Gastonia 2050 Comprehensive Plan Gastonia2050 Comprehensive Plan
Our Vision
Since 2025, Gastonia has grown smartly into a city balancing economic growth and natural resource preservation, with equitable access to employment, health care, education, culture, and recreation. Gastonia is a unique place within metropolitan Charlotte leveraging its position, as one of the earliest and largest municipalities in the region, to support a broad offering of cultural events, a vibrant central city, and diverse neighborhoods, all while maintaining an attractive cost of living and high quality life.
Gastonia’s high quality of life is grounded in the city’s neighborhoods, which are conveniently accessible to jobs, shopping, education, and recreation, through a smartly designed pedestrian friendly road network and transit system, which is augmented by extensive greenway trail and cycle facilities. Instead of social isolation and constrained mobility Gastonia chose a vision that has allowed the Community to develop into an equitable and safe city providing its residents a great place to live and prosper.
What's A Comprehensive Plan?
A comprehensive plan is a long-range plan that comprehensively addresses the future growth and development of a community. It identifies the vision and goals of citizens to establish more effective policies and provide direction for the use of public funds and priorities.
This plan will focus on the next 25-year period and will look at the relationships between land uses, infrastructure, and key community services and amenities. As a broad, long range planning tool, the Comprehensive Plan will guide growth and address community needs and priorities through a series of objectives, strategies, and goals.
The Comprehensive Plan is the blueprint for the actions of a community. It presents a vision for the future and establishes a strategic framework over a 20 to 25-year horizon. By setting long-range goals and objectives, the Comprehensive Plan guides, advocates and supports all municipal activities that affect the local government. This includes guidance for city staff, the Planning Commission, and the City Council on a day-to-day basis and shall direct Gastonia’s long-term policies.
Why Is A Comprehensive Plan Update Needed?
The current plan was adopted in 2011. As Gastonia continues to evolve and grow, the comprehensive plan is being updated to reflect the changing needs and goals of our community to year 2050. While the City of Gastonia Planning department is responsible for updating the comprehensive plan, we can’t do it without your help! This process will provide opportunities for citizens to take part in the conversation, to learn, and to provide essential input for the future of Gastonia. Scroll our website for more information, updates, public workshop recaps and upcoming events.
Peak Inside Our Previous Workshops
View Our Timeline
Come To Our Upcoming Workshop:
Workshop 1 Recap
October 2nd, 2024 | 6:00pm to 8:00pm
The first Community Workshop will introduce the purpose of the project and gather input from the community concerning the overall “vision” for Gastonia.
This workshop will include a presentation on what a Comprehensive Plan is and what it should focus on, introduce everyone to the project and process, review the roles of various team members, and review the components of the Gastonia2050 Comprehensive Plan.
Following the presentation, a keypad polling session (Community Pulse Survey) will be conducted to allow the public to provide input on the community’s aspirations and vision, and the key issues and opportunities of The Plan.
In addition to keypad polling, the public will also provide general comments and ideas for The Plan verbally at the end of the keypad polling session and on comment sheets located around the room and at breakout tables.
The keypad polling questions, and the presentation will be available on the project website so that individuals not able to attend the workshop can contribute via an online format as well.
Documents:
Workshop 2 Recap
Open Space, Land Use and Future Growth Areas
November 14th, 2024 | 6:00pm to 8:00pm
The purpose of the 2ndCommunity Workshop will be to discuss lands that could or should be annexed, developed, preserved for open space, agriculture, or environmental resiliency, and how and where the City can continue to grow over the next 15-20 years. At these meetings, Metrocology will begin with a presentation that reviews key takeaways from the first Community Workshop and existing conditions graphics that tell the story of current land use patterns. Metrocology will then conduct a keypad polling exercise focused on future growth topics. Following that, Metrocology will conduct a physical planning exercise, with participants working together at tables in groups of 6-8.
Documents:
Contact Us
Director: Sushil Nepal
City of Gastonia Planning Department
704-854-6652
Planning.Department@gastonianc.gov
