City approves comprehensive plan

City approves comprehensive plan News Staff Wed, 07/10/2024 - 9:14 am Ken Coignet, vice president of Public Management Inc., explained the next steps for the city's comprehensive plan Tuesday, July 2 during a Breckenridge City Commission Meeting. Photo/Mike Williams By Mike Williams news@breckenridgeamerican.com The city of Breckenridge’s road map to 2040 was made official last week. City commissioners voted to accept the Breckenridge Comprehensive Development Plan. During the city commission’s Tuesday, July 2 meeting, city commissioners officially voted on a resolution to enact the plan, which had been long overdue. The city received a Community Development Block Grant of $55,000 to help with creating the plan. The plan project serves as a long-range planning document that includes an updated parks plan, base mapping, land-use analysis, housing inventory and population analysis, financial analysis for the development of a capital needs priority list, and technical details needed to update zoning and subdivision ordinances. “This serves as a long-range planning document,” City Manager Cynthia Northrop said. “…We haven’t had an update to a comprehensive development plan since the ’67. So obviously, it’s long overdue. It’s great that we got a grant. There’s really been an update for development.” The development plan outlines the city’s current needs and predicts future needs as the city progresses through the year 2040. The plan was presented to city commissioners in three segments with Northrop presenting the parks and open space portion during the commission’s May 2024 meeting. During the June 2024 meeting, Sage Diller, vice president of Enprotec/Hibbs & Todd, presented the utilities portion of the presentation. Ken Coignet, vice president of Public Management Inc., presented the population and housing portions of the comprehensive plan. The parks and open space portion of the plan highlighted five priorities for the city. This includes work at Breckenridge City Park, Booker T. Washington Park, expanding Lake Daniel Park, improvements to the Community Garden, designations of natural areas for use as nature parks and establishing more neighborhood parks. Last month Diller pointed out five issues with the water system in the city —these issues are water line replacement and fire hydrant installations needed, rehabilitation of existing elevated and ground storage tanks, water treatment plant upgrades, galvanized and lead service line replacement and emergency power. While discussing wastewater, Diller highlighted four problems — three lift stations have not been rehabilitated recently, the wastewater collection main needs replaced, improvements are needed in the wastewater treatment plant and there is a lack of sufficient emergency power at the water treatment plant, booster pump stations and wastewater lift stations. The draining portion of the utilities plan includes cleaning culverts and storm inlets, grading road-side ditches, removing silt and vegetation from curb and gutter sections, creek maintenance on Walker Branch and Gunsolus Creek and developing a storm drainage maintenance program to include routine ditch grading, silt removal, vegetation removal as well as maintenance activities and annual cost-estimate. Coignet said a priority for the city needed to include removal of substandard housing. A survey was conducted of every commercial and residential structure in the city to classify each building by type, condition and occupancy status. Although the population of Breckenridge fell by 433 persons from 2000 to 2020, the plan predicts population increases between now and 2040. It predicts the population of the city to be between7,500–9,500 by 2040. This is based on a combination of the Texas Water Development Board Population Projections for Stephens County and a linear progression of the population growth rate from 2020 to 2023. With approval from the city commission, the plan will be submitted to the Texas Department of Agriculture to ensure the plan meets the CDBG contract. News