By James Feichtner
On Aug. 3, members of Fishers City Council met for a special meeting that focused on preparing for the city’s upcoming comprehensive plan. The plan would be headed by a steering committee that would be broken up into four groups. On Dec. 14, those four groups gathered at Launch Fishers to relay what they had learned.
“Hopefully what we’ll have here tonight is a general idea or vision of where we want to take our community and then we’ll go to work on how we’ll actually get there with actionable items,” Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness said at the opening of the meeting.
Each of the task force groups, which were Land Use, Transportation, Residential and Parks, relayed their findings, which took place over 600 hours of meeting time since their meeting in August. A total of 63 individuals participated, including 44 task force and steering committee members, 16 city staff and three outside consultants.
The Land Use committee highlighted six goals for the future land use plan including: providing more variety of housing types, creating more opportunities for mixed use, increasing employment opportunities, proving nodes for retail and services, protecting key areas from open space and designating areas for special studies.
Residential task force goals discussed facilitating creativity, innovation and a strong sense of place, encouraging open spaces with purposeful reason, integrating safe interconnectivity and walkability within housing, maintaining streetscapes, encouraging mixed use developments and integrating the elements like storm water, natural preservation and integration of trees, gardens and trails.
The transportation committee broke its priorities into the East and West parts of fishers. The task force highlighted maintaining current roads, increasing capacity for vehicles, completing pedestrian trails and sidewalk networks and implementing bike lanes and encouraging mass transit.
The parks committee’s vision implied a framework that would allow accessibility during all seasons for all ages and all abilities, offer mixed-use of both active and passive spaces, be sustainable in a mindful and environmentally friendly way, promote vibrancy in the community and its identity, be safe in design, operation, and maintenance, be a collaborative in its coordination with the region and quality design.
The next step in developing the comprehensive plan will be at the January council meeting. To learn more or to view the full comprehensive plan presentation, visit http://www.fishers2040.com/
