Tupelo steering committee drives closer to updating city comprehensive plan
Dec. 6—TUPELO — After months of meetings and closed-door discussions, the steering committee behind Tupelo's comprehensive plan is ready to hire a consultant and move forward with changes to the city's codes.
During a Monday afternoon meeting, City Planner Jenny Savely said the committee, which comprises 25 members from local businesses, city officials, nonprofit advocates and other local residents, will soon ask to pursue a contract with regional firm GMC Consulting for consulting work on the 2025 comprehensive plan.
"The firm will help us take some burden off of legal, help us write up the ordinance form and development code changes. It will also come with zoning map changes that this firm is part of their standard practice," she said.
Savely noted that the firm focuses heavily on area revitalization. Once it gets approval from the Tupelo City Council, the committee can move forward with the contracting process.
"One of the things the steering committee has looked most heavily at is defining commercial corridors and residential communities that we need to invest in with our zoning requirements ... and trying to figure out what we can do to revitalize some of our commercial corridors like along Gloster," Savely said.
Walkability, anchor points for communities and development of city-owned properties are also topics the committee focused on. An anchor, in a development sense, is any organization, development, or institution that supports growth in the community.
Savely said code enforcement and tax abatement, zoning and other programs to encourage growth were also prioritized.
The city's comprehensive plan is a document detailing the city's projected growth over a 15-year span. It provides a framework for all city ordinances, including the development code. The last update to the plan was in 2008. Since then, city officials said many things in the city have changed exponentially.
The process of updating the city's comprehensive plan began in March with the mayor appointing 35 members to the steering committee. Since then, the committee has met monthly. They began by discussing big-picture items and then breaking into subcommittees to focus on narrower topics, including housing, quality of life, community engagement, economic development and community development.
Chief Operations Officer Don Lewis gave further clarification on the purpose of a comprehensive plan as a guiding but ultimately non-binding document.
"This is just a plan," he said. "It is not locking anybody or any department into doing this, this, this and this. It is a recommendation for good business practices.... It is not concrete."
This will be a years-long project, said Tanner Newman, Tupelo's development services director. A final vote on the plan isn't expected until June 2024.
