2050 Comprehensive Plan Priorities

East Bethel’s next Comprehensive Plan will shape land use, infrastructure, housing, transportation, parks, and economic development for years. I believe the Council should establish its policy direction early rather than waiting for a finished planning document to arrive for approval.

1. Preserve Rural East Bethel

Large rural areas should remain low-density and should not be incrementally suburbanized through repeated lot splits, premature utility expansion, or development patterns that undermine the city’s long-term rural character.

2. Concentrate Growth

Commercial, industrial, mixed-use, and appropriate higher-density housing should be concentrated where transportation, utilities, and public services can support them.

3. Stage Infrastructure

Water, sewer, MUSA expansion, and major transportation investment should follow the adopted growth sequence. A single development proposal should not determine the city’s infrastructure map unless it clearly advances the broader public interest.

4. Expand Housing Choice in the Right Places

The plan should provide room for townhomes, smaller homes, senior-oriented housing, and other options in planned growth areas while maintaining low rural densities elsewhere.

5. Strengthen the Tax Base

Economic-development policy should prioritize commercial and industrial growth that adds employment, services, and taxable value without shifting excessive long-term infrastructure cost to existing residents.

6. Connect Open Space

Open-space policy should focus on meaningful, connected land rather than leftover fragments or land that is already undevelopable. Conservation design should preserve woods, habitat, agricultural land, natural corridors, and other features that contribute to East Bethel’s character.

7. Make the Plan Implementable

A Comprehensive Plan is only useful if zoning, subdivision rules, capital planning, utility policy, and Council decisions actually follow it. The final plan should include an implementation schedule that identifies which official controls need to change and when.

The Standard

The 2050 plan should answer a simple question: what do we want East Bethel to become, and what decisions must we make now to get there?