News and Articles

The Santa Fe Board of County Commissioners received an update on the status of the Sustainable Growth Plan (SGP), Community Planning Organizations, SGP Capital Improvement Plan and Fiscal Impact Assessment, and Chapters One through Five of the new Sustainable Land Development Code at Tuesday’s Board of County Commissioners (BCC) meeting.

Sustainable Growth Plan
The update on the Sustainable Growth Plan process emphasized the importance of sustainability as a core value intertwined throughout the Plan - sustainability defined as the ability to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable design strives to use natural resources and technologies in an efficient and appropriate manner to provide maximum benefit while minimizing the impact on the local and global environment and economic sustainability provides for economic opportunities and enhanced employment growth close to residents.

The next steps in the Growth Management Planning process are:

• Ensure that the County planning team and members of the community are using the same, and best available data, projections, and assumptions
• Revise Tiers and Sustainable Development Areas
• Refine Future Land Uses
• Refine land suitability / sensitivity analysis
• Incorporate and test new projections
• Estimate preliminary Capital Improvement Plans and fiscal impacts

Fiscal Impact and Capital Facility Planning
The update recommends incorporating the use of Fiscal Impact Analysis (FIA) in the County’s sustainable Growth Plan. FIA is important because:

• Using FIA methods provides better information, showing development that will be more profitable in the end.
• FIA helps to counter sprawl by emphasizing more compact development patterns introduces additional magnitudes of savings not possible by pursuing current development patterns.
• It introduces concepts such as tax increment financing to allow developer provision of required infrastructure at modest shares of the increase in County and State property and gross receipts taxes.
• It requires a strong land development code, which carefully addresses land development in the County, as the necessary first step to introduce advanced methods of infrastructure financing.

Community Planning Organization
As one of the key implementation strategies that will be identified in the Sustainable Growth Plan, the Community planning and participation process will refine the community involvement program created in 1999. The new process will improve County growth management activities, establish a structured community problem solving and issues identification process, provide for community input in the budget and capital improvement plan process, and coordinates community preferences and County action and improves County responsiveness and service provision.

The SGP will propose Community Planning Organizations (CPOs) and Registered Organizations (ROs). A Community Planning Organization (CPO) will be a self-appointed group of community representatives recognized the BCC with the authority to recommend and make comments on non-administrative, pre-development applications to the Planning Commission within the community or area represented. CPOs will develop specific Strategic Work Plans, to be implemented in accordance with a County Capital Improvements Plan. A Registered Organization (RO) is any organization with a charter or rules of organization that would like to be notified about development projects or other specific County activities. In addition, Santa Fe County will sponsor an Annual Congress of Community Organizations so that all CPOs and ROs can confer together.

Sustainable Land Development Code
The first five chapters of new Sustainable Land Development Code were presented to Board for their review, after a detailed explanation by Dr. Robert Freilich. The Board authorized the County Development Review Committee to hold public workshops and hearings on the first five chapters of the Code beginning in July. Dr. Freilich will conduct a series of workshops with the CDRC during July and August to explain the new document and address comments and concerns of the public. The Board is scheduled to receive the next chapters of the Code in late August.

All of the materials presented at the meeting are available at www.santafecountynm.gov or by clicking here.