The General Plan provides San Rafael’s vision for its future, including policies for the future growth and conservation of the city. It is a State-mandated document and covers topics such as land use, transportation, housing, open space, conservation, community design, and safety. San Rafael’s previous General Plan was adopted in 2004 and looked ahead to the Year 2020. Among other things, GP2020 defined the environment that led to the Village at Loch Lomond Marina (aka The Strand) development. So, this work is very important to our community.
On March 5, 2018, the City Council adopted a detailed work program for the General Plan Update, including descriptions of each task to be performed, and a project budget and schedule. The 90-page work program outlines 15 tasks and over 100 sub-tasks to be completed over a three-year period, culminating with adoption of General Plan 2040 (GP2040). It is likely that there are elements of GP2040 that affect developments at the San Rafael Rock Quarry and other aspects of our neighborhood, so this effort continues to be important to our residents.
The work program includes a Community Engagement Strategy, along with detailed provisions for traffic modeling, environmental review, land use analysis, and policy development. Specific milestones and deliverables are identified for each task. The project budget includes an appropriation of roughly $1.1 million for consulting services, to be drawn from an existing fund set up a decade ago to maintain and implement the General Plan.
The City has created a GP2040 website page to document and detail the process and results of this effort.