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
PREVIOUS STORY (1/28/2025): The Vision & Values of the Comprehensive Plan
Today, we are focused on the biggest section of the Comp Plan: Chapter 3. The third chapter is titled Accessibility. Chair of the Northfield Planning Commission, Betsey Buckheit, says that this was a unique combination of transportation and land use together in one chapter and that this is one of the most significant changes from the last comp plan made in 2008. She says that this chapter is meant to “connect people to places and opportunity.” Here’s Buckheit at the January 7th City Council meeting:
“Why accessibility rather than other things? Usually we’ve measured mobility, which tends to measure how fast can the cars go, and is there any delay. And you know, that’s important when you’re sitting in traffic, and you’re getting a little bored. But we’re more interested in how you really put people together with where they need to go.” – Betsey Buckheit, Chair of the Northfield Planning Commission, at the Northfield City Council Meeting 1/7/2025
Buckheit noted that this chapter focuses on all the ways that people move around Northfield, including cars, transit, biking, and walking in an effort to connect the city better. Some of the plan’s primary focuses include locating homes, services, and jobs for better access, as well as addressing affordable transportation options.
Additionally, part of the chapter includes creating a future land use map, which states which areas Northfield will prioritize growth and redevelopment in. Here’s Buckheit on KYMN in December:
“Sure, the future land use, thinks about land use in very general categories: residential, Commercial, and industrial, we have colleges as their own land use because they’re pretty distinct. But that doesn’t say anything about what the homes look like in the residential neighborhoods or the sort of form or character that gets to zoning rather than land use. We tried to simplify this, too, and we made all the places that are mostly where people live residential. And tried to think about where commercial development and industrial development would happen. And as we said, it guides future development.” – Betsey Buckheit, Chair of the Northfield Planning Commission, on the KYMN Morning Show
Buckheit noted that as part of this plan, the future land use map calls for fixing the borders of St. Olaf and Carleton.
The proposed future land use map from the January 2025 Planning Commission Meeting Packet.
Another part of the map states the priority growth areas of the city; Buckheit noted that there are several limiting factors in where the city can grow, like the river and college campuses. The plan calls for priority growth in the southeastern portion of the city past Highway 246 and Jefferson Parkway and also in the Northwest section of Northfield near the hospital. However, Community Development Director Jake Riley noted that part of the goal is to focus on what is currently in the city boundaries to better connect the city and also preserve some of the greenspace around Northfield:
“If we sort of self-limit ourselves by taking some of the high-value natural lands that are to the north and West of the city boundary today, and then the high-value agricultural lands which tend to be to the West and South. We don’t want to encroach on either of those things, and we want to create a situation where we can incentivize folks to build more, closer to downtown and closer to where people live, to minimize the need for people to travel if they don’t have to”. – Jake Riley, Community Development Director, on the KYMN Morning Show
We are not fully done reviewing the accessibility chapter, and we will loop back and cover more in-depth the transportation section in future news stories.
You can see the pdf of the whole comp plan below, and Chapter 3 starts on page 13:
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