After three and a half years of work, Doña Ana County Commission passed the county’s new comprehensive plan, Plan 2040, by a vote of 4-1.
Plan 2040 provides a list of goals for the county and ways to help get there. Doña Ana County Community Development Director Daniel Hortert says the plan provides a vision for the county for the next 25 years.
“You know it’s a blueprint,” Hortert said. “It’s a policy document. Nothing in that document says you must do this, but what it does is it takes the vision of the community and all the public outreach that we did, and it kind of combines it into these are important goals and actions that we need to take in order to get where we decided we want to go.”
He says over 200 hundred public meetings and workshops were held over the last three and a half years to make sure the public was involved in the decision making.
“Those included, charrettes,” Hotert said. “Workshops, one on ones, stakeholder group meetings, etc. So, there was really a lot of outreach for the comprehensive plan.”
County Commissioner Billy Garrett says the plan is important to help shape decisions made by the commission as well as for receiving money for projects.
“It provides us a way of moving forward throughout the county,” Garrett said. “In a way that responds to challenges and changes that are going to be coming. It allows us to take on some of the existing problems that we have, but it allows us to do it in a way that respects the qualities that people value. And that make this such a very special place to live in.”
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Commissioner Ben Rawson was the only vote against passing the comprehensive plan because the full plan wasn’t provided to the commission as part of the agenda packet, which is supposed to have all the information needed for the meetings.
“The planned proposal was not included in the packet for us to review” Rawson said. “It was a last minute change that staff didn’t even mention to us until after I started asking questions and found out the wrong information was included in our packet.”
Commissioner Garrett says he didn’t think it was a legal issue or one that should prevent a vote because the plan has been widely available to both the commission and the public for months.
“This is a culmination of three and half years of work,” Garrett said. “And all commissioners got not only hard copies, but information about how to link in to the website to look at the version electronically. So, everybody had access to the information, and we all knew what we were voting on.”
Community Development Director Daniel Hortert says no plan can be perfect, but that this is a living document and that it will be reviewed and changed over the next 25 years.
“If the public comes in,” Hortert said. “Says ‘There’s an issue. I’m having a problem with this, it’s just not working for me, how do we fix it?’ Well the first thing I’m going to says is yeah, how do we fix it, and let’s fix it. So, it doesn’t matter if it’s six months, six years, we’re going to look at it periodically. Every year for the next 3 to 5 years, and then after that I think it will go on a two to five year cycle. And that’s very common for comprehensive plans around the country for how they do that.”
If you have any questions or would like to see what’s in the comprehensive plan you can visit Viva DoñaAna.com.
