Additional Update Information

Element Summaries

Growth Strategy
Coordinating housing, transportation, and commercial development ensures Tacoma is implementing policies that support growth, strengthen neighborhoods, and ensure residents have access to a high quality of life.

Complete Neighborhoods
Tacoma’s neighborhoods should meet local needs and maintain their distinct character. The City is developing smart design policies that showcase Tacoma’s unique identity, cultivate beautiful places, and celebrate the city’s diverse architectural heritage.

Environment & Watershed Health
Our natural resources offer valuable ecological, aesthetic, and cultural benefits. The City’s land use policies include environmental protections and regulations to ensure our land and water stay healthy for future generations.

Housing
Tacoma wants to be a city with safe and healthy housing options for all residents. The City’s policies influence the location, style, and income mix of new housing stock, ensuring varied access to opportunity, stability.

Transportation
Tacoma’s transportation policies support growth by prioritizing transit-oriented development and infrastructure investments in key areas. This approach creates walkable communities with integrated transportation, housing, jobs, and amenities.

Economic Development
As a designated Metropolitan City, Tacoma is planning for 94,000 new jobs by 2050. Through strategic economic initiatives, the City is building a framework that will attract new businesses, support existing ones, and ensure alignment with existing land use policy.

Parks & Recreation
Parks, trails, and open spaces enrich Tacoma by connecting people to their community and their surrounding environment. The City is committed to safeguarding these spaces and enhancing them for the future, with an emphasis on improving access for all Tacomans.

Public Facilities & Services
A city with well-designed and maintained public facilities and responsive city services build community trust, resilience, and pride. The City is planning to manage its facilities and services in a way that meets the community’s needs and provides fair, high-quality service to all Tacomans.

Historic Preservation
Tacoma’s preservation program protects our historic architecture and cultural sites. The policies outlined in this chapter ensure that historic buildings are part of our collective future and contribute to citywide sustainability goals and economic vibrancy.

Public Engagement Plan and Engagement Summary

One Tacoma Community Engagement Plan:

The City of Tacoma is updating its Comprehensive Plan (to 2050), refreshing its Strategic Plan (to 2035), and developing a Community Safety Action Strategy. All three plans rely on community engagement to guide policies and strategies. A long-standing priority for Tacoma is ensuring that engagement fosters equity and empowerment. While the Growth Management Act (RCW 36.70A.140) requires “early and continuous public participation,” Tacoma goes beyond the minimum, striving for inclusive and meaningful engagement in all decisions.

Over the years, Tacoma has conducted extensive community engagement across many initiatives. Other partner agencies are also planning engagement activities on a similar timeline. However, some gaps in participation may remain. This strategy aims to maximize existing data and engagement efforts to minimize respondent burden and confusion, while focusing additional resources on specific thematic or community group gaps. It also includes leveraging external partner efforts to inform all three plans.

Community Engagement Summary:

As part of the One Tacoma update, the City of Tacoma conducted a variety of engagement activities to gather community input, including in-person and virtual workshops, pop-up events, neighborhood group meetings, an Ideas Wall on the website, and a multilingual community survey.

Feedback from these activities highlights strong community support for the 15-minute neighborhood concept, with a focus on improving public transit, pedestrian and bicycle mobility, safety, and access to essential services. Additionally, community members expressed a desire for more small businesses reflecting the city’s demographic diversity and greater economic opportunities through a wider range of jobs and employers.

These insights will be key in shaping the policies of the One Tacoma Comprehensive Plan.

Equity Assessment

Community Profile: The Community Profile includes information about the current context of the city and recent trends as a starting point for comprehensive plan research. It is also intended to serve as a key resource for shaping the community engagement process by summarizing information about City residents. The Community Profile is a working document, and each Comprehensive Plan chapter will expand on this research in the process of developing specific policies.

Equity Assessment Context History and Baseline: A review of relevant historical context, equity indicators, and baseline outcomes data disaggregated by race and ethnicity in Tacoma.

Equity Assessment Framework: A summary of equity priorities and policy and review rubrics used for the Comprehensive Plan policy audit.

Baseline Conditions

The baseline conditions reports provide a comprehensive summary of the existing analysis and reports relevant to each element of the Comprehensive Plan, as well as the necessary new data and mapping to support updates. These reports are designed to guide policy development by synthesizing current conditions, trends, and themes across multiple areas.

Below are the baseline conditions reports for several key elements of the One Tacoma Plan:

• Growth Strategy: Analyzes population allocation across Tacoma’s planning geographies to inform land use planning.
• Housing: Summarizes current data on Tacoma’s housing market, including all requirements to comply with HB 1220. The baseline conditions data also compiles the various planning efforts related to housing from recent years to synthesize themes and policy guidance.
• Economic Development
• Parks and Recreation: The Parks and Recreation baseline conditions report primarily references the Parks Tacoma Strategic Plan and includes updated levels of service (LOS) metrics that incorporate City-owned properties, a crosscheck of state-level parks planning guidance, and collaboration on equity findings to ensure parks and recreational facilities meet the diverse needs of the community.
• Historic Preservation: The report summarizes an assessment of existing plan language and regulations related to historical resources in Tacoma. It includes a comparative analysis of best practices from other jurisdictions that have updated their historic resource regulations, aiming to inform potential improvements and align with the goals identified for the update.
• Engagement and Administration: The baseline conditions report for the Engagement Element provides a summary of the gap analysis conducted on community engagement efforts in Tacoma. The analysis focused on studies conducted with community members since 2016, excluding those based solely on stakeholder interviews or advisory bodies.
• Environment and Watershed Health: The Environment baseline conditions report provides a high-level summary of the publicly documented critical areas within the City of Tacoma, detailing each of the five critical area types. It also summarizes watershed-scale assessments based on publicly available data.

Critical Areas Best Available Science (BAS) Review:

The Critical Areas Best Available Science (BAS) Review was compiled as part of Tacoma’s Periodic Update to the Comprehensive Plan, in compliance with the Growth Management Act (GMA). This review assesses the best available science for critical areas to ensure that Tacoma designates and protects these areas in accordance with the legal requirements of the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) Chapter 36.70A and Washington Administrative Code (WAC) Chapters 365-195 and 365-196.

Critical Areas Ordinance Gap Analysis:

The Critical Areas Ordinance Gap Analysis identifies potential gaps or inconsistencies within Tacoma’s current critical areas regulations. This analysis is part of the city’s Periodic Update to the Comprehensive Plan under the Growth Management Act (GMA).

Frequently Asked Questions about the Planning Process

What is a comprehensive plan?

A comprehensive plan is a tool that helps cities proactively respond to growth and change. It is a long-range plan that looks ahead 25 years to anticipate the needs of current and future residents, business owners, workers, and visitors of a city. The plan is organized into sections that cover a range of issues, including housing, land use, transportation, utilities, parks, economic development, and more.

What is the One Tacoma Plan?

The One Tacoma Plan is the City of Tacoma’s comprehensive plan, which is being updated in 2024 and 2025. This once in a decade update process is an opportunity for anyone who cares about the future of Tacoma to join together and think about the kind of community we want to become and believe we can achieve by 2050. The update process will also coordinate and align with other planning efforts currently in-progress, including the Transportation Master Plan, Community Safety Plan, the Metro Parks Tacoma Strategic Plan, the Strategic Plan update for Tacoma 2035, the Stormwater Comprehensive Plan, Home in Tacoma, and the Tideflats and Picture Pac Ave Subarea Plans. The One Tacoma Plan update process will be completed in 2025.

Why is this plan important?

The One Tacoma Plan affects everyone who cares about the future of Tacoma over the next 25 years. It allows us to plan for a changing city that keeps us safe, allows us to live sustainably with our land and water, and contributes to our physical, social, and economic health. The One Tacoma Plan can help maintain our quality of life while also building a more equitable future that offers the same opportunities to everyone.

How is this plan used?

Comprehensive plans guide city decisions on how we use land and water, improve city streets, create options for transportation, build housing, and take care of public facilities and services such as parks, libraries, and utilities. City staff use the Comprehensive Plan to direct and coordinate actions, policies, and programs that serve community members to improve everyone’s quality of life.

Why do we need a comprehensive plan?

Tacoma’s comprehensive plan is required by the State Growth Management Act. The GMA was enacted in 1990 and amended in 1991 in response to rapid population growth and concerns with suburban sprawl, environmental protection, quality of life, and related issues. The One Tacoma Plan is a coordinated effort to ensure the City has sufficient capacity of land planned for and zoned to accommodate its housing and job growth targets.

City Meetings

Event	Date	Materials
Planning Commission	January 18, 2023	Agenda Packet Minutes Audio Presentations
Planning Commission	March 1, 2023	Agenda Packet Minutes Audio Presentations
Planning Commission	June 21, 2023	Agenda Packet Minutes Audio Presentations
Planning Commission	December 20, 2023	Agenda Packet Minutes Audio Presentations Written Comments
Planning Commission	January 17, 2024	Agenda Packet Minutes Audio Presentations
Infrastructure, Planning, and Sustainability Committee	February 14, 2024	Agenda - Item 24-0133 Minutes Staff Report Video
Planning Commission	February 21, 2024	Agenda Packet Minutes Audio Presentations
City Council Study Session	March 26, 2024	Agenda Packet Minutes Video Presentations
Planning Commission: preliminary findings including the equity assessment report	July 17, 2024	Agenda Packet Minutes Audio Presentations
Planning Commission: initial review of Parks + Recreation element	September 4, 2024	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations Written Comments
Planning Commission: initial review of Public Facilities + Services element	September 18, 2024	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations
Planning Commission: initial review of Urban Form and Housing elements	October 2, 2024	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations
Planning Commission: initial review of Historic Preservation element	October 16, 2024	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations
Planning Commission: initial review of Transportation and Design + Development elements	November 6, 2024	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations Written Comments
Planning Commission: initial review of Economic Development and Environment + Watershed Health (Part 1) elements	November 20, 2024	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations
Planning Commission: initial review of Environment + Watershed Health (Part 2) and Engagement elements	December 4, 2024	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations
Planning Commission: releasing draft One Tacoma Plan for public review	February 5, 2025	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations
City Council Study Session: overview of Draft One Tacoma Plan	February 11, 2025	Agenda Packet Video Presentations
Planning Commission: Public Hearing	March 5, 2025	Agenda Packet Audio Presentations