Project Description
RICK Planning + Design completed the new Comprehensive Plan and Three Mile Plan for Granby, the hub community of Grand County, Colorado. The project developed a Future Land Use Plan for the Town of Granby and for areas that might develop over the next 20 years, including areas along the Highway 40 and Highway 34 corridors. The Granby Comprehensive Plan helped confirm the community’s vision for the future, which informs all land use and development decisions going forward. More importantly, the plan established the framework for a very much needed update to the Town’s development codes.
Our team coordinated with residents and property owners in unincorporated Grand County to develop a Three Mile Plan for areas within three miles of the Town limits. The Comprehensive Plan focused on establishing park, trail, and open space connections between the various areas of Granby and between the town and nearby lakes, the Fraser and Colorado rivers, and state and federal conservation areas and public lands. The RICK team established policies and action items related to multimodal transportation, including enhancing safety for people walking and biking around town and crossing the US highways in the Granby area and enhancing transit connections across Granby and between the town and other communities in Grand County. RICK went beyond the normal requirements for Comprehensive Plans for Colorado communities and provided additional graphical design of potential parks in Granby. We also created a prototype for a mixed use village along Highway 40 that is serving as the foundation for the Town’s update of its development codes. The plan focused, in particular, on housing issues facing Granby, as housing has emerged as the top issue facing communities throughout Colorado. Housing policies and action items were established within the Comprehensive Plan to help address the housing affordability crisis facing the area.
RICK utilized a project website housed on the Social Pinpoint platform to provide project information, mapping tools, and online engagement. We conducted outreach through a combination of in-person open houses, online surveys, online stakeholder meetings, and outreach at community events, including the Granby Rodeo and the Granby Farmers Market. We also reached out and conducted in-person engagement with students at Middle Park High School in Granby.
The Comprehensive Plan established the vision the community has for Granby in the future. Perhaps more importantly, it helped identify the vision of what the community would NOT like to see Granby become in the future.