County to release draft General Plan Update for comment tomorrow

San Diego County Department of Planning and Land Use will release its first draft of the General Plan Update for public comment tomorrow, reports Devon Muto, advanced planning chief for the department/

The plan, expected to be brought to county supervisors for approval in 2010, is the first complete upgrade of the county’s General Plan in 30 years. After the public comment period, the next step will be to finish writing the plan’s environmental impact report, a process that could take 18 to 24 months.

General plans guide community development. In general, they set the philosophy and policies that determine what gets built where — how communities will accommodate growth while preserving character and protecting what the community values.

The General Plan Update is expected to improve the current plan by balancing growth with the need to control traffic congestion, protect the environment and ease the strain on essential services such as water supplies and fire protection. That will be accomplished in part by shifting 20 percent of future growth to western unincorporated communities with established infrastructure such as roads.

The General Plan Update would reduce the growth that the current general plan would allow by 15 percent. But it would still allow 168,000 to 198,000 more people to live in the unincorporated communities that now house roughly 491,800 people.

The draft General Plan Update was developed with input from builders, business owners, environmentalists, farmers, homeowners, landowners and renters, said Muto.