As part of a multi-year project, the City of Lone Tree is asking for community input on how the city should evolve between now and 2045. 

The project, Lone Tree Elevated, is to update the city’s comprehensive plan and land use code, both of which help guide development in the city. The new comprehensive plan will guide the city’s growth through 2045. 

Hoping to include community members in the project, the city has opened an online survey for community members to share what their vision is for the city’s future. 

The survey, which can be filled out by visiting LoneTreeElevated.com, asks questions such as whether people think the city has enough housing options, what their transportation priorities are, and how the city can improve for people who work in the city. 

Ian Corder, the city project manager for Lone Tree Elevated, said that ideally, people will respond to the survey by the beginning of October. 

He said a big target audience of the survey is Lone Tree residents, but the survey is also open to others who engage with Lone Tree such as people who work and/or shop in the city. 

There will also be a raffle prize given out to someone who completes the survey. 

The prize will include a voucher for two tickets to the Lone Tree Arts Center and include a couple of gift cards to Park Meadows Mall and the coffee shop Monk & Mongoose, Corder said. 

Community input is important because it helps the city understand what people need and whether they’re receiving that, he said. 

“This is their opportunity to really get involved in how the community is built out over the next few years, and their input really does matter to this effort,” he said. “I think one of the driving factors of a successful comprehensive plan is that it kind of helps to build consensus amongst the community and helps to guide a lot of policy decisions related to land use.”

What is Lone Tree Elevated? 

Lone Tree Elevated is an overarching project to update the city’s comprehensive plan and land use code. The project started in May and is estimated to take until next fall, Corder said.

“There’s always technical pieces to a lot of what we do in planning, but at the end of the day, what we’re trying to plan out is a community that people interact with every day,” he said. 

The comprehensive plan is a land use document that helps inform other policy decisions as well, such as transportation infrastructure, he said. 

Last updated in 2019, the new comprehensive plan will provide an overall vision for the city through 2045.  

“We want this document to help guide not just the physical development of the city, but we want there to be some flexibility there as the city grows over that time,” Corder said. “This is really going to help us make sure that once we hit (2045) … whether it’s based off of our population growth and projections, job growth — that we’re hitting all the needs that we have identified.”

The land use code is centered on short-range planning, he said. It focuses more toward the specifics of how to build the vision laid out in the comprehensive plan. 

“Based off of what we find in the comprehensive plan and how people want things to grow, we can morph the development code to better inform our land use patterns,” he said. 

The first phase of Lone Tree Elevated has been a visioning process, Corder said. 

The city has put together a steering committee to help guide everything that includes residents, business owners, a developer and community leaders.

Around early November, the Lone Tree Elevated team will start transitioning into more of the planning phase and creating an outline of what the new comprehensive plan could be. 

There will be more community engagement events and an open house before the team starts drafting the comprehensive plan to help get community members talking with one another, he said. 

“We want to try to get the community to have a consensus amongst themselves first,” Corder said.

Around January of next year is when the team aims to have completed the draft of the comprehensive plan, which will have to be approved by the city council. 

“Along that process, we’ll start transitioning into the code update as well ‘cause we’ll have some of that information that we needed from the comp plan to kind of start rewriting that code,” he said. “I think our plan is to have the code update finished next fall.” 

Those who are interested in learning more about the project can visit LoneTreeElevated.com. Residents with questions can also email Corder at ian.corder@cityoflonetree.com.