Fiscal Analysis – Care4Suffolk

Decisions Without Data

Care4Suffolk — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:05:03 +0000

When the first draft of the Suffolk 2045 Comprehensive Plan was published about a year ago, Care4Suffolk raised the flag about the missing Fiscal Impact Analysis (FIA). Our concerns were brushed off and we were told it wasn’t necessary. City Council went on to adopt the comp plan in December of 2024 with big changes and without a public hearing or public notice.

This is all old news, so why do we bring it up? The answer is because the City’s lack of concern about the fiscal analysis is very relevant right now.

Just last week, City Council approved the annual Capital Improvements Program (CIP) and this week our real estate assessments will be mailed out. How much the City receives in revenue, and what it pays in services and capital improvements, is at the very heart of an FIA.

(For context, land valuations for Suffolk residential properties are up over 6% this year and the ten year outlook for capital improvement costs has reached $2 billion–an increase of $1billion from a few years ago).

Back on May 1, 2024, City Council and Planning Commission held a joint meeting about the draft of the 2045 Comp Plan where they heard a presentation by city staff. (You can read more about it here.) It was at that meeting that Comprehensive Planning Manager Keith Cannady assured council members and commissioners that the City didn’t need to do a FIA for the comp plan because they are done at the “site level” for individual developments during rezoning requests. He also said that the City’s current fiscal analysis tool needs work, so it isn’t a useful tool at the moment. Additionally, he stated that since the City wasn’t considering changing its growth strategy, a FIA for the comp plan wasn’t necessary.

As a counterpoint to Mr. Cannady’s argument that FIAs are conducted at the site level, we did a FOIA request and received a copy of the FIA that was done for the Port 460 Project. A fiscal impact analysis is supposed to show the revenue that a development will generate and the costs of services that the development will require. However, this site-level FIA was done by the developer and did not contain the required costs of services portion. The City can not accurately understand if a development will be fiscally net negative or positive in the long-run without the essential costs of services component.

Port 460 was arguably the largest rezoning request in Suffolk in years, yet staff recommended approval and City Council voted to approve it without an accurate idea of what the costs of the project would be for the City in the long-term.

We do know that there was also no FIA done for the 2035 Comprehensive Plan (adopted in 2015). We know, via another FOIA request, that the original Request for Proposal (RFP) and the contract for the 2045 Comp Plan (signed in early 2021), included the task of updating the fiscal impact tool and a Fiscal Impact Analysis, considering multiple growth models, to be completed during the plan’s development. City staff at that point (late 2020) clearly knew that the fiscal impact tool needed to be updated and understood that it is typically used as part of a comprehensive plan process.

In May of 2022, a group of city staff and comp plan consultants held a Land Use Workshop, one of the three main purposes of which was to “determine fiscal model objectives and data needs.”

In September 2022 the comp plan steering committee meeting apparently included quite a lengthy presentation about the role of a Fiscal Impact Analysis in the comprehensive plan. We obtained, via FOIA, the attendance list for this and other steering committee meetings:

The slide presentation from this meeting was available on the 2045 Comp Plan website and most of it is about the FIA and its importance in both the comprehensive plan process and in aiding city staff with evaluating development.

Below are some slides from that presentation:

This slide, Fiscal Impact Analysis: Understanding Costs and Revenues, covers what a FIA is and why it is important – will the revenue generated by new growth be enough to cover the resulting services and facility demands? This is a very important question that city staff and City Council should be asking, not just during the comp plan process, but also during each rezoning request. If development requires more services or capital improvements than the development will raise in revenue, the shortfall has to be covered by the city – paid for by taxpayers.

In this next slide, Role in Suffolk Comprehensive Plan, a key talking point was how a FIA can be used in the comp plan process to see how changes will affect revenues and costs for city services and infrastructure. We know that the contract included comparing three development models for the comp plan, so that the City could compare different models on a fiscal level. By the time of the draft release, the staff had decided not to consider any other growth models than what it’s currently using.

In this slide, What Types of Questions Can Be Answered?, we can see how land use policies and development patterns affect fiscal impacts. It is clear that staff was presented with the idea that different types of growth models have different fiscal impacts.

This slide, Capacity of Infrastructure, contains a real life example from Champaign, IL and the two model types it was comparing. Champaign was comparing “Growth Within the Service Area” and “Growth Beyond the Service Area” and the fiscal impact analysis showed that “Growth Beyond the Service Area” created a $50 million difference in additional capital infrastructure costs. It costs more money to extend into areas that lack infrastructure, like roads, water, sewers, storm water drainage, etc. versus building within areas that already contain many of these services. Suffolk’s “managed growth approach” for decades has been to extend growth areas into predominantly agricultural areas, which tend to lack the essential infrastructure needed for large residential neighborhoods and non-residential uses. This method of growth can be more expensive than growing within existing infrastructure, yet the City chose not to consider other growth options.

Fast forward to that May 2024 joint meeting, and Council Members Johnson and Butler Barlow, along with Commissioner Baur, all asked the city planner questions about the FIA. They wanted to understand why it wasn’t done.

Mr. Cannady’s response is below:

“The original RFP, and this was November of 2020, actually recommended that the city evaluate the different growth strategies that could come out of this process, for their fiscal impacts. In other words, if we picked something very different from the growth management approach that we’re following, it would be good to evaluate that new alternative for its fiscal impact. As this plan developed, we realized we were gonna 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.”

– Mr. Keith Cannady, Joint Session of the Suffolk City Council and Suffolk Planning Commission, May 1, 2024

According to Mr. Cannady, the FIA is only necessary if the city wants to change its growth strategy. However, the current approach was never fiscally evaluated in 2015 when the 2035 Comp Plan was adopted, so we don’t know if the strategy that’s been used for at least a decade is even fiscally sound.

The comprehensive plan is the single most important piece of policy for the City. It is a 20-year, long-range plan that guides all future development in Suffolk and city staff chose to be willfully ignorant to the fiscal impacts of this growth strategy AND refused to consider any other models for comparison.

Later he adds:

“I think what we wanted to make sure is that you all understood what we recommended several months ago, and have been recommending actually for quite a while, the way to go forward with the fiscal impact analysis. I think there was some concern that, ah, we took out a step that we should have taken. Ah, that we um should have had this analysis done because it was in the RFP. Ah, and I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe we made a good recommendation based on the ah plan that was developing, um, and the strategies and priorities that we needed to set going forward. I think it would have been, frankly, a waste of our time and our money to evaluate options that were essentially all the same.”

– Mr. Keith Cannady, Joint Session of the Suffolk City Council and Suffolk Planning Commission, May 1, 2024

In the video above, we here Mr. Cannady talk about recommendations. This was not a recommendation as Mr. Cannady characterizes it. City staff that made the unilateral decision. When Care4Suffolk spoke with most of the City Council members and Planning Commissioners, not a single one said to us that they were aware of the removal of the FIA from the comp plan process, despite several of these individuals being on the comp plan steering committee. It was also surprising because the Planning Commission, according to Virginia state law, was the body responsible for leading the comp plan process.

Instead of listening to the expert advice that was already budgeted for and following the contract to analyze three different growth methods for their fiscal benefits and burdens, City staff decided to simply continue its current “strategy”– a strategy that is known to potentially increase costs. These are the kind of decisions that can cause budget shortfalls down the road, requiring taxes to be increased. Knowing this, staff still felt that the fiscal impact analysis would be, as Mr. Cannady said, “…frankly, a waste of our time and our money”.

The City staff, at some point during this process, decided that we, the taxpayers, don’t need or want choices for future growth in our city. There was a plan developing and those ‘strategies’ and ‘priorities’, that Mr. Cannady alluded to, made looking at alternatives unnecessary, possibly even inconvenient.

Maybe we can garner some insight from Mr. Cannady’s explanation below:

“I think one of the things that we were concerned about, um and I think the city is concerned about too, is um when it comes to those larger employment center types of uses, we realized that we just didn’t have room within the current growth area boundary to be a part of that growth opportunity that this region has. And so when we put some options out that we thought would allow us to do that. And that one, [Rt] 460, was one of those corridors. 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 um that opportunity that the city has um 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, was something we all needed to think about, recognizing that there are some trade offs there.”

– Mr. Keith Cannady, Joint Session of the Suffolk City Council and Suffolk Planning Commission, May 1, 2024

There’s that word: “Regional.” We keep hearing this over and over again. There are regional interests pushing to build here and to do that, the City of Suffolk has to expand its growth areas and drastically change land use. Mr. Cannady actually is in agreement that these changes are significant, which is in direct contradiction to his previous statement early in the meeting that we didn’t need to do the FIA because we weren’t really changing anything.

Let’s recap: Suffolk has had a growth strategy to expand its growth areas into agricultural areas. The City’s fiscal analysis tool has not been fixed in many years, so fiscal impacts of all development over this time period were not adequately evaluated. Staff had the opportunity to look at the costs of this growth, as well as compare it to some alternative growth methods, but decided it wasn’t ‘worth the time or money’. Staff stated the reason the growth areas need to be drastically expanded is for ‘economic development opportunities’.

How can staff, with a straight face, seriously say that it is NOT in the best interest of the City to analyze cost benefits and burdens, but then use the excuse that this is being done for economic development? That is essentially saying that we don’t need data about the money, but we are doing this for more money.

Decisions about taxpayer money should ALWAYS be based on data.

There is no data to support that the enormous growth laid out in the 2045 Comp Plan will be a net positive fiscal opportunity for Suffolk. This could just as easily be a boondoggle that burdens us with infrastructure costs for decades (like the latest $2 billion ten-year CIP!) Mr. Cannady doesn’t know, we don’t know, and no one knows, because staff chose NOT to do the fiscal analysis.

The City staff, who work on behalf of the citizens of Suffolk, didn’t want to look at what this development model will cost Suffolk residents, nor consider any alternatives that might be better for the taxpayers.

A large portion of the citizenry is not happy with the current development model the City is using. During the comp plan public engagement sessions, the majority of citizens specifically asked to slow development down, so infrastructure can catch up. But instead, growth will be accelerated with the 2045 Comp Plan. We are paying more in taxes, but our quality of life has deteriorated. Traffic is worse, more roads need repairs and improvements, storm water is a recurring issue, our waterways are ‘impaired’, and many of our schools remain over-crowded. As evidence of citizen frustration, last November, the council member in charge of the comp plan was voted out of office and the mayor barely made it back into office, receiving only one-third of the vote and winning by only about 100 votes.

Maybe the reason why our costs are going up and our quality of life is going down is because this growth model isn’t working. Maybe all the development that the City has been approving for a decade or more is costing more money than it’s generating in revenue. Maybe the FIA would have shown this. If the FIA showed a negative fiscal impact, that would have been very inconvenient for those that want to implement these Regional goals (read more about regional goals here and here.)

Let us be clear: – it isn’t that the City can’t know what all this development will cost taxpayers, it’s that the City chose to NOT know.

City leadership needs to acknowledge that they have been making huge land use changes without complete fiscal data. Those who are responsible for these poor decisions need to go. Suffolk can NOT continue to force the taxpayers to foot the bill for bad development decisions.

Fiscal Troubles Ahead?

Care4Suffolk — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 19:52:48 +0000

We are just a few days away from the City Council Meeting where the 2045 Comprehensive Plan is on the agenda. Care4Suffolk has pointed out many problems with this comprehensive plan, among the most important issues is the lack of a fiscal impact analysis.

A fiscal impact analysis allows a municipality to understand how specific development will impact a city financially over time. It looks at both the revenue that will be generated from the development and also the costs of services (roads, schools, utilities, emergency services, libraries, parks, etc.) and then compares them to determine if the development will bring a net positive fiscal contribution to the city, or if it will be a net negative and cost the city money.

Most municipalities also do a fiscal analysis during the comprehensive planning process. It allows a city to look at the type of growth they want to see and whether it will financially benefit the city or be a drain on the taxpayers. The City of Suffolk has decided to forgo the essential fiscal analysis. Why?

City Staff assured City Council that a fiscal analysis isn’t necessary for the comprehensive plan, despite the fact that it is about to increase the growth area by the largest amount of any previous comp plan. Staff’s reasoning was because the fiscal analyses are done at the site level. It is true that by law, they are required to be done for all rezoning applications.

Suffolk’s UDO (Unified Development Ordinance) reads:

B-14. – FISCAL IMPACT ANALYSIS.

All applications for a rezoning shall include a Fiscal Impact Study containing a comparison of the public revenues anticipated to be generated by the development and the anticipated capital, operations, maintenance and replacement costs for public facilities needed to service the project at the adopted level of service standards (see Section 31-601 of this Ordinance).

Furthermore, the UDO states that no rezoning application is complete without a fiscal analysis.

However, in a previous article, we demonstrated that the fiscal analysis for the Port 460 project, which was two years ago and was arguably the LARGEST rezoning application in years, failed to provide an adequate fiscal analysis. The developer did provide fiscal data, but it only showed all the money the city might make on the development. It left out all the costs of services.

Based on the UDO, that rezoning proposal never should have made it through the Planning Department because it lacked a proper fiscal analysis. Yet, it not only made it through the Planning Department, the Planning Commission voted to recommend approval, and City Council voted to approve the rezoning.

Suffolk has been rezoning with no idea if all this development in the long-term will bring money into the city coffers or cost taxpayers money to maintain it. The whole point of a fiscal analysis is to protect the citizens from poor planning and development that drains our resources.

Currently, City Staff fail to provide oversight to make sure a complete and accurate fiscal analysis is done at a rezoning. They also refuse to do a fiscal analysis for the comprehensive plan. How can City Council be so irresponsible with our taxpayer money? If the developer and the city can’t prove that these developments are fiscally beneficial for the city, they should not be approved. The same is true with the comprehensive plan. If City Staff want to increase Sufflolk’s growth area by the largest amount of any comp plan, they should have to prove that it is fiscally sound.

Join us at the City Council Meeting on Wednesday, November 20th at 6pm (City Hall, 442 W. Washington St.) and let City Council know that you do not want the 2045 Comprehensive Plan approved until they have completed the fiscal analysis.

Letter to the Suffolk News-Herald

Care4Suffolk — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 23:41:28 +0000

Below is a Letter to the Editor of the Suffolk News-Herald, written by Care4Suffolk’s Ann Harris. She wrote this back in July of 2024, just before the 2045 Comprehensive Plan went before City Council and was tabled until after the election. You can read this on the Suffolk News-Herald.

The Master Transportation plan has been a major part of the discussion since the August City Council meeting, but it is important to remember that the 2045 Comprehensive Plan was also supposed to include the Fiscal Impact Analysis, which the City chose not to do. This omission is irresponsible and it is not getting enough notice.

Dear Editor:

A recent Suffolk News-Herald article about the 2045 Comprehensive Plan update presented to City Council on July 17th mentioned that there was a petition against this plan. I’d like to highlight a main reason why many residents think the 2045 Plan should not be approved. Page six of the 2045 Comprehensive Plan draft states that “Different kinds of development have different impacts on the fiscal health of the City. Development that is not supported by existing infrastructure (roadways, water, sewer) and that is more consumptive of land can be a greater drain on the City’s finances.” This is a pretty intuitive concept! When the initial draft came out in February with recommendations to expand Growth Areas by a shocking 23%, many people assumed it would be backed up by some solid data. (For context, our current 2035 Comprehensive Plan only increased the growth area by 5% back in 2015.) Planners did reduce the recommendation to a 17% increase and have since reduced it again, but it is still roughly a 12% expansion.

While looking for the justifications for this kind of growth (that flies in the face of the public feedback the City received), we realized that it is a norm to have a Fiscal Impact Analysis (FIA) done during the comp plan update process. Originally, there were plans to do one: it was a requirement in the City’s Request for Proposal seeking a consultant to review and update the 2035 Comp Plan; it was part of the Scope of Work and timeline in the selected consultant’s proposal; Tischler Bise was the consulting firm scheduled to do the FIA and in 2022 their representative attended a workshop here with city staff. However, in August 2023, city staff decided to postpone the FIA until after plan approval. At a joint Planning Commission/City Council work session on May 1 of this year, Planning explained that an FIA is not really needed now because the City will continue using the same growth strategy it’s already been using. This assumes that the current strategy is a good one! The FIA can help determine probable long-term fiscal effects of different growth scenarios. Why would we want to move forward without this information?

Citizens of Suffolk deserve data-driven reasons as to why our Planners want to double down on a strategy that is negatively impacting our ability to move around the City and increasingly straining our infrastructure.

Please sign Care4Suffolk’s petition asking City Council to oppose the 2045 Comprehensive Plan.

How Much Will It Cost Us?

Care4Suffolk — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 02:12:29 +0000

The recent groundbreaking ceremony for the future 5-million square foot Port 460 development provides a good opportunity to remind Suffolk’s decision-makers about why a whole-city Fiscal Impact Analysis needs to be completed before a new comprehensive plan is approved.

After the August 21 City Council Meeting’s public hearing on the 2045 Comprehensive Plan, Mayor Duman made a few comments before City Council voted to delay final action on it. One statement (at Mark 2:59:50) was regarding the Fiscal Impact Analysis (FIA) that was supposed to have been completed:

“I’m not that concerned with a fiscal analysis for the whole city.”

He is not the only person on Council or city staff to feel that this FIA is unnecessary. (We wrote about Comprehensive Planning Manager Keith Cannady’s response in this article.)

However, a FIA is a very important piece of data for a city when considering growth. It details the expected revenue that different development scenarios will bring and the costs of services that the city will have to provide over time. Essentially, it tells you if certain types of growth will likely be: net positive – we make money; net neutral – we break even; or net negative – it will be a fiscal drain on the city.

Mr. Cannady offered two justifications for skipping this crucial step in the 2045 Comprehensive Plan. The first reason is that city planners aren’t changing Suffolk’s current growth approach (which is to just expand the growth area every five years with each new comprehensive plan update). The second reason is that he believes that the site-level FIAs conducted by developers for rezoning applications are sufficient.

A recent example of one of these site-level FIAs is the one provided by the developer (Matan Companies) for the Port 460 rezoning. If you read through the FIA they conducted here, you will see that they include figures for jobs created, tax revenue, and the money they will spend on road construction and improvements. You will also notice there is something missing: Cost of Services. This is the second piece of the equation that would include maintenance for roads, sewers, and storm water drainage, as well as costs for emergency services and other city services. A FIA should not just look at the one-time cost of these services at installation, it is supposed to include costs over time.

Matan claims that they will be spending about $27 million dollars on road construction and improvements. Only $8 million goes to improving existing roads and the remaining $19 million is to create 5 new public roads – which Suffolk and its taxpayers will have to continue to maintain indefinitely. Roads that have non-stop tractor trailer traffic traveling on them are not cheap to maintain! Leaving out the cost of services is NOT a minor detail. It is half of the piece of this puzzle.

We don’t know the answer to how much Port 460 will actually cost taxpayers, because the developer didn’t provide the data and the city didn’t ask!

The City didn’t require an independent third party to conduct or review the fiscal analysis for this huge and impactful project – they simply took the word of the developer as they do with any other ordinary rezoning application.

Is it fiscally responsible to just trust that a developer won’t omit, distort, or fabricate data on a project worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Mayor himself stated, as he presided over the Port 460 rezoning hearing, that he didn’t believe the accuracy of the claim from Matan when they said that they would be creating 9,000 jobs. He stated:

“I agree, you know, that the number of jobs projected seems pretty high to me. I mean, I’m telling you. I’m… you know… I guess anybody can do a study, but I don’t know where we are getting 9,000 jobs from. I mean, but I’ll take 2,000.” (Source: City Council Meeting, September 21, 2022, at mark 2:08:05)

To rely solely on these site-level FIAs goes against recommendations by experts that a FIA be done during the comprehensive plan process. If the growth approach we have been following is not making the City money, then we want to change it. If there is another way to grow and we can make money and not pave over our farmland, we want to know that, too. Suffolk seems to be blindly going down the path it has been following for decades, but with no data to prove it is a good path.

We go into great length explaining the importance of the FIA and documenting expert opinions in this article. Importantly, the FIA for a comprehensive plan is not conducted by a developer, but instead as a collaboration between the city staff and the comprehensive plan contractor. We shared all of this information with the Mayor and most City Council members. A quick summary is that this FIA allows the city to analyze multiple growth build-out scenarios (3 scenarios were originally a requirement of Suffolk’s contract for the FIA). It can offer comparisons over small or large areas and allow the city to consider the fiscal impacts if certain land is developed as residential or industrial or simply left as agricultural. Our city leaders chose NOT to look at any data on any scenarios. Not only are they skipping this step for this 2045 Comprehensive Plan, it was not done for the 2035 Comprehensive Plan either, which was adopted back in 2015.

The city has been doing decades worth of this type of growth based on no fiscal analysis.

Mayor Duman says he’s not concerned with the FIA. But Suffolk’s citizens ARE concerned. The City is putting the 2045 Comprehensive Plan on hold to complete the Master Transportation Plan, which is very much needed and may demonstrate the need for a lot of expensive projects.

We have been asking since April to hold off on the plan until city staff provides a proper fiscal analysis, as originally required, for the growth that they are proposing. If development in this new comprehensive plan will be so beneficial for the citizens, then there shouldn’t be an issue proving it with an actual FIA. This plan and any future developments should be denied until we know how much it is going to cost us – the taxpayers.

Voice of the People

Care4Suffolk — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:15:47 +0000

The City of Suffolk is on the verge of adopting the new 2045 Comprehensive Plan. This plan just got approved by a vote of 7-1 by the Planning Commission and it now heads to City Council for a vote on Wednesday, August 21 at 6pm at City Hall.

This plan is NOT in the best interest of the residents.

Please sign our petition opposing this plan and read on for more details.

The City received more than 7,500 responses from citizens telling the City what they want for the future of Suffolk. The responses were documented and then summarized, and you can read those here.

The key themes from the public’s responses are in the chart below along with whether the City has a plan to deliver based on the 2045 Comprehensive Plan:

WHAT THE PEOPLE ASKED FOR:	2045 COMP PLAN TO DELIVER
Small town feel	NO
Downtown Investment	NO
Open Space and Parks	NO
Well planned development	NO
Fix traffic issues	NO
Safe, walkable communities	NO
Invest in public transportation, trails, and rail	MAYBE
Well planned economic development	NO
More amenities	MAYBE
Affordable housing	MAYBE
Limit warehouses	NO
Preserve agriculture	NO
Engage public about their wants and needs	NO

Using all the public feedback, the City could have developed a vision for Suffolk that the people could get behind. However, the 2045 Comp Plan has no vision. With the demand from citizens to invest in downtown, the City could have focused economic development on downtown, but instead, they are carving out new areas for even more warehouses (we already lead Hampton Roads in warehouses!) Instead of limiting warehouse development to existing space and fixing our traffic problems, the 2045 Comprehensive Plan will exacerbate these problems, destroy the open space and farmland people want to preserve, and ruin that small town feel that Suffolk has.

People want to live in communities that are safe and walkable. The push for more warehouses is driving the housing market’s need for higher density housing, and builders want to build where it is cheap and easy (namely on agricultural land), so they can maximize their profits. The City could have focused on community building and infill development close to downtown, but instead we are going to get more of the same suburban sprawl that is NOT walkable, and it will devour more agricultural land. The City keeps allowing these huge suburban neighborhoods and thinks that just because they put sidewalks there, that makes them walkable.

The people of Suffolk value the open spaces and farmland in Suffolk. Farmland is a finite resource that once gone, is gone for good. Getting rid of the land that grows our food is terribly short-sighted. The city pays lip service to preserving agricultural land, but it stipulates that it will preserve it only OUTSIDE the Growth Areas. Yet the City keeps expanding the Growth Areas. They also added language to this new plan that gives them flexibility to build outside the Growth Areas IF the City deems it is a good idea. So basically, no farmland, forestry land, or open space is safe from development, if it can feed the City’s voracious appetite for ‘growth’.

L.5.3 Consider amending the City’s development regulations to add guidelines for the review of exceptional development opportunities outside of the growth boundaries. (p.68 of 2045 Comprehensive Plan)

Before getting public comments, the City met with ‘focus groups’ and staff. We don’t know who attended these meetings, so we submitted a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request, and are waiting for that information, but what is pretty clear is that early on it was staff and certain groups of people that were able to sway this plan to their desires, and it definitely wasn’t the citizens.

Here are some highlights from those meetings (full summary is here):

WHAT ‘FOCUS GROUPS’ ASKED FOR:	2045 COMP PLAN TO DELIVER
Interest in expanding Growth Areas	YES
Vacant, rural land provides areas for transformative development projects	YES
Demand is there for continued growth	YES
Efficient and predictable review process, “speed to build” or will look at other communities.	YES
Infrastructure costs – water, sewer, and roads can become barriers for industrial development.	YES
Growth of industrial areas is what drives many of the housing developments.	YES
There is a shifting need to invest in infrastructure prior to building homes (initial investments for long-term returns) would assist developers.	YES
City should either allow for more industrial development or limit based on current boundaries; there is a demand so this is a choice for the City to make.	YES
Renewable energy is looking within the region, planning for this in rural areas is important.	YES

These focus groups got a lot of things THEY wanted – expanded growth areas along with more land use for industrial and then more land for residential development to support it. They asked for a faster and more predictable review process.

L.1.2 Review and revise current development regulations, including the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) and the zoning map, to improve compatibility with the comprehensive plan. (p.64 of 2045 Comprehensive Plan)

This is part of the “efficient and predictable review process”. It doesn’t matter how many times a staff or City Council Members says that this is ‘just a plan’ and ‘not written in stone’, because the City is planning to rewrite the UDO to reflect the 2045 Comprehensive Plan and rezoning applications that come before them that conform to the Future Land Map will get rezoned. This new Land Use Map is the future of Suffolk. If you don’t know what the land around your home will look like in the future, you should check it out now. This could be our last chance to change this.

The other item that was requested by these ‘focus groups’ was about infrastructure. Developers want it in place so they don’t have to pay or wait for it. Let’s take a moment to appreciate that one about infrastructure. As citizens, we get told all the time that development builds the infrastructure, as in literally, if a developer wants to build, he has to pay for the sewer connection, a pump station if necessary, build the roads and sidewalks, etc.. All of a sudden, developers are complaining about how expensive that is and maybe they won’t build unless the infrastructure is already in place – and so the City adds into the 2045 Comprehensive Plan:

L.5.1 Identify priority economic development sites and make strategic investments to advance site readiness. (p.68 of 2045 Comprehensive Plan)

E.1.6 Strategically expand utility service (water, sewer, fiber) to sites that can support new employment generating businesses. Develop financing options to

facilitate the construction of water and sewer projects to support development.

Use City-funded utility capacity improvements as incentives for development. (p. 81 of 2045 Comprehensive Plan)

The site-readiness is all about having everything in place so developers don’t have to do the work or spend the money to get the land ready. The idea is now that the city will bring in the sewers and other utilities and have the site ready to build on, which will make it more attractive to developers.

Keep in mind that the people asked for fewer warehouses, but now we will get to pay to help build what we don’t even want. How is this representing the citizens? If these warehouses are going to be bringing in so much money, the developers should foot the bill to invest in infrastructure – not the taxpayers!

To entice these warehouse developers that the citizens don’t want, the City is prepared to make Suffolk’s current farmland ‘site-ready’ for the developers on our dime. Knowing this, the City still made the decision to skip the fiscal analysis. The experts that had been contracted to do the FIA, recommend doing the FIA first and then evaluating options, only then should the city write the comprehensive plan. The City of Suffolk decided that it wasn’t going to even evaluate different options for development and it wasn’t necessary to look at the long-term financial impact. This is a HUGE increase in growth for the city, including building large scale warehouses and residential developments on farmland that does not currently have infrastructure.

The State of Virginia requires that comprehensive plans be adopted with the purpose of “prosperity and general welfare of the inhabitants”. This plan does NOT meet that standard. This plan is supposed to be about us, our needs and wants, and our vision for the future of Suffolk, not the Port’s needs, developers’ desires, and the will of City staff.

If any of this isn’t sitting right with you, please join us in opposing the 2045 Comprehensive Plan. Please sign our petition, share with all of your neighbors, friends and family in Suffolk. Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us tell City Council we don’t want this, maybe they will listen to the voice of the people.

Please sign our petition to urge City Council to vote ‘NO’ to the new 2045 Comprehensive Plan.

Pause the Plan – Help Spread the Word

Care4Suffolk — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:46:41 +0000

Care4Suffolk has been following the City’s 2045 Comprehensive Plan since November 2022. After a two-year process, the draft has been completed and the next step will be for this 2045 Comprehensive Plan to make its way through the Planning Commission and to City Council where, if approved, it will be implemented immediately.

Unfortunately, this 2045 Comprehensive Plan does NOT represent the needs or wants of the majority of citizens of Suffolk. This plan is going to expand the growth area by almost 25%. The previous plan, adopted in 2015 only expanded the growth area by 5% and look at how that has impacted the traffic on our roads, our over-crowded school, and over-stretched public services.

Additionally, the City is increasing the growth area without having done due diligence. The City chose NOT to do the fiscal analysis. The fiscal analysis was part of the original proposal requirements and was supposed to be completed prior to writing the draft. This fiscal impact analysis is a set of tools that the Planning Department could have – and should have – used to see what various development options cost in infrastructure and public service and compare it to the revenue they generate. It shows planners whether specific types of development in specific locations are a net positive for the city or a net negative, which will cost the taxpayers money in the future. This is THE key tool that should have guided decisions: should we expand the growth area and by how much, where should that expansion be, and what type of development is best? Instead of looking at data to answer these questions, the planners just decided not to do the fiscal analysis!

We can NOT allow our City to proceed with this plan until AFTER the fiscal analysis is completed AND used to guide the decision about the growth area and land use types.

Below is a flier that we are circulating. Please help us in our efforts to ‘Pause the Plan’ by sharing this with family, friends, and neighbors in Suffolk. We need as many people as possible to let City Council know that this is NOT acceptable.

A Comprehensive Plan is the document that guides growth and development in a city. Suffolk’s 2045 Comprehensive Plan (suffolk2045.org) will soon be voted on by Planning Commission and City Council. If approved, it will have a major impact on future land use decisions.

Problems with the 2045 Comprehensive Plan

No Fiscal Impact Analysis Was Done:
- The City failed to use this essential tool as prescribed in the original contract and against the recommendations of the consulting firm.
- The fiscal analysis was supposed to have been done BEFORE the draft was written.
- Without the fiscal analysis, the City doesn’t know how much its desired development will cost taxpayers.

Huge Growth Area Expansion:
- A Growth Area is where a city encourages development.
- The 2045 Comprehensive Plan will increase the Growth Area by almost 25% (adding 17 square miles).
- Previous comprehensive plans, from 1998 to 2015, added only 12 square miles total.
- New Growth Area will destroy farmland and open space adjacent to our reservoirs.
- Suffolk’s farms are an economic powerhouse that should NOT be sacrificed in favor of warehouses and suburban sprawl.
- Suffolk already struggles with traffic congestion, unsafe roads, over-crowded schools, and over-extended emergency services.

Let City Council know that you want them to ‘Pause the Plan’ and have the fiscal analysis completed BEFORE adopting the 2045 Comprehensive Plan: council@suffolkva.us

Michael D. Duman, Mayor

mayor@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-514-4009

Lue R. Ward, Jr., Vice Mayor

(Nansemond Borough)

nansemond@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-377-6929

Shelley Butler Barlow,

Council Member

(Chuckatuck Borough)

chuckatuck@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-346-8355

Leroy Bennett, Council Member
(Cypress Borough)
cypress@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-407-3750

Timothy J. Johnson, Council Member
(Holy Neck Borough)
holyneck@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-407-0556

Roger W. Fawcett, Council Member
(Sleepy Hole Borough)
sleepyhole@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-377-8641

John Rector, Council Member
(Suffolk Borough)
suffolk@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-407-1953

LeOtis Williams, Council Member

(Whaleyville Borough)

whaleyville@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-402-7100

Pause the Plan

Care4Suffolk — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 18:04:39 +0000

You wouldn’t build an addition on your house and ask afterwards how much it cost, would you? Of course not – that would be ridiculous! If you waited to find out the price until after you built, you would have already incurred the cost and be responsible for the money you owe for the addition whether you could afford it or not. Nobody makes big, expensive decisions that way. First, you estimate the costs, you determine if you can afford it, and then you do a cost-benefit analysis to see if it is worth it.

This is how most people make decisions and we expect the same cost-benefit analysis from our government. After all, we have to pay for the decisions they make. This is why it is so concerning to see what is in the new 2045 Comprehensive Plan Draft AND what is NOT in it – there is no fiscal analysis. The City was supposed to have a fiscal analysis done prior to writing the comprehensive plan draft. The City chose not to have it done. What will the new development in the 2045 Comprehensive Plan cost? We don’t know, but it could potentially saddle us, the taxpayers, with huge infrastructure costs for decades to come. The lack of due diligence on the City’s part in making these recommendations without the fiscal analysis is concerning.

This image shows a map of Suffolk from the 2045 Comprehensive Plan Draft (p. 41) with the new and current Growth Areas. The red arrows have been added by Care4Suffolk to help show where the new growth areas will be.

Suffolk city managers and planners want to expand the city’s Growth Areas by almost 25%, prioritizing “land use type” changes to allow for a lot more industrial and suburban growth. Almost all the proposed new growth area is currently agricultural or low-density rural residential, adjacent to our water supply reservoirs. Turning rural areas into suburban residential and industrial areas is sprawl. Sprawl comes with a high price tag for infrastructure costs – roads, water, sewers, schools, and emergency response services.

This image is from the Fiscal Impact Analysis Report from the City of Eagle, Idaho (p.24). This is an example of the type of information from a fiscal analysis that provides valuable insight for a city to use in planning future development. The City of Eagle is looking at long-term Net Fiscal Impact for development in a specific area.

This image is from the Cost of Land Use Fiscal Impact Analysis for the Town of Davidson, North Carolina (p. 17). The Town of Davidson is comparing the fiscal impact (surplus vs deficit) of various non-residential land use types from 2014 compared to 2020. Notice that the warehouses are net negative, from 2014 to 2020.

During the planning process, the City sought public feedback and heard many concerns and frustrations regarding the rapid expansion in the last decade. Citizens are suffering from traffic congestion, unsafe roads, insufficient schools, increasing taxes, and lack of adequate public services. Considering the public pushback on development of warehouses and high-density housing in recent years, one would expect city managers and planners to go out of their way to justify why they recommend 17 square miles of additional suburban and industrial development in the new 2045 Comprehensive Plan draft. You would think that in order to alleviate our concerns they would be eager to demonstrate how all this benefits the city as a whole and improves our quality of life. The City has not done this. Instead, we are left with additional concerns about the lack of due diligence in the process.

The City of Suffolk has paid over a million dollars to create this plan. We expected that the City would analyze costs and impacts of growth and development as part of this new plan. We expected a thorough analysis of a variety of growth scenarios, weighing the costs versus benefits. We expected the City to provide specific strategies, goals, standards and methods of accountability. Yet, this has not been done.

The Fiscal Impact Analysis should have–and could have– been completed already according to the initial requirements of the contract with the consultant, but the City specifically asked to delay it. Below are all the records that show that contrary to the original agreement, the City of Suffolk asked to have the Fiscal Impact Analysis delayed and only done AFTER the new 2045 Comprehensive Plan is approved.

In November 2020, the Suffolk Purchasing Division put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) for “Review and Update of the 2035 Comprehensive Plan.” It contains a “Scope of Services,” (p.6-11) which lists what the City feels are the desired components “essential for reviewing, evaluating, and updating” the 2035 Plan by a potential contractor/consultant. One of these desired components was “Development of an appropriate fiscal analysis format and model; and review, update, and prepare fiscal impact analysis of future and preferred development scenarios” (p.6).

In January 2021, the consulting firm, Planning NEXT, presented its proposal to review and update the 2035 Plan. Their Scope of Work talks about fiscal analysis and “alternative land uses and build out scenarios” that they will prepare to “be compared with a set of metrics developed in collaboration with Staff” (p10-11). It states that they “will conduct an analysis to help determine the most advantageous types of economic development” (p12) and a Fiscal Impact Analysis is clearly listed as a specific task within the Technical Analysis component of the document (p12). The Plan Development component of the proposal lists a task to “Develop fiscal impact model tool and reports,” to include a “Growth Impact Report” as a “stand-alone document, that is easily understood by all interested parties” (p15).

The image above is an excerpt from the Proposal: Review and Update of the Comprehensive Plan Suffolk, VA (p. 18) which is from Planning NEXT (January 20,2021). The highlighted section shows that the plan originally included a fiscal analysis that was to be completed prior to writing the comprehensive plan draft.

The images above are excerpts from the Scope of Work Amendment from Planning NEXT dated August 29, 2023 (page 3 on left and page 4 on right). These excerpts show that there was a change from the original plan where the City has made the decision to postpone the fiscal analysis until after the 2045 Comprehensive Plan is approved.

Suffolk’s city managers and planners decided they wanted to wait until AFTER the 2045 Plan was approved by City Council to have a thorough Fiscal Impact Analysis done. They want to approve this new growth plan without knowing the short-term or long-term costs. A Fiscal Impact Analysis is a standard recommended part of the comprehensive plan process. The consultants hired to help develop this plan both recommend, and routinely complete, these studies for the other cities that hire them.

This is an excerpt from Fiscal Impact Analysis: How Today’s Decisions Affect Tomorrow’s Budget by L. Carson Bise II of TischlerBise. This excerpt explains what an important tool the fiscal analysis can be for planners while making decisions like the ones made in the 2045 Comprehensive Plan. TischlerBise is the consultant that was going to conduct the fiscal analysis. Full document available at the end of the article and on their website.

This is an excerpt from Fiscal Impact Analysis: Reader Beware: Some Caveats by Paul Tischler of TischlerBise. This excerpt states that a fiscal analysis should be completed prior to developing the plan (before writing the 2045 Comprehensive Plan Draft). TischlerBise is the consultant that was going to conduct the fiscal analysis. Full document available at the end of the article and on their website.

It is clear from the city’s original queries and the consultant’s proposal that a Fiscal Impact Analysis is an integral part of the comprehensive plan review and update process. Plain old common sense tells the average person that these recommendations for drastic growth should be data-driven. To use the previous analogy, here we are with the City poised to build an addition and they have failed to do the basic cost-benefit analysis we all expect and require from our City officials and city planners. They want to build and then find out how much it will cost us.

The comprehensive plan impacts almost every land use decision the city makes and citizens of Suffolk need to know WHY our city managers and planners think moving forward with almost 25% increase in Growth Areas is warranted. We need the fiscal analysis completed so we can see the long-term impacts of the development proposed in the 2045 Comprehensive Plan. We deserve more than expansion without substantiation. Until we get some clear answers, the city needs to put a pause on the plan.

Let City Council know that you want them to ‘Pause the Plan’ and have the fiscal analysis completed BEFORE adopting the 2045 Comprehensive Plan: council@suffolkva.us

Michael D. Duman, Mayor

mayor@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-514-4009

Lue R. Ward, Jr., Vice Mayor

(Nansemond Borough)

nansemond@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-377-6929

Shelley Butler Barlow,

Council Member

(Chuckatuck Borough)

chuckatuck@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-346-8355

Leroy Bennett, Council Member
(Cypress Borough)
cypress@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-407-3750

Timothy J. Johnson, Council Member
(Holy Neck Borough)
holyneck@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-407-0556

Roger W. Fawcett, Council Member
(Sleepy Hole Borough)
sleepyhole@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-377-8641

John Rector, Council Member
(Suffolk Borough)
suffolk@suffolkva.us
Phone: 757-407-1953

LeOtis Williams, Council Member

(Whaleyville Borough)

whaleyville@suffolkva.us

Phone: 757-402-7100

Fiscal Analysis – Care4Suffolk

Decisions Without Data

Fiscal Troubles Ahead?

Letter to the Suffolk News-Herald

How Much Will It Cost Us?

Voice of the People

Pause the Plan – Help Spread the Word

Problems with the 2045 Comprehensive Plan

Pause the Plan

Supporting Documentation and Additional Reading: