PLUS Revisions

Wednesday morning March 10th, Connie Holland Director, Office of State Planning Coordination and Cleon Cauley, Deputy Legal Counsel to Governor Markell hosted an information and question & answer session on the recent Preliminary Land Use Service (PLUS) revisions.

Mark Parker, P.E., Principal and Melissa Koenig, P.E., Associate of Landmark/JCM attended this session held in Dover at the Department of Agriculture’s main office. Connie and Cleon provided an upbeat presentation providing information on the changes to the PLUS application and review process.

The main points were:

1. The Office of State Planning and Coordination (OSPC) now reports directly to the Office of the Governor;

2. Applications are still due on the first of every month to be considered for that month’s meeting. If the first falls on a weekend, then the first working day following is the deadline. All PLUS meetings are still on the last Wednesday of the month. If there are too many applications to be heard in one day, the following Wednesday will be utilized as well;

3. The application is scheduled for some streamlining and should be online soon. In the meantime, all of the forms, links, etc. can be found here:
http://stateplanning.delaware.gov/plus/plus.shtml#forms

4. Applicants are encouraged to use the PLUS process at any point in their development process to get comments and recommendations;

5. All comment letters from PLUS will now separate code related comments from recommendations provided by the PLUS agencies, allowing for more concise responses from the consultant. Repetitive comments will be eliminated through an internal review prior to release of the comment letter; and,

6. PLUS promises to bring to the table the decision makers from the various PLUS agencies. They expect the same from the developer and engineer. This common courtesy from both sides is why the PLUS process was so successful at its inception. Bringing together those who can and should make decisions will eliminate some of the iterations in the process.

Landmark/JCM continues to watch these changes and how they affect your land development endeavors. Please contact us with any questions or to meet with us for your next successful project.