By Logan Wells, News Director | Logan@kymnradio.net
Editor’s Note: For the last 18 months, the City of Northfield has been drafting its Comprehensive Plan, which is the 20-year plan for the city. This story will be part of a series of stories breaking down the contents of the Comprehensive Plan before it is approved by the City Council later this spring.
PREVIOUS STORY (1/6/2025): What Is The Comprehensive Plan?
PREVIOUS STORY (1/10/2025): How the Comprehensive Plan Was Made
Today, we are focusing on the beginning of the plan, the vision, and Northfield’s values. The following vision was crafted for the city:
The Shorter Vision of the City of Northfield:
Northfield is a welcoming city, providing equitable access to a high quality of life.
The Longer Vision of the City of Northfield:
We are a city with a strong identity rooted in history while growing as a diverse, inclusive, and sustainable place. We maintain our integrity as an independent and distinct city shaped by our historic and natural resources, the Cannon River, rural neighbors, and our colleges.
The Chair of the Northfield Planning Commission, Betsey Buckheit, described vision as what the city wanted to look like in 2045.
With the city’s vision, there are 8 Guiding Values: emphasizing equity, creative solutions to local problems, fostering resilience and mitigating the effects of climate change, planning economically to be responsible and sustainable, promoting safe and stable housing, providing mobility options, and fostering human connections. (read more about the guiding values on the 2nd and 3rd page of the document below).
Buckheit stated that the plan was made based on public input, and the vision and values reflect what they hear,d and one of the core pieces of feedback has been the small-town feeling of Northfield; here’s Buckheit on KYMN in December:
“Because one thing we have heard for all the while all the comp plans really going back to 1966 is we like. Be a town and not a suburb.” – Betsey Buckheit on the KYMN Morning Show
Some other major themes of public input were addressing equity issues in Northfield, sustainability and the preservation of the trees and nature areas in Northfield, smart and sustainable growth the helps to address the high rate of taxes, and addressing housing and mobility issues.
View the entire chapter below:
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