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Comprehensive plans come in all shapes, sizes, and varieties. Their general purpose is to provide communities and governments within a planning area with information and policies that will guide future planning and community decisions. Comprehensive plans incorporate a medium- to long-range planning horizon, often twenty-years, to incorporate vision and goals to provide a rational basis for local land use, municipal management, infrastructure, development, timing and location of future growth, and related decisions.  Communities and planning areas vary greatly in size, population, circumstance, and vision. The uniqueness of individual comprehensive plans reflects community-specific and locally driven planning processes.

A comprehensive plan may be a single document, or series of documents, that serves as a decision making guide that establishes long-term goals and objectives to guide the future growth of a city. Comprehensive plans are also known as a Master or General Plan.

Walworth County's CNRED Educator can provide support to communities and municipalities concerning planning activities.

Return to Walworth County Community Development Homepage

Above: Land use plan for Walworth County: 2035 (2009 Comprehensive Plan)

"Smart growth" has a number of definitions, but generally incorporates a range of development and conservation strategies that help protect the natural environment and make communities more attractive, economically stronger and more socially equitable. A smarth growth strategy focuses on the long-term implications of growth and development decisions, and how it may effect communities at various geographic and time scales. Smart growth has become a label for traditional comprehensive planning activities that seek to integrate core planning elements such as land use and transportation with emerging ecological and social concerns with the intent to create an integrated policy structure for approaching growth and change in communities over time.

According to s. 66.1001, Wis. Stats., beginning on January 1, 2010, if a town, village, city, or county engages in official mapping, subdivision regulation, or zoning, those actions must be consistent with that community's comprehensive plan.  The Wisconsin Comprehensive Planning Law (s. 66.1001) does not mandate how a local community should grow, rather it requires public participation at the local level in deciding how a community wants to look and be in the future.

Walworth County has cooperated with thirteen towns in the County in a planning effort that will result in a multijurisdictional comprehensive plan that satisfies the State planning requirements. The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC)worked under contract with the County and participating towns to provide support staff and expertise in this process. A draft of the comprehensive plan can be downloaded from the SEWRPC website.

Support Publications

Comprehensive Planning and Citizen Participation (UW Extension Publication)

Required Elements of a Local Comprehensive Plan (UW Extension Publication)

American Planning Association

Smart Growth Network