On May 1st, Keith Cannady, Suffolk’s Comprehensive Planning Manager, gave a presentation to Planning Commission and City Council on the new 2045 Comprehensive Plan. It included some changes Staff is recommending to the draft as well as attempts to address points of concern from the community. One of these points of concern was the lack of Fiscal Impact Analysis, which Care4Suffolk has been bringing to the forefront over the past several weeks. This new plan is set to make major changes to the landscape of Suffolk, opening up huge swaths of land for suburban sprawl and warehouses, which should only be done after careful consideration and the use of good data. An analysis of the fiscal impact of these changes must be part of that decision process.

However, city planners chose NOT to do a fiscal impact analysis, and Mr. Cannady’s reasoning was that their current system needs work, so it isn’t a useful tool at the moment. He stated that since Suffolk is planning to continue with the same growth strategy it has been using, it isn’t necessary to do the fiscal impact analysis. Instead, the City plans to update their fiscal impact analysis tool after the adoption of the 2045 Comprehensive Plan.

This begs the question: How did the City determine it is a good strategy to continue?

In the last decade or so, the City of Suffolk has been rezoning and allowing massive amounts of agricultural land to be turned into suburban sprawl and mammoth warehouses. While making these decisions, the city was using this tool that they KNOW needs to be fixed in order for it to provide good data. Does this mean that maybe the city has been making BAD decisions based on bad data? It could mean that. 

In light of this, now would be the perfect opportunity to pause this process and update the tool – as was part of the original proposal – before moving forward. This way, the City can be confident that it is getting good data on which to base decisions. But that isn’t what was done. City Staff decided not to use the data at all, and are planning to continue business as usual – turning farmland into suburban sprawl and warehouses.

The citizens have been complaining about over-crowded schools, heavy traffic and unsafe roads. During this meeting, Mr. Cannady discussed the need to get federal and state money to fix our roads. We are told that all this growth is supposed to bring in the revenue to fix these problems, so why do we have to rely on state and federal funding to take care of our city? 

Keep in mind that a lot of this recent growth has happened while operating under the 2035 Comprehensive Plan (passed in 2015). The city didn’t do a fiscal impact analysis then either (which we learned when we did a Freedom of Information Act request for it). They have based all this growth on bad or no fiscal data. We think Suffolk deserves better than that.  

Mr. Cannady explained that, “if we picked something very different from the growth management approach that we’ve been following, it would be good to evaluate that new alternative for its fiscal impact. As this plan developed, we realized we were going to stick with our basic growth management approach. So it didn’t really make sense to evaluate something that we weren’t going to seriously consider.”  [Emphasis is mine.] This is Mr. Cannady’s initial reasoning for not conducting the fiscal impact analysis – they weren’t really even considering another approach!

However, later in the meeting Council Member Butler-Barlow and Planning Commissioner MaryEllen Baur commented on how large these growth areas are and how this is a big change from its current agricultural zoning. Mr. Cannady responded, “I don’t disagree with you, that’s a significant change in land use and expansion of the growth area, but we felt like to take advantage of that opportunity that the city has, providing an area that’s in a good location, you can effectively, cost effectively extend utilities to it and capture some of those economic development opportunities, which is something we all need to think about, recognizing that there are definitely trade-offs there.” [Emphasis is mine. May 1st meeting, mark 15:45] 

I think most of the citizens looking at the new Growth Area and Land Use map would agree with Mr. Cannady’s first statement: this IS significant change in land use and expansion of the growth area. We would like to know what these opportunities are (which he only alludes to and never specifies) and why they are worth diminishing another successful industry in the City (farming!) He needs to explain these trade-offs he mentioned. This is why the citizens are upset that the city skipped the fiscal impact analysis.

Let’s review: Mr. Cannady says it’s not necessary to do a fiscal impact analysis because we are just continuing the growth strategy we have been using already. He agrees that these huge growth areas and new land use types ARE  significant changes. However, he feels we need them in order to have unspecified economic opportunities. The City didn’t do a fiscal impact analysis for the 2035 Comprehensive Plan either and apparently has been using an inaccurate tool to make massive changes to the landscape of Suffolk over the last decade. We are also being told we can’t maintain our current or future infrastructure without federal and state help. 

If you are a Suffolk resident, you may be feeling the same confusion and frustration as me. If what we have been doing isn’t fixing our problems and we aren’t happy with the results, then we need to STOP! We need to fix this fiscal impact analysis tool FIRST and then we can evaluate these proposed changes. Mr. Cannady said, “… we realized we were going to stick with our basic growth management approach.” I say: let’s stop doing what we’ve been doing because it obviously isn’t working! Citizens are unhappy with the effects of the recent growth and the city is struggling to fix its infrastructure. City leaders need to listen to the people. Instead of doubling down on this development model while using bad or no fiscal impact data, let’s do this right. Citizens and taxpayers deserve a data-driven, fiscally sound plan and not just business as usual.