Okay.

Good evening, everybody.

My name's Owen Kearney.

I'm deputy commissioner for the City of Syracuse Planning and Sustainability Division.

And I am excited to welcome you to our kickoff meeting or at least public engagement meeting for the city's comprehensive plan 2050.

We're going to go ahead and get started here in just a minute.

But I am excited to excited to turn it over to our project team who are going to introduce themselves.

But the city is taking on this project.

It's been over a decade since we've last updated our comprehensive plan.

This team has been working really for the past almost year prepping to get to this place.

And we're excited to provide an overview of our work to date and ultimately our work moving forward and specifically talk about what is a comprehensive plan, why is it important for the city to update our comprehensive plan and how you can get involved.

And that's really the goal here.

You're going to hear more about opportunities even later this week to get involved, online tools to participate, and just generally how you as a city resident, as a city property owner can help shape this important long-range planning document.

So with that, just a quick note.

And I'm going to again turn it over to the project team to do that.

But we are going to take a question and answer, sort of have a question and answer period here at the end of the of our slides, which we anticipate to be about 20, 25 minutes.

So please use the QA tab at the bottom of your screen to record your questions, and then again, we'll walk through them towards the end of the meeting.

So with that, thanks for being here.

And again, I'll turn it over to Pete and Charles to introduce themselves and get started.

Thank you.

All right.

Thanks, Owen.

I'm Pete from CZB, along with my colleague Charles, and also joined on this webinar with Gisela, Sarah, and Radia from EDR.

And we're the consulting team that's working with the city of Syracuse on this new comprehensive plan.

So for the next uh few minutes, what we'll be doing, as Owen mentioned, is providing an overview of this project, uh, just a simple explanation of what you can expect from this comprehensive planning update, what a comprehensive plan is, why it's important to the city, um, and the process that we're going through, the timeline.

Um, and then we'll be talking about the different opportunities that the public will have, that all of you will have in the coming weeks uh to add your voice to this process and also the opportunities that will be coming up later on in this year to help inform this uh important long-range plan for the city of Syracuse.

Um just uh a quick reminder that uh we'll be uh taking questions as we go through this uh webinar.

There's a QA uh tool that you'll find on your Zoom toolbar.

Um please use that to submit your questions.

And as we get towards the end of this webinar, uh we'll go through and answer them uh in order.

Um, and uh we really encourage you if there's anything that uh that isn't clear, or if you, you know, just questions you have about about planning and and how it how it fits into the context of this comprehensive planning process, please do uh submit a question.

So we'll start with the project overview.

Um this comprehensive plan is Syracuse's first major update to the comprehensive plan since 2012.

Um so uh, you know, most communities in New York State have comprehensive plans that serve as long-range um direction for the municipality that outline goals that outline uh priorities for communities.

Sometimes there are 10-year, 20-year planning horizons, sometimes longer.

Um, but the goal here is long-term planning, providing direction uh on a whole host of issues potentially, um, and um really providing direction on what goes where, land use issues, development issues, um, resource allocation issues, providing guidance on how the city invests um its resources, what it invests in in terms of infrastructure, programs, all of those things.

Um, and so the way to think about uh a comprehensive plan and its importance is that it really is one of the most important guides for the common council, um, for city staff, for the city's partners and thinking about how to craft budgets, um, how to allocate uh tools for for improving infrastructure and programs, um, and also an important role of the comprehensive plan is um providing recommendations on how to potentially um update the development code, uh, which influences uh what new development looks and feels like.

And also an important role of the comprehensive plan is providing recommendations on how to potentially update the development code, which influences what new development looks and feels like.

This planning process is really focused on three important aspects of great planning.

One of them is getting the big things right.

So that is really trying to use this planning process to prioritize what is most important to the community, recognizing that everything that Syracuse, the community would like to do, it doesn't necessarily have the resources to do.

So it's really critical to get clear about what it prioritizes and how to how to use limited resources to best achieve the city's utmost priorities.

So that's that's one important leg of this process.

The second is planning for what is known.

So that's using the process to really uncover the information, data.

Some of that is quantitative, it's it's number crunching, some of that is qualitative.

It's listening to the community to understand what's happening, what has been happening, and how should that influence how the city thinks about its next moves in relation to its priorities.

Those things represent a really important framework for uh for making sure that the plan is actually adaptable and useful, even when things that it doesn't anticipate occur.

So those are the three really important legs of planning that this process is trying to reveal.

Um this is a process that began last year, um, January to October of 2025.

Um EDR and CZB worked on with the city on a phase one effort to really get a sense of um how the 2020 12 comprehensive plan implementation has been going, um, to talk to stakeholders in the community on a preliminary basis to understand some of the important issues that are out there, um, and also to lay the groundwork for the full-scale planning process that involves public engagement, which starts with uh with this webinar tonight.

So, this phase one work last year, there were interviews with a number of different um city teams, um, that 2012 plan audit to understand the goals and actions that were recommended back then, what went well, um, and what can be learned from from what was implemented and what can be learned from what wasn't implemented from that planning process to inform what we're doing now, um, an updated community profile to begin to understand some of the important development trends and other influences that are acting on the city right now that will uh that will be an important part of understanding what is known about uh Syracuse's planning context today.

Um, and then there was, as I said, some preliminary stakeholder outreach to understand what what individuals who are actively working every day to uh to help make the city better, what they see as important issues that need to be um uh addressed by by the new plan.

So all of those efforts led to the production of a phase one summary that is um on the uh the project website at the city's website right now.

And later on in this webinar, we'll provide the QR code for finding that uh that that project web page.

As we move forward from phase one, where we are right now is at the beginning of phase two.

And phase two has three components.

Um, phase two A started in in March with some preliminary work, discussions with city staff, um, beginning to work with a project steering committee.

Um, and this work extends into next month, where we're beginning the process of understanding what are the priorities or big things that this project should uh be centered around, um doing some supplemental deep dive analysis into issues that have been raised so far, um, and to uh begin to understand what the community, what the public uh prioritizes, um, and uh what core values um are at the heart of how the community makes decisions and thinks about the future.

So all of those pieces are part of phase two A, and that will be coming to a head next month, and we'll be informed by the public engagement round that starts with tonight and will include open houses and a virtual open house, which we'll describe in the next part of this webinar.