After more than two years of work, Suffolk could pass a new comprehensive plan that will inform future development and land use as well as possible city programs, initiatives and capital improvements.
A public hearing on the plan is scheduled before the city council Wednesday.
But multiple groups of residents are hoping that doesn’t happen. They are concerned the plan will open the door for more growth Suffolk is not prepared for, and don’t think city staff has made the case for moving on from the prior plan.
Comprehensive plans are long-term planning documents that set a locality’s growth strategy – touching on where new development should be focused, what services or utilities need to be expanded to meet the city’s needs and what community assets need protection going forward.
Keith Cannaday, Suffolk’s comprehensive planning manager, compared it to an aspirational roadmap for city planning. He said it’s typical for localities to periodically update their plans after 5 to 10 years.
“You’ve got things that, frankly, you just didn’t think of 25 years ago,” Cannaday said. “Big changes that impact growth areas and land use that we’re certainly trying to deal with.”
Suffolk’s working comprehensive plan, titled Suffolk 2045, would be the fourth iteration of the city’s plan if approved by city council. It would replace the prior plan, called the Comprehensive Plan for 2035, that was approved in 2015.
But that doesn’t mean they start from scratch, according to Cannaday.
“We’re really just kind of building on what we’ve done,” he said. “So we’ve got the benefit of the strategy that we’ve been learning from and implementing for a long time.”
Work on the plan began in early 2022. Suffolk and its contractors began years of community engagement efforts ranging from focus groups and open houses to online surveys. In February, the city shared drafts of the plan with the public.
The plan is broad, including objectives ranging from creating an arts district downtown and finding strategies to protect and grow agriculture businesses to developing a portfolio of sites suitable for large-scale development and improving roadways in traffic-laden areas. It also proposes an overhaul of how the city defines place types and the land uses suitable in each.
Cannaday said the draft plan is an attempt to balance the interests of different sectors of the community while not stymying new development and economic growth in Suffolk.
But residents like Eryn Siegel don’t see the balance. She’s part of a group called CARE4Suffolk, a grassroots community advocacy group that opposes the Suffolk 2045 plan.
“Our frustrations with this plan is, after reading through it, it does not reflect what the citizen input was,” Siegel said.
Suffolk reports that it collected more than 7,500 comments on the plan and that staff interacted with more than 3,600 people at in-person meetings with the community. Siegel saw many of them after CARE4Suffolk requested the written comments through a Freedom of Information Act request.
“They wanted that small-town feel, downtown investment, open space and parks, well-planned development,” Siegel said. “They wanted to fix the traffic issues, safe [and] walkable communities, affordable housing, limit warehouses – that’s a specific one, a lot of people just don’t want any more warehouses.”
For Siegel, the disconnect is most apparent in the Suffolk 2045 plan’s expansion of the city’s growth areas. Growth areas are locations identified as ideal for new development, including potential development of new warehouses to support increased Port of Virginia activity.
While reduced from earlier drafts, the plan as it stands includes a more than 12% increase in the city’s growth areas in downtown and north Suffolk – the largest total acreage increase of the growth areas since they were created.
“We’re already straining under the rapid growth that’s happened in the last few years,” said Ann Harris, also with CARE4Suffolk. “It just doesn’t seem to be the right timing for [this].”
The increased growth area acreage is located adjacent to existing growth area boundaries, something Cannaday said is informed by a long-time strategy of focusing growth closer to Suffolk’s urban core and main transportation routes.
“You create new opportunities for people, places to live [and] job opportunities and stuff like that, but you’re not sprawling out all over the city,” Cannaday said. “So impacts are minimized. The efficiency and effectiveness of the money that you’re spending for services are optimized.”
Siegel and Harris, though, see the new development and proposed growth area as encircling downtown.
“That makes it a problem to transit the city and you’re making it even harder to get from the southern to the northern part of the city,” Harris said.
The issue of traffic has also been a point of opposition for the Port 460 development and Suffolk’s Route 460 project to handle the increased volume of trucks that will come with it.
Though the Suffolk 2045 plan does identify various road infrastructure improvements as objectives, Cannaday said the document is too broad to drill into what needs to be done. He said a future transportation master plan is recommended by the comprehensive plan to prioritize a list of possible roadway improvement projects.
Cannaday added that though a location may be included in an identified growth area in the plan, all developments would still have to go through a rezoning process.
Siegel, though, worried that the growth area could be used as justification to approve any proposed rezoning in a public hearing.
Kelly Hengler, executive president of the Crittenden-Eclipse-Hobson Heritage Civic League, said the plan signals a pivot in focus toward becoming a dry port in Suffolk’s economic development plans.
“It looks like the plan that pivoted in 2026 and 2035, to focus inward and be less auto-dependent, somewhere along the way stopped being the adopted comprehensive plan,” she said.
Hengler also pointed to a lack of a new fiscal impact analysis accompanying the plan as a problem. A fiscal impact analysis calculates the net financial impact of development by assessing the total tax revenue collected in an area and the cost for extending city services and amenities to new growth.
Cannaday said the city ultimately opted not to do a new analysis as the Suffolk 2045 plan is largely an extension of the existing focused growth strategy in Suffolk. He added that while they do calculate fiscal impact at the project level, the tool they use to do so is aging.
“The [change in] tax rates, the cost of the services that you provide really requires that you go in and revise and update those tools much more frequently, frankly, than we have been doing,” Cannaday said. “We’ve been hearing that even though that big strategy piece doesn’t make sense for us to evaluate, we definitely need to sharpen our tools.”
But opponents aren’t convinced. Hengler said the city has not done enough to demonstrate the need to move past the 2035 plan and that the cost of the objectives in the 2045 plan are not clear to residents.
“Show us why there is a substantial reason to change from the 2035 [plan],” she said. “We want the growth, but this isn’t going to cause growth. This is going to cause displacement.”
Residents also worried about increased pressures on schools and the impact of heightened development and traffic on Suffolk’s waterways and wetlands, among many other concerns.
Cannaday told WHRO that he respects the position of the plan’s opponents despite their different conclusions, and that he expected push-back.
“It’s not unusual for growing communities, particularly the way this community is growing, to really bristle from the growing pains,” Cannaday said. “We’re still working on how … we communicate these issues and at least feel like they understand why we’re doing the things that we’re doing and the different perspectives that we’re trying to weigh.”
The comprehensive plan now falls to the city council for consideration. Mayor Mike Duman on his routine Facebook Live preview of the city council meeting said he’d like to see the plan pass before the start of 2025, though it might not happen Wednesday.
“I’m just one vote out of eight, but personally I can’t see passing the comp[rehensive] plan,” Duman said. “There’s too many questions that still need to be answered. I’m not real happy as to where we are right now after two years and five or six months.”
