Dynamic Comprehensive Strategic Planning: Integrated Land Development, Public Facility Capacity Planning, and Capital Budgeting Decision Analysis Framework

The Metropolitan Washington region is bracing for projected increases of 1.6 million residents and 1.2 million new jobs between 2005 and 2030, according to a 2005 publication “An Eye to the Future” by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) (2005). However, in several regions of the United States, prior years of rapid growth have already created severe quality-of-life and environmental problems due to land-use policies and governments’ failure to build infrastructure to keep pace with private development. Unbalanced employment and housing-mix development has created sprawl and congestion with employees forced to live in housing far from their jobs. Existing public sector facilities such as transportation and school system infrastructure are experiencing inadequate capacity and low levels of service. Governments are challenged to overcome fiscal and environmental constraints in their quest to build infrastructure capacity to timely meet demand generated by economic growth. Decisions on comprehensive land-use policies (master plan, sector plan, zoning, and annual growth policy) are often made separate from capital improvement program and capital budgeting decisions, which deal with capacity replacement and expansion under financial and environmental constraints. The economic development problem of individual governments is further complicated by the competitive position between governments to expand their tax base that dictates the priority on expansion of employment as opposed to residential growth. This paradoxically leads to issues that affect the region, such as sprawl. Local governments have to choose between regional issues and strategic advantages they may gain by limiting housing that requires more service. There is a need for a dynamic comprehensive strategic planning (DCSP) decision analysis framework to assist decision makers to take steps to: (1) balance the amount and type/mix of jobs and housing developments in a sector/area to limit sprawl; (2) steer land development to areas with adequate existing facilities that can support it; and (3) expand and maintain inventory of adequate public facilities to keep pace with appropriate size, location, and timing to match growth. Scenarios can be used to address uncertainties in forecasts of both growth and capacity.

The DCSP can be used at different levels of government (federal, state, and local) to simultaneously integrate land-use policies, functional technology/facility capacity planning, and capital budgeting for a balanced and staged growth that supports enterprise-wide strategic goals and objectives within acceptable impact risk.

I present:

The scope of this paper is limited to development of a conceptual DCSP decision support system framework for simultaneous land development and strategic capacity planning on sector and aggregated enterprise levels. The model will address methods of building alternative sets of job-housing mixes and corresponding alternative sets of feasible technologies (modal split) and facilities to provide capacity. Location and pace of land development alternatives will also be considered. Scenario-based analysis (in combination with alternative land-use and technology mixes) will be considered to address uncertainties of forecasting economic growth (state of economy, demographic composition, etc.) and technology performance (life-cycle performance under varying demand and advance) over the planning horizon. Resulting impact (economy, safety, and environmental problems such as emission and noise) will also be addressed. The framework for the DCSP provides long-range and short-range analysis at various discrete stages of the planning horizon. There are existing models for most of the key components of the DCSP framework with the exception of long-range capacity planning and project portfolio selection for the capital improvement program. The problem is that these models are used separately (not interactively). I am also working on dynamic long-range capacity planning (Fig. 1) and medium- and short-range capacity-constrained quadratic capital improvement/capital budgeting programing models as key components of the DCPS.