Municipalities, MAPC, and the state must dedicate more resources to support the development of local plans and zoning consistent with MetroFuture.  Ideally, this effort must be more deliberate, intensive, and far-reaching than other recent initiatives such as Executive Order 418, which provided funding to municipalities for the development of local plans, but without any significant attention to regional consistency or local implementation.  State and regional support for these efforts would involve two components: technical assistance from MAPC,  other public agencies, or qualified private consultants (supported by state funding), and direct state funding in support of comprehensive planning processes.  

In order to build in consistency with MetroFuture, MAPC should be a close partner in the local comprehensive planning processes, and the MetroFuture scenario should be an explicit point of reference for these plans.  Local planning efforts should apply planning support tools in the context of deliberate (and diverse) public participation with an emphasis on learning and stakeholder development.  In this manner, local plans will reflect local priorities and decision making while being consistent with the regional plan.

MetroFuture’s population, housing, and employment scenario for each municipality should form a basic expectation  of what each comprehensive plan should seek to achieve.  While MetroFuture targets should be the starting point for development of local comprehensive plans, MAPC should also develop a mechanism to adjust those targets based on local conditions and preferences, while maintaining the broad outlines of the MetroFuture scenario. 
Given a “palette” of appropriate land uses that recognizes different Community Types, the comprehensive planning process would allocate land uses and basic forms of development to places within the municipality based on appropriate criteria.  On aggregate, each municipality would end up with:

• Sufficient capacity to accommodate its population and employment targets;
• Designation of sensitive and/or important landscapes that should be protected from development;
• An understanding of the positive and negative impacts of putting the plan into action as well as how impacts are distributed across the community and its populations;
• Housing production, economic development, open space, and other plans that are demonstrably consistent and together demonstrate how the municipality expects to achieve its comprehensive plan; and
• A detailed description of zoning and regulatory changes necessary to implement the plan.

While comprehensive plans are important, they must often be supported by district plans and capital plans that provide a greater detail regarding specific growth areas or infrastructure improvements necessary to support growth.  Such plans are necessary to ensure that the capacity exists to support planned growth, or to define the improvements necessary to develop the needed capacity. 

6.a    The Legislature and Governor should establish a significant new funding program for regular and ongoing local comprehensive planning efforts

6.b    MAPC should develop best practices and checklists for development of local plans within a regional context, on a community type basis

6.c    MAPC should develop a “MetroFuture summary” specific to each city and town, with data and maps depicting growth projections and recommended growth and preservation areas 

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