In 2021, Planning staff conducted 2 CPA assessments in Near Heights and Southwest Mesa and learned a lot!

• Not only did staff learn a lot about what the City does that meets the needs and addresses the concerns that communities have, we also learned that the schedule we'd put ourselves on was not enough time to engage the community and to vet recommendations at the end of the process to make sure that they met community priorities and that they had buy-in from implementing organizations, institutions, and department/agency staff. 

Given that lesson, we are requesting a revised schedule for CPA assessments to give more time in each CPA. The assessments will be conducted in largely the same order. Learn more below.

• We also learned that we would need additional staff, particularly experienced leadership, for the CPA teams to be successful. 

Based on that lesson, we requested 2 additional principal planner positions to serve as CPA team leads. City Council provided those positions in December 2022, and the Planning Department is advertising those positions as of March 2022.

• We learned that our assessment report was going to be too  long to be useful for community members or decision-makers.

Based on this learning, we revised our assessment report template to be more visual and reorganized the content to highlight community priorities. Instead of summarizing existing resources and programs in the assessment report, Planning staff will try to keep relevant information updated on the implementation page for the Comp Plan here, with lots of links to existing webpages maintained by implementing City and County departments, outside agencies, institutions, and community organizations. 

In April 2022, Planning staff sent City Council a recommendation for a revised schedule for the first cycle of assessments, based on our learning from the first pilot assessments in 2021, described above.

• Read more here.

City Council adopted an order for a proposed cycle from 2021-2024 in June 2020.

• Read more here.