GARDEN GROVE : City Selects Firm to Update General Plan

The City Council has voted this week to pay an Irvine civil engineering and land planning company more than $500,000 to perform the first comprehensive update of the city’s General Plan in nearly 20 years.

The document is expected to lay down policies and patterns as guidelines as the nearly built-out city goes about rebuilding itself.

Officials said the firm of Robert Bein, William Frost & Associates will start gathering data in the community shortly after the first of the year. Work is expected to continue on the project for nearly two years.

The General Plan was last overhauled in 1974 and many of the elements are out of date and incompatible with one another, officials said.

The contract is one of the biggest to be awarded by the city in recent years, officials said.

The General Plan will deal with growth, land use, housing, safety from natural disasters, noise, traffic circulation, open space and parks and recreation and an economic analysis.

Bein, Frost & Associates will gather opinions of residents in a number of community forums. The General Plan is required “to reflect the values, goals and desires of the community,” City Manager George Tindall said.

When completed, the executive summary of the document will be printed in Garden Grove’s three most used languages--English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Tindall said it has been such a long time since a major overhaul of the city’s General Plan that various components are inconsistent with each other “and don’t represent the community today.”

Garden Grove and other cities are required by state law to adopt a comprehensive long-term General Plan for development. The General Plan is the foundation upon which all land use decisions are based, officials said.

A cost lid of $505,859 has been put on the contract for the General Plan and accompanying environmental impact reports and assessments.