LAKEWOOD —The city of Lakewood is asking residents to dust off their crystal balls and take a look into the future, all in the name of a new planning document for the community.
“How do you want Lakewood to look in 2025?” city officials are asking.
The answer will go toward updating the city’s comprehensive plan and forming Lakewood’s first-ever sustainability plan. A revised comprehensive plan was last adopted in 2003 , before the W Line opened, St. Anthony Hospital moved, the Denver Federal Center became part of Lakewood and Belmar was completed.
“The comprehensive plan is really the city’s vision for the future, involving land use, transportation, economic development,” said Holly Boehm, a principal city planner.
To kick off the planning process, the city has been hosting community open houses since mid-September, the final two of which are Oct. 29 and Nov. 12.
The topic of the Oct. 29 session is “Lakewood Moves,” focusing on transportation and how to encourage a multimodal system. The Nov. 12 meeting, “Lakewood Sustains,” will discuss sustainability and how the city can be more resource-efficient and reduce waste.
Surveys from previous sessions are also available and can be completed online at . Areas of focus include the city’s changing demographics and growth, economic development, housing options and quality of life.
The final result, the revised comprehensive plan, will be presented to the Lakewood Planning Commission and Lakewood City Council for adoption in late 2014 and early 2015. Additional open houses will be held in the fall of 2014 to get community feedback on the proposed policies and goals, Boehm said.
“It’s about being prepared for the future rather than reacting,” Boehm said. “We can design a clear path and a clear idea for what’s important to the community and what we want to see, rather than just reacting to things as they come in. By being more proactive, you get better results.”
The sustainability plan, the first of its kind for Lakewood, is really the next step in the city’s ongoing commitment to sustainability, said Jonathan Wachtel, the city’s sustainability planner.
The final plan will include both measurable goals and proposed actions, he said. Following the community open houses, six working groups of city staff, experts and residents will be convened to flesh out ideas for the plan.
The groups will focus on energy in the built environment, healthy communities, waste and recycling, transportation, natural systems and ecology and sustainable economics, Wachtel said.
“We really want to identify what a sustainable community is, how Lakewood will define that and how we measure that,” Wachtel said. “Once we figure out how to measure that, we can create policies and programs and set goals to ensure Lakewood is moving in the right direction.”
