Scenario Planning

Consulting firm City Explained, Inc. actively seeks to align itself with cities, counties, and regions that appreciate and uphold the virtues of community-based planning. The team emphasizes a process-driven approach to sustainable development and town-building; always with an eye toward sound technical analysis, meaningful public involvement and creative solutions for realizing a community’s vision.

The firm relies on creativity and national experience to provide clients with plans that are bold, achievable, and fiscally-responsible. City Explained’s flagship software product — CommunityViz — is widely used throughout North America and the world for scenario planning, decision analytics, and visualization.

Scenario planning is a process that considers multiple futures for a planning area based on competing physical, policy, or financial scenarios. Scenarios contemplated for the area are not forecasts or predictions, but possible futures that might occur based on physical features, community desires, infrastructure investments, or policy decisions in the area. They represent possible futures based on what already exists, emerging trends and opportunities, or community desires to change the future.

The essential requirement for any growth scenario is that it is plausible, within the realm of what exists today, or what could be in the future.

Each growth scenario contemplated for Berkeley County included a theme, a story, and a map to convey big ideas or important decisions facing the community. These were rooted in a series of community meetings in the fall of 2020, then further refined by the project team to incorporate additional thoughts and ideas evaluated for the new comprehensive plan.

Ultimately, the scenarios themselves were fictitious stories about the future and offered an objective view of the trade-offs associated with competing growth alternatives. Information presented for the Scenario Planning and Likely Impacts Analysis was almost entirely data-driven, and the findings and conclusions presented from the analysis responded to the data considered. It was important to put this information in the context of the overall planning process for the Comprehensive Plan and weigh recommendations from the analysis against the community vision and guiding principles created for the new Comprehensive Plan.

Return-on-investment (ROI) is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments combined. ROI for the scenario planning and likely impacts report measured potential returns to Berkeley County in terms of increased local government revenues compared to the relative cost of providing facilities and services to support future growth and development in the planning area.

To calculate ROI, the total benefit (revenues) was divided by the total costs (expenses) for each of the alternative growth scenarios. The result was expressed as a ratio, and a value greater than 1.0 indicated expected annual revenues to the County would be greater than expected annual expenditures. The surplus each year would be available to the County to save for, purchase, or finance new capital projects in the planning area.

Certain revenue categories for the County — ad valorem taxes and specific fees — are more sensitive than others to different development types, locations, patterns, and intensities in the planning area. The official Future Land Use Map in the One Berkeley Comprehensive Plan provided the first vision and policies for the county that influenced the physical distribution of growth and the type of development in the planning area, which are implemented in the county’s zoning ordinance and official zoning map.

The decisions made while preparing and adopting the new Future Land Use Map had the potential to generate wealth for the county in terms of increased, decreased, or stable revenues moving forward. Concurrently, the decisions made also impacted the type, size, and distribution of different infrastructure needed to support future growth and development, which influences the costs-to-serve for each infrastructure category and could possibly impact the county and its partners’ ability to provide specific facilities and services or control tax rates to keep up with anticipated growth.

As communities grow, the demands placed on supporting infrastructure continue to rise and eventually necessitate additional capacity improvements to maintain adequate levels of services.

Traditionally, elected officials will rely on rising property taxes and special fees in addition to state or federal funding to pay for future year capital improvements. However, recent decreases in outside governmental funding, increases in construction costs for replacing and expanding infrastructure and facilities, and rising resistance to increased property taxes have led many local governments to reconsider how they fund and program future capital improvements and facilities.

The Scenario Planning and Likely Impacts Analysis was completed concurrent with the One Berkeley Comprehensive Plan, and provided insights into the opportunities and trade-offs associated with multiple futures contemplated for the Berkeley County planning area. Findings and conclusions from the analysis were shared with project team members during the comprehensive planning process and influenced the official Future Land Use Map and its supporting recommendations related to land use, natural resources, community facilities, transportation, and priority investments in the Comprehensive Plan document.

Issues surrounding infrastructure deficiencies and expensive, unplanned improvements are exacerbated when decisions are made not to follow the adopted Future Land Use Map. To this end, the County’s Planning and Zoning Department should continue their involvement in the Capital Improvements Program and annual budget processes to ensure future development patterns and intensities (the “demand-side” of infrastructure planning) are considered when deciding how to make systems more efficient and less costly to build, operate, maintain, and replace.

Scenario planning is widely used in communities ranging from small, newly incorporated towns to large regions to support more informed decision-making processes. Towns, cities, counties, and regions throughout the country are using scenario planning to develop comprehensive plans, small area plans, corridor studies, regional land use studies, long range transportation plans, growth strategies, and fiscal impact studies. Scenario planning studies to support a new comprehensive plan sometimes, like this one, have their legacy in a regional planning initiative (i.e., Our Region, Our Plan completed in the Berkeley-Charleston-Dorcehster region in 2008).