The entire Request for Proposals can be found on the City of Verona website at https://www.ci.verona.wi.us/236/Comprehensive-Plan

Proposals are due no later than 4:00 PM CST on Friday, July 19, 2024

Introduction

The City of Verona is seeking written proposals from qualified planning firms and consultant teams to prepare a Comprehensive Plan for the City.

The City of Verona is a rapidly growing municipality located in south central Wisconsin, just minutes from Madison, with room to grow. The City currently has a population of 15,553. The City operates under the Mayor-Council form of government. Under this form of local government, the Mayor and an eight-member City Council determine policy and legislative direction while the City Administrator is in charge of day-to-day operations of the City. The City provides a full range of services including police and fire protection; the construction and maintenance of streets, highways, and other infrastructure; recreational activities and cultural events.

The City has been through a number of transitions over the past few years with several new City Council members and Department Heads coming on board, including a new Planning Director. The Mayor, City Council, and Plan Commission finds it an opportune time to update the Comprehensive Plan ("Plan") with the release of the 2020 U.S. Census data, new leadership and accelerated growth and development in the City; and to establish a regular update after each U.S. Census.

The existing Comprehensive Plan was completed in 2009 and updated over the years with the following plans:

• Southwest Neighborhood Plan 2009
• Southeast Neighborhood Plan 2010
• Downtown Mobility and Development Plan 2014
• North Neighborhood Plan 2015
• Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan 2017
• Northwest Neighborhood Plan 2018
• Reconfirmation of the Comprehensive Plan 2019
• Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan 2022

The City is currently receiving development requests for areas outside the municipal boundary where the existing Comprehensive Plan provides only general guidance to developers and Staff as to the City's official vision for those areas. In addition, the baseline for those plans are over ten years old and much has changed in Verona since then, including population growth, employment growth, and real estate markets. This makes development review cumbersome and lacks predictability for the City and development community. This has placed an unnecessary burden on City Staff and the Plan Commission.

Staff

The City of Verona Planning and Development Department includes a Director and a Community Development Specialist. Staff works closely with Staff from Parks and Recreation, Public Works, Engineering, and Building Inspection. The Director of Planning and Development will serve as Project Manager for the City and the main point of contact between the consultant and the Task Force. Throughout the entire process, extensive interaction is expected with City Staff.

Comprehensive Plan Task Force

The City has established a Comprehensive Plan Task Force to provide oversight and assistance in preparing a recommendation to the Plan Commission. The Task Force will provide direction to the consultant in developing draft goals and objectives for the Task Force's consideration. It is anticipated the consultant will develop materials for and attend Task Force meetings. Meetings with the Task Force will be held as needed but are anticipated to be no more than once a month and less frequent depending on the stage of the planning process.

Scope of Services

The City of Verona is seeking a consultant to update and revise the Comprehensive Plan with corresponding maps, images, and graphs. Consultants are encouraged to use their model plan and approach to best communicate information in a user friendly, easy to interpret and implementable Comprehensive Plan. The City seeks to amend the City's budget for $120,000 for this project after a consultant is selected. If there are services proposed that are beyond this budget, but that will provide value to the Plan, these additional services and associated costs should be listed separately in the proposal.

The detailed schedule for the project shall be included in the consultant's proposal and should be limited to eighteen (18) months.

The State of Wisconsin has specific elements that are required to be contained in comprehensive plans per State Statute 66.1001. All of these items are expected to be met to ensure compliance with the statute but should not be solely limited to those items. Additional items of focus will be determined through discussions with the public, Staff, and the Task Force; however, a housing and commercial market analysis is already requested. In addition to the State Statute a public participation plan must be created and approved as the City does not have any public participation requirements outside of the statutes.

The consultant team will work with the City's engineering consultant, AECOM, to analyze existing conditions and necessary improvements to accommodate future growth. These topics include: water and sewer utilities, road and mobility networks, wetlands, floodplain, and environmental corridors. AECOM will provide the necessary analysis of these topics and the consultant team will incorporate those into the Plan. Costs associated with AECOM's analysis will be directly between AECOM and the City and will not need to be accommodated in the proposal. The proposal should include costs associated with coordination and incorporation of the data and analyses into the Plan.

Special focus must be given to future land use mapping and transportation networks at the fringe of existing development. The areas outside of the current municipal boundary can be grouped into the following subareas:

• East
• Southeast
• Southwest
• West
• North