The first of three public meetings gathering input for the Envision Heber 2050 general plan update happens this Wednesday evening. The plan will shape the growth of the city for the next 30 years.
Heber City Mayor Kellen Potter says that the update to the general plan have been spurred in part by the rapid growth occurring in the Heber Valley.
“We were recently named number four in the most dynamic city by the Walton Family Foundation. There’s a lot of potential economically for our city with all this growth coming. It just seems like now is the time that we really need public input and we need to come together as a community and make these decisions for what will be best for us in the next decades to come.”
Mayor Potter says that the council doesn’t have any predetermined priorities to come from the general plan update.
“Since this plan is supposed to represent the wishes of the community, we’re not really prioritizing the issues. We’re kind of letting this come organically through the steering committee and through the issues that are brought up in our public meetings.”
The first of those public meetings will take place on Wednesday evening from 6:00-8:00 pm at the Heber Valley Elementary School.
“It’s really a hands-on workshop. Where people will have the opportunity to look at maps and decide where density should go and shouldn’t go and how we accommodate the population growth that’s anticipated to come to Heber in the next twenty to thirty years.”
The two public open house events will take place on May 15th and August 1st. Mayor Potter says they anticipate finishing the project in about a year.
“Then after that we’ll have to go and do a lot of code amendment, but the three meetings will be planned over the next six months. Then we’ll kind of go from there, hoping to get it all tied up by the end of the year, first of next year.”
Initially the city budgeted $20,000 to update the general plan.
“We realized that was not adequate. It’s kind of a moving target, we’ve probably spent—we’re up to about not quite $100,000. Getting some consultants, making sure that we have adequate information out to the public, having people help us do the process who have done it in other cities.”
You can find a link to the Envision Heber 2050 websitehere.
