This story is part of Worthington Pulse's coverage of the July 23 Architectural Review Board and Municipal Planning Commission meeting. Start with the July 23 meeting recap.
Four residents and eight board members spent most of Thursday evening on a Worthington's draft comprehensive plan. No vote was taken and none was scheduled. But by the end of the night the Municipal Planning Commission had given staff direction on two specific changes to the document, and its vice-chair had laid out, in detail, how a plan's maps can commit a city to something nobody in the room intended.
The draft returns to the commission on September 24, then goes to City Council in the fall. There are no Architectural Review Board or Planning Commission meetings during the August recess.
A hearing just for public comment
Chair Mikel Coulter opened the item by explaining what it was not. "This is just here for public comment tonight. We will not be taking a vote. We're not going to table anything." The Architectural Review Board had no cases on its agenda at all, which is why a body that usually spends its evenings on signs and storefronts spent this one on the 190-page draft policy document.
Planning & Building Director R. Lee Brown walked through where the plan stands. Three rounds of public engagement, a speaker series, and an 18-member community committee that met 11 times have produced a draft organized around land use and character, economic vitality, mobility and connectivity, housing and neighborhoods, and environment and resiliency. Beneath those sit 15 strategic priorities and roughly 46 action items.
He also read back the comments the plan collected at the July 6 joint session with City Council, from making the maps consistent to adding metrics so the city can show what it actually implemented. "Don't just do a plan to do a plan," Brown said.
What residents said
Four residents spoke, and their comments covered the spectrum.
The most specific objection came from a resident near the Wilson Bridge opportunity area. The draft's designations there would keep buildings at three stories along Wilson Bridge Road but let them rise to ten stories "only a short distance into the site," a few hundred feet from homes on Hinsdale Court. His ask was concrete: replace the Mixed Use Core designation west of Old Wilson Bridge Road with Mixed Use Edge, capping height at three stories. He called the current draft "one of the most significant changes in the building scale ever proposed in Worthington without providing adequate transition to nearby neighborhoods."
A resident of more than 40 years said the plan "seems to be trying to ruin the reasons many of us moved here," pressed on the loss of mature trees, and asked whether residents would get to vote on the zoning changes the plan recommends - the board answered no later in the evening. Kate LaLonde, director of the Worthington Historical Society and a member of the plan's community committee, addressed the draft's undefined use of "historic": "Historic does not simply mean old, rather it refers to the places that help tell the story of our community." And a fourth speaker argued the other side, calling the tax base "the engine that underpins everything that makes the city valuable" and naming the Wilson Bridge corridor buildout as the most promising item on the city's list.
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The map that says more than anyone meant
Vice-Chair David Foust used most of his time on a single argument, and it began with a story about the last comprehensive plan.
About 20 years ago, he said, the city adopted its 2005 plan. A few years later a developer came in for the former United Methodist Children's Home property across High Street and proposed five-story apartment buildings right at the street. "And I was kind of shocked," Foust said, "and then I realized in going back and looking at the plans that we had pictured five story apartment buildings as examples of what could be built on that site." The board's intent had been that such buildings sit back in the middle of the site, with single-family housing to the west and commercial along High Street. That intent was never written down.
He then applied the lesson to the current draft. The plan's existing-conditions map, on page 23, is detailed and accurate down to small pockets of multifamily housing worked in among single-family homes. But the proposed land-use map two pages later extends the downtown commercial designation over blocks along Hartford and Oxford streets that are entirely residential today, plus residential areas along Route 161 that the board has specifically protected over the years.
The problem is what that color means elsewhere in the document. In the section defining land use for the Old Worthington core, Foust said, the plan lists mixed use and office commercial as the primary uses and residential only as secondary. A developer reading the two together, he said, would reasonably conclude the city wants commercial on those blocks. "Some of us don't interpret it that way. Maybe this was just done to square off some of the blocks."
The board's actual long-standing practice, he said, has been the opposite: "We have traditionally, for all the years I've been up here, tried to draw a line down the middle of the block between the commercial and residential. So we have commercial on High Street, residential on the side streets." If extending the boundary was not the intent, he argued, the plan should not say so in writing, "because somebody will jump on it."
Brown said the point had not been on staff's radar. "Mr. Faust, until you mentioned your comment about how the boundaries expand over, I had really not paid attention to it," he told the board, and asked members to email him any such edits during the August recess so the consultants could work through them before September.
A guiding document, and the legally binding one behind it
The thread running through the whole discussion was a distinction that residents rarely have explained to them: the comprehensive plan does not regulate anything. The zoning code does. And the plan's own first implementation step is to rewrite that code.
Foust raised it directly, noting the plan calls for revising the comprehensive zoning and development code in several places. Brown confirmed the sequence: staff will wait until the plan is adopted, then audit the current code "to see what's in it and everything that we need to change, with the idea of doing a complete rewrite in 27 and 28." City Council has already funded the audit.
That distinction also answered the resident who asked whether the public gets to vote on zoning changes. It would not be a public vote, Brown said, but it would be a public process: recommendations come to the Planning Commission, which forwards them to City Council, and council holds the authority to adopt a new zoning code or rezone property but there would be public input.
Several members made the same point in their own terms. One, who served on the 2005 plan, said that if a ten-story building is ever proposed, "the whole city is going to be involved in whether or not there should be a 10 story building." The zoning stage, not this one, is where the hard choices land.
Linworth gets its section
The one question Brown put to the board directly was whether Linworth should be added as a sixth opportunity area alongside Wilson Bridge, North High, South High, Old Worthington, and Forge Fields — a point council had pressed at the July 6 joint session, where members argued West Worthington and Linworth had been left out of the plan entirely.
The board's answer was unanimous and immediate. The sharpest argument came from a member who pointed at the map itself: Linworth "is the only gateway to Worthington that's not represented as an opportunity area." Brown took the answer as direction, and said he could strengthen the plan's connectivity language regardless.
What the board decided not to change
A second question from the July 6 joint session got a clear answer in the other direction: whether to extend the Architectural Review Board's boundaries beyond the current historic district. "I think across the board the answer was no," Coulter said, "Let's concentrate and make good what we have."
What happens next
The draft comes back to the Municipal Planning Commission on Thursday, September 24, 2026, for another round of public comment and review, then goes to City Council. Brown said the council date is subject to change and that staff now expect to bring the document forward in October rather than September.
Between now and then is the August recess, with no ARB or Planning Commission meetings. Brown asked board members to send their document edits by email during the break so the consultants could work through them before the September meeting.
Residents can submit comments through the city's Planning and Building division, and the city website offers email and text alerts for specific boards, projects, and the comprehensive plan itself. Council member Amy Lloyd noted that these alerts can be a substitute for a local paper that publishes more than monthly. (Editor's note: this is exactly what Worthington Pulse is aiming to do as well!)
The draft plan and supporting materials are posted at worthingtontogether.org.
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This story comes from the July 23 meeting recap.