By EMILY SPARACINO / Staff Writer

MONTEVALLO – The Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham will lead the process of updating Montevallo’s comprehensive plan.

The Montevallo City Council has approved a proposed contract with the RPCGB to work on the city’s comprehensive plan, which hasn’t been updated in about 12 years.

“Your last plan was in 2007,” RPCGB Principal Planner Lindsay Puckett said during her presentation. “Every five years, you need to update your comprehensive plan, so you’re a little overdue.”

Puckett said RPCGB looks at facets such as existing land use, zoning codes, demographics, facilities, transportation, infrastructure, economic development, a housing market analysis and public input from meetings, open houses and online surveys in the process of updating a city’s comprehensive plan.

Puckett said a steering committee would also be established and would meet with the planning and zoning board, which will in turn use the updated comprehensive plan to guide future decisions.

Another option the city could have chosen was to work primarily with Shelby County on the plan, but Planning Services Supervisor Christie Hester said the county would not be able to provide services as quickly as the RPCGB.

“Our resources are limited, and we can’t commit to that rigorous schedule,” Hester said of the RPCGB proposal. “It’s not that we don’t want to do it. We would love to do it, but we just don’t have the resources.”

Hester said even though the county won’t be the primary overseer of the process, they would still help with any needs that might arise.

“We support your efforts, and we want to help in some capacity,” Hester said, adding Shelby County and RPCGB work hand-in-hand on a regular basis.

“We plan to get a lot of their data,” Puckett said. “They know the city very well.”

According to its website, the RPCGB provides planning services, economic development services and multiple initiatives for six counties and 84 communities throughout central America.

Puckett said the RPCGB’s goal is to develop an action-oriented plan to help the city determine what the state of the city is, what its issues and vision for the future are, how the city will achieve its vision for the future and how the city will know it’s achieving that vision.

“We’re setting a nice trajectory toward what we want to do,” Mayor Hollie Cost said. “The comprehensive plan gets us where we need to go.”