2025-2045 Comprehensive Planning Process
What is a Comprehensive Plan?
A comprehensive plan represents a community’s vision over a 20-year horizon. This vision is derived from extensive collaboration and community engagement between residents, elected officials, and stakeholders. During the planning process, residents discuss and create goals for a range of topics such as housing, transportation, infrastructure, land use, and economic development. To plan for community growth, the comprehensive plan creates general land use guidelines for land outside the current village limits in the “Extra-Jurisdictional Planning Area.”
Components of a Comprehensive Plan
A comprehensive plan is developed to answer three questions:
What are we as a community?
The first component of a comprehensive plan is taking inventory of the existing conditions of the community. During this phase of the plan, Tri-County Regional Planning Commission gathers extensive data to understand community trends and build a community profile.
What would we like to be as a community?
Once the community’s current conditions are understood, a vision is created. This vision represents Creve Coeur’s goals and the type of community it wants to be. This vision is created through extensive community engagement and public input.
How do we get there?
With a common vision in mind, the community works to identify and prioritize actions that build toward that future. This final step creates a road map for elected officials, community members, village staff, and local advocates to use in their decision-making processes and everyday work.
Roles and Partners
Tri-County Regional Planning Commission
Village of Creve Coeur
Steering Committee
Community
Tri-County Regional Planning Commission (“Tri-County” or TCRPC) facilitates the planning process, leads steering committee meetings, gathers and analyzes data, and supports the community organizing efforts of the steering committee by coordinating engagement events, like workshops and open houses.
The Village of Creve Coeur plays a crucial role in the comprehensive planning process, providing support and feedback on implementation strategies and ensuring that the plan is realized after adoption.
The Steering Committee consists of volunteers who act as liaisons between Tri-County and Creve Coeur residents and stakeholders. Volunteers with different interests, roles, and backgrounds offer community insights, market engagement opportunities, interpret community input, and review the draft plan.
Community members are comprised of residents, employees, and stakeholders of Creve Coeur. The role of the community throughout the planning process is to provide feedback that informs the priorities and goals of the comprehensive plan.
Steering Committee Members
Planning Process Timeline
Community Engagement
Ideas and input from community members form the backbone of the planning process and outcomes. Tri-County, in collaboration with the steering committee and the Village of Creve Coeur, will maintain inclusivity to ensure the development of an impactful plan. The engagement plan provides multiple opportunities for the public to give input and incorporates methods to reduce barriers to participation.
The following are different components of the engagement plan:
Youth Engagement
Roughly 100 Parkview Middle School 7th and 8th graders shared their ideas for Creve Coeur during a “dream city” exercise in April 2024. Students drew and listed ideas for infrastructure and services that would exist in their perfect city or town and compared them to what the village already offers.
Community Survey
Surveys offer easily accessible, low-commitment crowdsourcing opportunities and are widely known as effective tools for establishing a baseline for local opinions. Creve Coeur’s survey was published in early April and remained open through May. It covered a range of topics, including questions about housing, recreation, the economy, village communication, and more.
The survey was promoted in a community mailer, through social media and the Village’s push notification system, at pop-up events, and at the May 23rd open house. The Village Water Department and Creve Coeur Public Library also offered paper copies of the surveys.
Open House
The Steering Committee, Village, and Tri-County hosted a community open house on Tuesday, May 23rd from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. at Parkview School. Residents were encouraged to stop by and share their thoughts on what changes they want to see for Creve Coeur. The open house featured several interactive stations designed to help community members evaluate community assets and identify priorities for Creve Coeur. Steering Committee members and Tri-County staff were on hand to answer any questions. Snacks were provided.
Stakeholder Interviews
Tri-County interviewed elected officials, staff, and other community leaders to assess the Village’s institutional capacity and key services, and to develop implementation strategies.
Pop-up Events
Successful engagement plans meet people where they are, offering outreach and participation options at festivals and events already happening within the Village. The Steering Committee identified community events to inform residents of the comprehensive plan:
‘Art Night at LaSalle Elementary,’ aiming to encourage participation from families with young children, and
LaSalle and Parkview Schools Cookouts. Steering committee members staffed the pop-up events, encouraging their neighbors to take the survey and share their ideas at the open house.