprehensive Plan?

A comprehensive plan is a statement of a community’s goals and a conceptual roadmap for how to achieve them. A comprehensive plan provides guidance to municipal leaders, government agencies, community organizations, local businesses, and residents, and helps to ensure that the community’s needs are met, both now and in the future. Long-term in nature, with generally a 10-year outlook, comprehensive plans concentrate on drafting land use policy, suggestive regulatory tools and measures, and proposing local laws that, over time, will foster the community’s future in a manner consistent with residents’ preferred vision.

In reading and using a comprehensive plan, it is also important to understand what it is not. This comprehensive plan is broad in its scope, not its detail. It is not a step-by-step instruction manual that tells exactly what to do or what will happen. While it does not predict the future, it frames the necessary steps to achieving the Village’s desired goals for the future. There are many ways to accomplish a community’s goals in a comprehensive plan. When creativity and responsiveness to public input and evolving community needs are carefully heard and considered, the result may better fit the Village than what was initially envisioned.

The comprehensive plan is like a conceptual sketch of what a house will look like when it is built; not the house itself or the blueprints that instruct the builder exactly what to build.