What is a Comprehensive Plan? It is a municipal blueprint - a document that evaluates the history, development, and demographic trends in a given community, using that information to determine the way that the community should grow for the next few years. It forms the basis for zoning and planning ordinances, describing where new development should occur and where it should be redirected. The plan also helps to determine what (if any) public projects and facilities are needed to support the community's desired future, and it also identifies important environmental and cultural resources which should be protected. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania encourages the use of Comprehensive Plans to guide the growth and development of the state's municipalities.

The Borough's Planning Commission was particularly interested in developing a planning process based around a series of public workshops. Those workshops will allow the Borough's citizens to work together and create a vision for the future.

The first public workshop was held on Monday, November 5 at 7:00 PM at the Bear Creek Clubhouse. At that meeting, Larry Newman of Urban Workshop introduced the comprehensive plan process and reviewed the responses to a visioning questionnaire that had been sent to each household in the Borough.

Excerpts from the responses to date are posted elsewhere on this Web site.

The second public workshop was held on Monday, January 7, 2002. Attendees identified, and then ranked, the major issues that they hope to see addressed by the Comprehensive Plan.

The Planning Commission and the consultant will be using those rankings, together with the questionnaire results to date, to develop three or four citizens' "task forces" dealing with critical issues, such as land use regulations, or traffic and transportation. Each task force will focus on a specific critical issue, developing goals and objectives for the Comprehensive Plan as it relates to the issue in question.

The task forces drafted their goals and objectives at the third public workshop, which was held on Monday, March 4, 2002 at the Bear Creek Clubhouse. From those recommendations, Urban Workshop created formal goals and objectives that were reviewed at the fourth public workshop.

That fourth public workshop was originally scheduled for May of 2002, but it, and the Comprehensive Plan process, were delayed by the flooding which struck the Borough just before that meeting was to occur. By October of 2002, however, the Borough had recovered sufficiently to resume the comprehensive planning process. The goals and objectives were revised and adopted by the Planning Commission, and the consultants are now in the process of preparing the final plan document for review by the community.

Goals and Objectives Main Page

The maps and graphics were prepared for the Borough of Bear Creek Village, in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, as part of the development of that municipality's first Comprehensive Plan. The plan, which has been fully funded through a grant from the Luzerne County Office of Community Development, is being prepared by the planning firm of Urban Workshop, based in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, along with the MAP Center at King's College in Wilkes-Barre. The expected completion date is December of 2003.