Ocean Springs has contracted Slaughter & Willingham (Urban Planning Consultants) to prepare the revised Comprehensive Plan that will be used as a guide for future Planning and Zoning decisions through the year 2045. This was presented as a draft to the public last year (October) and comments were requested before the final draft is prepared and sent to the Planning Commission and Board of Aldermen for approval. Now is the time to weigh in on anything you do not like (or do like) with this plan. It is a lengthy document; however if you focus on the second half of the document where future plans are discussed in detail, specifically:
Chapter 5 - Vision, Guiding Principles, Goals and Objectives
Chapter 6 - Land Use and Development Guiding Principles
Chapter 7 - Transportation Plan
Chapter 8 - Community Facilities Plan
The mayor is trying to push this through before his term ends at the end of June 2025. This should be tabled for the new mayor and board of aldermen to deal with.
Elements that concern us:
The Plan violates industry standards by it being a NON PARTICIPATORY plan. The existing plan that was drafted by the Planning Works took over a year to develop with numerous meetings where participants drafted the plan with the engineering company, starting from zero baseline. This proposed plan was completed without any input, using verbiage that is not specific to Ocean Springs' unique characteristics and without any investigations, studies or analysis.
The resulting draft has proposed sidewalks on streets such as Washington Ave. that are lined by ancient oaks, which make it impossible for that to happen. Either the oaks would be cut down or they would die if sidewalks were carved into the root system.
The map incorrectly shows properties such as the Reynolds property at Front Beach and Jackson Ave as proposed Commercial, which is impossible as it has been designated as a federally protected property in perpetuity due to being purchased under CIAP funding and its deed prohibiting any commercialization in perpetuity.
The Legend in Current Use maps has the color PINK as Vacant, and in the Proposed Future Use map, the same property has the Legend as Pink for Light Commercial Mixed Use. This is very deceiving if you are comparing one map to the other. It should be clearly different colors for different uses or one could assume there was "no change." As written this Plan provides for significant future rezoning of single family properties to Commercial.
There is quite a bit of development in the downtown area which is already overdeveloped, with no account for traffic or parking issues.
There are new roads noted such as making Robinson a through street, further destroying the small neighborhood feel of our historic community. These changes were not requested by Slaughter and Associates, nor the residents. Who directed these changes?
The plan is over 150 pages with numerous maps with changing legends and it is virtually impossible for the average resident to know this plan exists, or have the time to review all of this to make their concerns known. It is up to a handful of people that have the expertise to review all of these changes that are difficult to discern and therefore this entire process is disingenuous from its beginning as it purports to reflect a plan that was reviewed by the residents of Ocean Springs.
This Plan is a canvas for the City to complete their expansion of the entertainment district with dense mixed use commercial development.
This plan, once approved, can be used by City officials to execute aggressive re-zoning changes that favor developers over single-family property owners, with the justification that "it was developed with City resident's input.”