The City of Brighton

The City of Brighton’s Comprehensive Plan is intended to serve as a guide for how the city can continue to grow and evolve as an exemplary small town in Livingston County, Michigan. The Comprehensive Plan includes a Complete Streets Plan, Downtown Plan, Recreation Plan and Master Land Use Plan. By creating all these long-range planning documents concurrently, the city is promoting and strengthening city-wide community assets in a coordinated fashion that reflects how these assets are interrelated.

Giffels Webster initiated the project with a joint workshop with the Downtown Development Authority, Planning Commission and City Council. This was followed by an intensive NextSteps for Downtown® assessment, which included evaluation of building form, streetscape, circulation and parking.

Our planning team facilitated public participation via an on-line survey, open house and Giffels Webster’s online crowdsourced platform, PictureThis™, which provided a resource for citizens, businessowners, and visitors to upload photographs, link them to a map location, and offer comments.

The Downtown Plan establishes a block-by-block Framework Plan which specifies building frontage types and building heights consistent with planned outcomes. It also calls for expansion of pedestrian passages that link Main Street and Grand River with larger parking areas and other street frontages. This focus on non-motorized transportation also weaves through the Complete Streets Plan and Recreation Plan.

Action strategies are provided in a matrix that makes implementation straightforward and trackable. The matrix shows how various land use, transportation, recreation, and downtown actions are connected.

This project received the 2019 Vernon Deines Merit Award for an Outstanding Small Town Comprehensive Plan by the American Planning Association’s (APA) Small Town and Rural Planning (STaR) division. The APA STaR Awards Committee noted that the Brighton Comprehensive Plan “embodies the best of small town planning.”