Mooresville, North Carolina

Located on Lake Norman near Charlotte, North Carolina, Mooresville provides a high quality public educational experience and the Town’s desirability as a community has increased over the past decades. With this success has come growth and related public infrastructure and transportation challenges. To address these new opportunities, the Town of Mooresville contracted with Clarion Associates in 2018 to jointly lead the development of the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. This planning effort serves both as an update to the Town’s Comprehensive Transportation Plan and the Town’s Comprehensive Land Use Plan. Working with a combined steering committee and technical advisory team that included neighboring communities and regional partners, this project was focused on capitalizing on future growth in a manner that prioritized growth potential in areas that are or will be served by transportation and utility infrastructure.

The process included centralized public engagement through community workshops and online surveys as well as decentralized efforts to take “planning to the people” through public intercept events. The draft plan includes a new Growth Management Framework that provides guidance for annexation and utility extensions and land use and design of character areas. It also includes plans for 11 Strategic Transportation Corridors that identify desired improvements to maximize multi-modal opportunities and create greater internal and regional connections. The big ideas for the plan include recommendations for a new greenway system, improvements to the future land use classifications to better align with zoning and support development of 21st century places, providing explicit guidance on Street Typologies and multimodal designs of streets, and advancing efforts to support workforce housing. The OneMooresville Comprehensive Plan was adopted in September 2019.