A community meeting held this week in Mayfield about the Comprehensive Plan began with confusion between residents and city staff about purpose; concluded with concrete ideas for future.
Some residents came to Wednesday’s Comprehensive Plan meeting in the Mayfield neighborhood thinking a new plan for their community was already in place.
It was an example of what city staff can learn through engagement with residents, and vice versa, planning director Chuck Johnston said.
“All planning processes are education processes—both ways. The citizens educating the staff/consultants as well as the reverse,” said Johnston said in an email to the Advance Thursday morning.
The meeting was one of a number of opportunities the planning department and consultants have scheduled to gather community input into the city’s Comprehensive Plan, “FXBG Forward,” which is in the process of being updated.
The comprehensive plan is a “long-range guiding policy document for Fredericksburg that establishes the community’s vision for the future,” the FXBG Forward website states.
It’s used to guide decisions about land use, transportation, environment, housing, and other topics. It does not lay out laws or rules about what can or will be done in a specific community.
Some residents came to Wednesday’s meeting with the understanding that there already is such a plan in place for the Mayfield neighborhood.
“We want to know how the plan will affect us,” said Hashmel Turner, a former City Council member and current pastor at First Mount Zion church. “We are concerned with how the plan will affect the Mayfield community.”
About 20 citizens attended the meeting, many of them members of the Mayfield Civic Association and the local chapter of the NAACP.
“We want to know what your plan is,” said another resident. “We want to know what’s on the table.”
Johnston told the residents that city staff were there to hear from them.
“We are here to hear your plan,” he said. “We are not here to tell you what the plan is.”
Mike Craig, senior planner for the City, said the Comprehensive Plan team wants to know what Fredericksburg’s residents want their city to look like in 2050.
“This is big picture,” he said. “Roads, parks, housing—who needs it? Is it affordable? What businesses do you want to see more of?”
Craig clarified that in September, the planning department will begin working on a Small Area Plan for the Mayfield area, which will provide “specific guidance for the development, redevelopment, and public facilities” of the neighborhood.
Johnston said in his email that, “Perhaps we did not make it clear that there is no small area plan now for Mayfield.”
“We will make it clear there is no current plan at the small area plan meeting planned for September (a date has not been set),” he said. “We’ll talk with [Trudy Smith, president of the Mayfield Civic Association] before then and offer to follow-up, if she wants to before September.”
A representative from RHI, the planning firm the city has contracted with to prepare the Small Area Plan for Area 8, which includes Mayfield, attended Wednesday’s meeting.
Mayfield is a historic neighborhood that dates to the 1930s. Many of those who attended the meeting on Wednesday said they had been born and raised in the neighborhood and have deep roots in the city.
“I still live in the house I grew up in,” said Charles Bumbrey.
Others, such as Derrick Williams and Pam Lamar, said they left the community for a while, but returned and bought homes in the neighborhood near their parents.
Turner said Mayfield is “predominantly residential” and suggested the area doesn’t have room for more development.
“We are pretty much built out,” he said.
Planning staff and consultants with Stantec, which is working with the city on the Comprehensive Plan update, set up stations at which participants could write down what they like about Fredericksburg, what they’d like to see more of, and what they’d like to see less of.
Participants at the Mayfield meeting said they like the city’s peacefulness, parks, pool, “old timey feel,” and small, close-knit community.
Overwhelmingly, they said they want less traffic. Another answer was “less segregation in housing.”
The participants had many suggestions for what they’d like more of—school space, parks and recreation, “healthy food options in underserved areas,” Black-owned businesses, entertainment venues, a community amphitheater, meeting spaces, and “real affordable housing.”
Lamar said she’d like the city to help maintain and fix older, dilapidated properties, and Ashley McNeil, 31, said she’d like more entertainment options downtown for younger residents.
The Comprehensive Plan team are working on scheduling more opportunities for in-person participation, but for the meantime, citizens can complete a survey or submit written comments at the FXBG Forward website.
