MORGANTOWN — Over the last 18 months, hundreds of citizen ideas, requests and suggestions have helped plot the map to Monongalia County’s future.
Now that 133-page document is ready for its public debut.
The 2023 update to Monongalia County’s comprehensive plan is available online at monongaliacounty.gov.
West Virginia code mandates political subdivisions update their comprehensive plans every 10 years for the purpose of informing future decisions regarding land use, transportation, economic development and housing.
Monongalia County Director of Planning Andrew Gast-Bray said he hopes the community will take a look.
“The one we have online that we’ve been working so hard on really behaves a lot like a website. You click on it and find the stuff you want. From there, you can continue to delve in to the specifics of what you’re looking for. People don’t have to read through 200 pages to find what you’re looking for,” Gast-Bray said.
“There’s a nice synopsis at the front which gives you the plan at a glance. If you want to find out more, you click on it and you’re right to it and you can down get into the weeds of it. I think that’s pretty cool.”
The Monongalia County Commission plans to schedule a public hearing in the coming weeks. The county’s last plan was adopted in February 2013.
But the county isn’t alone in this process.
“Right now we’re in the plan draft phase, so the consultants have done all the background research, we’ve gathered the community input and they’re taking that and putting it into a draft,” Morgantown Director of Development Services Rickie Yeager said. “Our intent is to roll that out as a draft early in 2023 for the community to review and provide comment on.”
The city is looking at an April deadline for adoption.
Morgantown kicked off its public input process with consultant Rhodeside & Harwell during a March event at the Morgantown Event Center.
Yeager said citizen feedback is the lifeblood of the planning process.
“It’s going to sound cliché, but it’s their community. If this is a policy document that our community leaders should be looking at when making decisions about the future, we need the public’s input on that,” Yeager said. “What’s the priority for the public?”
The county joined all the municipalities and the Morgantown Monongalia Metropolitan Planning Organization for a Comprehensive Plan Fair in September. Gast-Bray said that event was representative of the entire process.
“People talk about how contentious things are working together here in this community, but I don’t find that at all. I thought it was an amazing process,” he said.
“We’ve been able to cross-pollinate. Morgantown borrowed stuff from us. We borrowed things from Morgantown. That’s really great in so many ways because it means everybody flows together. Our goals are reinforcing each other and we’re trying to target concentrated investment in key areas and leave places that don’t want to be messed with alone.”
