Edmond City Council Special Meeting: Comprehensive Plan Update Workshop – September 22, 2025
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Edmond City Council Special Meeting: Comprehensive Plan Update Workshop
On September 22, 2025, the Edmond City Council held a special workshop to review the proposed update to the city's comprehensive plan. Long Range Planner Hannah Nolan presented the changes, which were driven by three recent studies: the 2022 Edmond Shift mobility plan, the 2023 citywide housing assessment, and the 2023 forest composition ecosystem analysis. The update creates a new housing chapter, renames the transportation chapter to mobility, expands utilities to include natural resources (urban forestry), and revises the implementation chapter. The land use, economic development, and parks and recreation chapters remain unchanged. The presentation also covered the tracking of action items, the upcoming unified development code update, and the annual progress reporting process.
Discussion Items
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Housing Chapter: The new chapter is based on the 2023 housing assessment, which found a need for nearly 9,000 new housing units over 10 years and that three out of four Edmond workers commute from outside the city. Four housing goals were developed: make it easier to build housing, diversify options and price points, improve older housing while preserving affordability, and support workforce housing. Five new action items were added, including strengthening home buyer assistance and rehabilitation programs, improving housing resources and management, and modernizing zoning to allow more housing types by right. Council members expressed support for addressing barriers such as NIMBYism and for specifying the types and price points of housing needed. Councilmember Frame noted that 70% of the city's workforce, including city employees, lives outside Edmond. Councilmember Murdoch Nichols emphasized the need to protect smaller existing homes west of downtown from being torn down and replaced with more expensive homes, and to make revitalization easier than demolition.
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Mobility Chapter: The renamed mobility chapter incorporates recommendations from the 2022 Edmond Shift plan and aligns with the city's Vision Zero commitment. New action items include updating street standards to reflect plan categories, ensuring safe walking and biking, reorienting policies to prioritize vulnerable road users, establishing a program to assess and maintain sidewalks, curbs, gutters, and drainage, modernizing street designs for all ages and abilities, retrofitting existing streets, improving neighborhood connectivity, and expanding transit. Councilmember questioned the term "overhaul" for the ITS master plan, suggesting it be softened, and clarified the meaning of reprioritizing policies. Staff noted that four-lane undivided roads, which are common in Edmond, are dangerous and that the goal is to eliminate left turns from travel lanes where possible. The mobility commission recommended changing "bike share" to "shared micromobility solutions."
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Urban Forestry: The forest composition analysis showed a 1% increase in tree canopy over 10 years, bringing coverage to nearly 39%. Existing forestry items were consolidated into the utilities and natural resources chapter, and a dedicated forestry goal was added. Three new action items were added: updating development codes to protect sensitive areas, conducting a full inventory of public trees, and creating an urban forest master plan and long-term management plan. Council briefly discussed transfer of development rights (TDR) as a tool to preserve trees by allowing development rights to be sold from conservation areas to denser areas. This idea came from the East Edmond 2050 plan and is under consideration but not yet adopted.
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Implementation and Tracking: The implementation chapter was revised to accommodate the changes. Action items are tracked in a table with lead departments, estimated start years, and status (completed, ongoing, not started). The appendix is updated annually and posted on the city website. Examples of completed items include the housing assessment, Edmond Shift plan, and pavement condition assessment.
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Land Use Not Updated: Councilmember questioned why the land use chapter was not updated, given recurring issues with PUDs. Planning Director Ken Bryan explained that the land use map was recently updated (2018-2019 and again with East Edmond 2050), and that the pending unified development code update will address the misalignment between the current code and the comprehensive plan, which is why land use changes were deferred. He noted that the code update is expected to be ready for public body action around late winter/early spring 2026, with a joint workshop scheduled for October 27, 2025.
Key Outcomes
- The council received the comprehensive plan update presentation and asked clarifying questions. No formal vote was taken on the plan update itself; the workshop was informational.
- The next step is for the city council to consider final acceptance of the plan update at a regular meeting in October 2025.
- Staff will provide council with additional information on transfer of development rights.
- The meeting was adjourned by motion, seconded, and passed unanimously.
Meeting Transcript
I'm calling the September 22nd Edmund City Council meeting, the special meeting, which is a comprehensive plan update workshop to order. Mr. Anns, would you like to kick this thing off? Just real briefly, I'd like to introduce Hannah Nolan, our long range planner. She's going to walk us through this today. And she'll be happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Good afternoon. Like you said, I'm Hannah Nolan, long range planner, the city of Edmund. I'll be walking through the city's comprehensive plan update. I've been with the city for just over a year, so updating our comprehensive plan was quite the onboarding experience. I've met with and talked to a lot of different departments and learn a lot about what everybody does, but I'm not an expert, so I may need to call on some of my friends if I get any hard questions. But today we'll talk about what a comprehensive plan is, why this update matters, and the changes we've made to address our community's evolving needs. Here's a quick overview of what we'll cover. I'll introduce the concept of comprehensive planning and introduce Edmund's current plan. Then we'll look at why we're updating the plan now and what is changing, and then we'll go deeper into the four major focus areas housing, mobility, urban forestry, and implementation. So the comprehensive plan is the city's long-term roadmap for how we should grow, develop, and change over time. It reflects the vision and values of the community developed through public engagement. Unlike a strategic plan, which has a more narrow focus and is shorter term, a comprehensive plan is broad, holistic, and typically looks out 20 to 30 years. A comprehensive plan is meant to be dynamic. It needs to be updated so that can those so that it continues to stay relevant. Edmund's first comprehensive plan was adopted in 1963. The plan has always served as a guide for long-term growth and development. It builds on three elements capturing our community's vision and goals, identifying the challenges we may face, and outlining the tools, policies, and actions to help us see that the vision is achieved. In the 1990s, the city launched a visiting visioning project called Tomorrow's Edmund. That process gathered broad community input on what residents wanted Edmund to be in the future. That visioning process has remained a foundation for every comprehensive plan update since. Each of those subject areas has its own chapter, and each includes a subject overview, current conditions and trends, and then the goals associated with that topic area. And then at the end of the plan is a list of all the actions and recommendations. These provide us direction for how we will go about achieving our vision. And then finally, the most detailed level is our actions and recommendations. These are the specific projects, programs, policies, regulations that will move us toward our goals. So since 2018, when the previous plan was adopted, we've had some important updates to the comprehensive plan. For example, in 2022, we incorporated the East Edmund 2050 plan. That was to include initiatives and new plan categories that came out of that plan. More recently, three major plans and studies have been completed. Edmund Shift in 2022, the housing assessment in 2023, and the forest composition ecosystem analysis in 2023. These plans and studies are what prompted the need to update the comprehensive plan now. These are three plans that council has already seen and heard in various states, and what we are doing now is essentially consolidating the findings into one place. This keeps the plan dynamic and ensures that it still reflects the community's current priorities. Since 2022, the city has completed those three plans and studies, and so the updated plan that you have before you today is how we are proposing to incorporate those changes into the comprehensive plan. Well, some things are changing, many core pieces of the comprehensive plan remain the same. The vision originally shaped by tomorrow's Edmin is still relevant today. And the chapters for land use, economic development, and parks and recreation have not been altered in this update. So what has changed? We created a new housing chapter to reflect the housing assessment to reflect the findings and recommendations of Edmund Shift. We renamed and updated the transportation chapter to be mobility. And then we expanded the utilities chapter to include natural resources like urban forestry, and that is where we incorporated the findings from the forest composition and ecosystem analysis study. And finally, because we made those changes to those three areas, we needed to revise the implementation chapter. And so I'll go through each of these in more detail with a brief overview of each plan, the goals associated with the subject area, and the new action items.
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