Project Description
RICK Planning + Design led the creation of a new Comprehensive Plan (referred to as “Legacy Lafayette”) for Lafayette, Colorado (population: 30,000). Lafayette is nearing build-out, and the Comprehensive Plan focuses on how the community can guide development of older portions of the city and diversify the range of housing available, in order to ensure sufficient housing is available for all generations and for people of different professions and backgrounds. The team developed all aspects of the Lafayette Comprehensive Plan through the lens of sustainability, as environmental resiliency is one of the core values of the Lafayette community. The plan effort involved significant public outreach, including a Community Advisory Committee and outreach to various groups and constituencies in Lafayette. The Lafayette Comprehensive Plan helped to crystalize the values that drive all of the community’s actions, including inclusivity and sustainability, and thus the document serves as an important foundation for all community initiatives and efforts.
RICK developed a project website for the effort that included bilingual components (English/Spanish) and conducted outreach to the Latino/Hispanic community throughout the process. The project website included online discussion forums, online surveys, and the full range of background information and project content. We conducted outreach at community events and festivals throughout the community to go beyond traditional meetings and bring community outreach and public input efforts to the people of Lafayette, where they live, work, and play. Legacy Lafayette included economic and housing analysis, fiscal analysis of the Comprehensive Plan, transportation planning, sustainability planning, land use planning, and integration of parks and open space planning concepts.
The RICK team also leveraged online input beyond the expectations of the client to move the plan forward at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Spring 2020, the RICK team developed an online mapping tool for the community to comment on the preferred direction of the Comprehensive Plan and actively marketed online functions for community engagement to continue to build support for the plan during the pandemic. Rather than having the effort stall out, like many other planning projects across the region at the time, this extra effort allowed Lafayette to move the plan toward completion within a year of the pandemic beginning.
The Lafayette Comprehensive Plan established a land use framework for the community that represents the first major pivot away from the suburban development patterns experienced in the community over the last 40 years. This aspect of the plan in particular is helping to inform updates to the City’s codes and subarea planning for different corridors in Lafayette.