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Regional Plan for Sustainable Development: Component Plans

The Regional Plan for Sustainable Development is a compilation of key regional plans and strategies with common goals and themes.

Visioning

• The region's Land Use Vision, adopted in June 2010, provides a forecast and vision for metropolitan growth, rooted in the objectives and strategies contained in local comprehensive plans, that supports an increased level of development and reinvestment in existing and emerging activity centers and along key transportation corridors.
• Creating Quality Places, first developed in 1999, seeks to shape future development in ways that will maintain and enhance the high quality of life that our residents enjoy. It includes 20 design principles that represent a powerful consensus on what is needed to design successful neighborhoods, vibrant mixed-use commercial areas and efficient transportation systems — all within a healthy natural environment.

Strategy and Implementation

• Transportation Outlook 2040, the long-range transportation plan adopted in 2010, describes how the region will manage, operate and invest in its multimodal transportation system for the next several decades. The federal government requires MARC to update this long-range transportation plan every five years.
• The Smart Moves Transit Plan, begun in 2002, articulates a vision for how transit should serve the Kansas City metropolitan area in the years and decades ahead. It proposes a primarily bus-based system along priority corridors that connects people to employment and activity centers.
• The Clean Air Action Plan, first published in 2005, provides a comprehensive, voluntary, community-based strategy for reducing ground-level ozone pollution in the Kansas City metropolitan area. It includes formal, public commitments by participating stakeholders to work collaboratively through new and existing partnerships to maximize the plan's air quality benefits.
• The MetroGreen Action Plan provides a greenprint for a metropolitan trails system that connects urban and rural green corridors throughout seven counties in the Kansas City region. The plan is also designed to protect and improve water quality in the region for the next 100 years, conserving and enhancing the region's existing natural elements. Above all, MetroGreen exists to ensure that area residents continue to enjoy a high quality of life. MetroGreen builds on the vision plan created in 1991 by the Prairie Gateway Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
• The Solid Waste Management District's Strategic Plan of Action guides short-term planning efforts and identifies long-term strategies to provide consistent access to solid waste services for residents and businesses, increase waste diversion and public awareness/participation, and sustainably manage waste for the next 30 years.
• The Regional Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy is designed to increase opportunities for communities across the region to conserve energy, use it efficiently and consider renewables. The strategy fosters greater regional collaboration through community partnerships and public outreach, involvement and education.
• The Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy Plan (CEDS) is designed to bring together the public and private sectors the Kansas City region to create an economic roadmap to diversify and strengthen the regional economy. It provides an analysis of the regional economy, integrates human and physical capital into economic planning and provides useful benchmarks for evaluating progress.
• Other regional plans currently in development include:
  • A coordinated and coherent affordable-housing strategy that identifies what capacities are needed for the region to successfully develop affordable housing; evaluates current capacities within the metropolitan area; and discusses how we can enhance those capacities.
  • Social equity strategies to ensure that all populations — including people of color, people living in poverty, people with special needs and other often under-represented groups — are actively engaged in the development of plans that will affect them
  • Healthy living, including plasn to encourage healthy eating by addressing enhanced local production, improved school and institutional healthy food options, and addressing food deserts and access to healthy foods, as well as plans related to healthy lifestyles and the built environment.
  • A workforce development strategy to meet labor force needs of employers in the Kansas City region by identifying emerging and high-demand occupations and industry sectors, and developing training and educational opportunities that will help match workers to jobs.
    
    

Technical Tools

• The Natural Resources Inventory documents valuable natural-resource assets and ecological features in the Kansas City region to provide a framework for environmental planning at local and regional levels.
• The Stormwater Quality Standards manual provides a guide for applying stormwater best management practices to land development in the Kansas City region in order to control the volume and quality of stormwater discharges from developed sites, maintain overall water quality and create more environmentally sensitive site designs.
• Metro Outlook provides a model for understanding progress toward a vision of the Kansas City region as a world-class metropolitan area, effectively competing in the global economy by sustaining a rising quality of life attractive to talented people.

Regional Vision:

"Greater Kansas City is a sustainable region that increases the vitality of our society, economy and environment for current residents and future generations."