The City of Sheboygan has extended the timeline for its proposed Comprehensive Plan.
Taylor Zeinert, Sheboygan’s Director of Planning and Development, has announced that the timeline has been extended by one month to “allow for additional community feedback.”
This comes after a scathing public hearing on the Comprehensive Plan on Tuesday (October 13th), when the City Plan Commission was set to approve the document for adoption by the Common Council.
Residents’ feelings about the plan were made abundantly clear during the public hearing, with zero Sheboyganites voicing their approval. In fact, most speakers were emphatically opposed to the plan for being legally out of line with state statutes, without any sort of implementation plan, weakening the City’s environmental protections, and for being intentionally vague despite being a ‘Comprehensive’ Plan.
This included Sheboygan County Board Supervisor and City of Sheboygan resident, Rebecca Clarke.
“The plan is vague where it must be specific and specific where it doesn’t count. The purpose section lists things like pet-friendly policies, wellness development, sustainable agriculture. But none of these appear anywhere else as actual policies,” she explained. “In the 2011 Plan, the natural resources section actually spanned multiple pages. In this draft, it has been reduced to six bullet points. Where was the public request for expanded industrial development or weakened environmental protections?”
Meanwhile, in the City’s public statement, they did not address any of these concerns, but Mayor Ryan Sorenson did note, “This extension is intended to create space for those conversations and strengthen the overall planning process.”
However, whether or not any of these concerns about the vagueness and incompleteness of the Comprehensive Plan will actually be addressed remains to be seen.
