South Carolina law requires those municipalities with planning and zoning authority to create comprehensive plans that address specific land-use elements, but these plans aren’t just created to sit on a shelf. For planning officers, they are consulted often while making decisions about how a city grows and changes.
“It's kind of a road map, so to speak, to guide us in the direction we'd like to take,” said Tim Macholl, North Charleston’s director of planning and zoning. “We use it as guiding document and for foundational information daily, or we try to use it daily, especially for anything that relates to development and the environment.”
Doug Polen, Irmo’s deputy town administrator, said comprehensive plans prompt towns to spend quality time thinking about where they are in terms of development and where they want to be. They use that information to determine the daily and longer-term workings of their planners.
“Sometimes we get so caught up in the day-to-day that we don’t really think about five or 10 years from now,” Polen said.
Like many municipalities in a fast-growing state, Irmo is part of a larger region facing the issues of how to handle growth.
“There are large lots adjacent to town and the Midlands as a whole is growing considerably,” Polen said. “Commercial and residential developers are constantly reaching out to build new restaurants, retail centers, senior living or general residential neighborhoods,” he said. “The town needs a plan to deal with that.”
For Irmo, planners face the questions of both “Do we want to grow?” and “Do we have the capacity to grow?”
Those are particularly important since the town doesn’t levy property taxes, and each additional home will require police, parks and planning services.
“We have decided, through the comprehensive plan that we want to grow and that growth is worth the additional cost,” he said.
Polen said he understands that people can be wary of growth, so when the town put out the request for proposals for comprehensive planning services, it looked for firms that had a track record of strong public outreach. When asked what type of development people wanted to see in Irmo, respondents overwhelmingly chose walkable mixed-use development and small-scale retail. That gave the council the information it needed to be comfortable working to expand the town in both annexation and infill development, he said.
So how does the work go from the plan into practice?
“The big example for us is the Water Walk development,” he said. “I don’t know if this would have passed prior to the comp plan.”
The property was already in town, but was rezoned to accommodate up to a 550-residential unit, 150,000-square-foot commercial development. The current plan shows 456 residential units and 90,000 square feet of commercial. Polen said they currently are seeking to annex an additional 21.8 acres across the street from the primary development to build 78 townhouses and an additional 20,000 square feet of commercial development.
“There has been some opposition to the development, but this is mixed-use development with small-scale retail — exactly what the plan said our respondents want,” he said.
In North Charleston, PRIME North Charleston — the city’s comprehensive plan, adopted in 2020 — is just finishing its five-year review, checking on the progress made on some of its identified projects and recommendations.
“Whenever there is a rezoning or other various things that face the city on a day-to-day basis, it grounds us in a plan to make informed decisions,” Macholl said.
He stressed the importance of knowing the local audience and seeking public input as part of the development of a comprehensive plan, adding that finding ways to engage with the public helps guide good policy-making for the council, the mayor and staff.
“We need to make a robust engagement program as part of these larger plan initiatives, so that we're addressing the concerns of the residents of the city and not just making goals and plans that don't tie in with the needs of the community,” he said.
Some projects and recommendations from the original PRIME plan have been met, while others are on track for approval.
“We broke it down into a couple different distinct categories — livability and quality of life. ‘What are things that the city can do to affect livability and quality of life?’ There's a considerable list of items,” he said.
Among those available actions are new creating age-in-place communities and allowing for a wider range of residential and established neighborhoods. That means instead of having single-use districts, the city could adopt a wider range of housing types permitted throughout all zoning districts. While North Charleston has not yet expanded the types of housing units permitted in its base district, it is something that remains on the table to look at in the near term, Macholl said.
The PRIME plan is also being used to help with the large task of updating the city’s zoning ordinance, first adopted in the mid-1970s. Other parts of the plan guide decisions about identified cultural resources. For example, the plan helps determine what historic neighborhoods or locations merit preservation.
The updated plan also added a resiliency section, which considers not just the initial impact of a development, but how the area could recover from disasters or other unforeseen circumstances. Given North Charleston’s coastal location, major storms are an issue, but the city is also near an earthquake fault.
“There's the potential for any number of natural disasters [that could be] exacerbated by the decisions that we make, or that can be alleviated by planning and making good decisions based on [the plan’s] recommendations,” he said.
The Town of Lexington maintains both a comprehensive plan and a vision plan, the latter of which aims to prioritize and leverage public resources that will attract private-sector investment. When the town updated its comprehensive plan in 2022, leaders emphasized the importance of ensuring the plan aligned with and supported the vision plan.
“This created a unified and intentional framework for managing future land use, development and growth,” Jessica Lybrand, director of planning and building, said.
Since completing the update to both the comprehensive plan and the land development and zoning ordinances, council, the planning commission and staff have used the future land-use elements of the comprehensive plan as the “playbook” for how Lexington grows.
“When developments, annexation requests or rezoning proposals come forward, the future land-use map and the character area descriptions are essential tools for determining whether a project aligns with the town’s goals and guiding principles,” Lybrand said. “These planning documents have also helped guide and support major initiatives such as the Greenways and Trails Master Plan, Safe Streets for All and the Long-Range Transportation Improvement Plan 2.0.”
Lybrand said a major focus of the 2022 plan update was modernizing the land-use element, and in turn, the town’s land-use and zoning ordinances. Ensuring that the vision plan’s guiding principles continued to shape Lexington’s long-term future was critical, she said.
Updates included the establishment of phasing requirements for subdivisions, which Lybrand said helps ensure “that infrastructure is built proportionately as each phase is developed.”
Other changes included clarifying and increasing the number of ingress points required based on project size, and strengthening interconnectivity standards between multiple developments. The town also created guidelines and authority to request traffic impact studies, and enhanced requirements for sidewalks and multi-use paths, as well as connections to the town’s existing trail network.
The legal requirements for comprehensive plans are found in SC Code Title 6, Chapter 29. Learn more in the Municipal Association’s Comprehensive Planning Guide for Local Governments.