This story is part of Worthington Pulse's coverage of the July 6 joint City Council and Municipal Planning Commission session.
After two years of committee meetings, public workshops, and speaker series, the draft of Worthington's new comprehensive plan reached City Council. The 20-year blueprint was created through a community feedback process known as Worthington Together and got its first full airing before council and the Municipal Planning Commission at a joint session on July 6.
Council voted to send it into the formal adoption pipeline: the Planning Commission takes public comments on July 23, and after a recommendation there, the plan returns to council for more public comment and an adoption vote expected in the fall.
The nearly 200-page document sets guidance for where and how Worthington should grow. It contemplates buildings up to 10 stories in one part of the Wilson Bridge corridor, "gentle" new housing types like duplexes and accessory dwelling units in the right locations, and detailed direction for five opportunity areas. It also produced the evening's two longest discussions: what "historic character" should actually mean, and why West Worthington and Linworth weren't given their own section (an omission council asked staff to fix before adoption).
Two years in the making
City Manager Robyn Stewart opened the session by noting the process began two years ago and is now in its final stages. Planning & Building Director Lee Brown traced the history back further: council allocated money for the plan in the 2024 budget adopted in December 2023, and the city hired the consulting firm planning NEXT, whose principals Jamie Greene and Michael Curtis led the evening's presentation, in mid-2024.
The heart of the process was an 18-member community committee appointed in February 2025. Since its first meeting that month, the committee has held 11 meetings alongside three public input rounds, three speaker series, and multiple council updates. Across the three public rounds, roughly 2,000 people actively participated.
The consultants were candid that the engagement was "self-selected qualitative research," not a random-sample survey. They argued the credibility comes from how hard the committee and staff worked to make participation available to everyone, including focus groups with the school district and two rounds with high school students.
What's in the plan
The draft is organized into five topic chapters containing 15 strategic priorities supported by 48 discrete action items, anchored by a future land use and character map. The consultants stressed repeatedly what the plan is not: it is not a zoning map, it does not mandate development on private property, and it does not guarantee any recommendation gets built. Instead, it becomes the touchstone for evaluating development proposals, and the foundation for a complete rewrite of the city's zoning code.
For what the document itself says — chapter by chapter, including its recommendations for each of its five opportunity areas — see the Pulse's special edition resident's guide to the draft plan.
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The housing math, and how to explain it
A single line in the draft's economic vitality chapter — that new housing scores as a net fiscal negative for the city — drew nearly 20 minutes of discussion. Curtis explained the result is largely an artifact of Ohio municipal finance, where cities run on income tax rather than property tax, and was direct that it should not be read "as something that could support opposition to new housing": adding units spreads a city's fixed costs across more households. Council President Pro Tem Rebecca Hermann, citing resident confusion she'd seen online about "why we would ever as a community want housing that is a negative towards the city," pressed for the document to connect those dots itself. Council Member Joy Dong proposed a standalone fact sheet, modeled on the infographic one-pager the city produced for its housing assessment, and the consultants agreed to take the idea back to city staff.
The housing chapter discussion that followed centered on sequencing: new housing types like duplexes, accessory dwelling units, and cottage homes go to the designated opportunity areas first, with only "gentle" infill inside existing neighborhoods where it fits the surrounding context. Council Member Maria Ramirez returned to a point she has pressed in multiple settings — that redevelopment must come with protections for vulnerable residents, renters and struggling homeowners alike — and Architectural Review Board member Ben Niebauer asked the city to revisit the plan's charts on home values and rents in five to ten years, so Worthington can tell whether any of it is working. (The chapter's contents are covered in depth in the special edition's housing article.)
Council probes the growth areas
The plan's most concrete guidance comes in five opportunity areas: the Wilson Bridge corridor, North High Street, South High Street, Old Worthington, and Forge Fields. Our special edition tours what the draft recommends for all five. In the room, the discussion concentrated on the two biggest.
In the Wilson Bridge corridor, where the draft contemplates the city's tallest buildings, Curtis said residential can be part of the mix, but "the emphasis should be on income tax generating uses" with a net fiscal benefit. The guidance arrives just as Crawford Hoying prepares to bring its West Wilson Bridge redevelopment concept to the Planning Commission and Architectural Review Board this week.
North High Street drew the most public comment of any area in the first engagement round — hundreds of map comments centered on the 1033 High Street (former United Methodist Children's Home) site and the 6700 North High Street site. Council Member Joy Dong asked whether the plan should allow going higher than the recommended three or four stories along High Street itself; the consultants said concentrating development in a smaller footprint could preserve more open space and make structured parking viable, and agreed it "may be worth looking at".
What does "historic" actually mean?
The heights question opened the evening's longest debate. Hermann asked whether the Architectural Review Board's jurisdiction should extend to Wilson Bridge, since the board currently has no authority there. Mikel Coulter, who chairs both the Planning Commission and the ARB, would "rather see us pedal it softly" than expand the board's formal reach, and Planning & Building Director Lee Brown said the working assumption is to build design guidance into the coming zoning code rewrite instead — noting the city already gets "the teeth of control" over projects like Crawford Hoying's through the planned-unit-development process.
From there, Dong pushed the group to say what the plan actually means by "historic character," a phrase she noted appears throughout the draft without a definition: "Is it as simple as being on a register? Is it as simple as being a specific design?". Consultant Jamie Greene answered that the intent is form, not replication — a new building's scale and relationship to the street, not 18th-century architecture — and the group traded local proof points: the McConnell Arts Center addition and the Worthington Jewelers building, both controversial when proposed and both now cited as successes. The consultants committed to sharpening the plan's language, including explicit openness to contemporary design within Worthington's established building patterns.
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West Worthington gets written in
Dong flagged what she called a missed opportunity: none of the plan's five opportunity areas touch the city's west side. "I heard consistently that West Worthington often felt overlooked, and I feel that this plan kind of feeds into that bias a little bit", she said, noting the plan is meant to guide the next 20 years. City Manager Robyn Stewart explained the omission was a byproduct of process, not a judgment — the five areas came from where public engagement generated the most comments — and Brown noted the area already carries a "corridor transition area" designation on the citywide map, allowing mixed use at one to four stories.
Even though the area is largely already built out, multiple meeting participants argued the area belongs in the document, pointing to the fire-damaged Linworth Center, a roughly 500-unit housing proposal near Brookside Estates, and years of west-side residents feeling cut off. When the consultants asked whether there should be a full named section, Kathy Holcombe answered: "I personally think so, because it is our city." Staff and planning NEXT committed to drafting one before the July 23 Planning Commission hearing; the land use already shown on the draft map won't change, but the new section will add detail on connectivity, streetscape, and economic development.
Dig deeper into the conversation
A standalone sustainability plan next
Council Member Pete Bucher, invited to weigh in on the environmental resilience chapter as council's longtime sustainability advocate, praised the chapter's first implementing action, a coordinated standalone sustainability plan, and said he would love to see the city start on it in early 2027 once the comprehensive plan is adopted. Stewart noted city staff are already participating in the Power a Clean Future Ohio climate action planning cohort and drafting a framework as part of that work.
The chapter builds on the city's existing MORPC Sustainable2050 Platinum status and ties sustainability to land use decisions. Walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly development, the consultants noted, is one of the most effective greenhouse-gas tools a city has. Priority actions include updating stream corridor protections and tree canopy standards in the zoning code.
What happens next
The consultants asked council to treat adoption as a beginning, not an ending. The plan recommends an annual progress report on its 48 action items, a prioritization matrix assigning timeframes and lead departments to each, and revisiting the plan itself roughly every five to 10 years. "A plan is really in many ways a basis for change... you won't know what you're changing from unless you have a plan".
Council passed a motion sending the recommendation forward. The dates for residents:
- July 23 — Municipal Planning Commission meeting with public comments on the draft plan
- September (expected) — the plan returns to City Council, with another round of public comments before an adoption vote
The full draft plan is available through the city's Worthington Together project page at worthingtontogether.org.
Dig deeper
- Wilson Bridge Corridor Could See 10-Story Buildings — And a Debate Over What Counts as "Historic"
- 'It Is Our City': Council Pushes to Give West Worthington and Linworth a Place in the Comprehensive Plan.
Or go back to the July 6 meeting recap.