Coordinate. Advocate. Implement. | Issue 2 of From the Committee Table🏗️

When I wrote the first installment of this series in February, I had just been appointed to the CPIC and made a simple promise: I’d report back once the committee got moving.

We’ve had two meetings now. The work has started. Here’s what’s happening — and why it matters for Manheim Township.

A quick orientation for new readers.

Rooted & Renewing 2035 is Manheim Township’s comprehensive plan — a detailed, community-developed blueprint for how the Township wants to grow and invest over the next decade. It covers housing, transportation, land use, historic preservation, agriculture, fiscal sustainability, and more. The Township adopted it in September 2025.

Adopting a plan is the easy part. Implementing one is where most communities struggle.

The Comprehensive Plan Implementation Committee (CPIC) exists specifically to prevent that gap. Its charge — written into the plan itself — is to coordinate and advocate for implementation across all of the plan’s goals and action strategies. That means working with Township staff, other advisory committees, elected officials, and the public to make sure Rooted & Renewing doesn’t sit on a shelf.

That’s what we’re trying to do. These posts are one part of how we’re doing it.

The committee held its first meeting on March 25th. Township staff gave the committee a thorough orientation to Rooted & Renewing 2035 and what it asks of us. The Township’s Board of Commissioners made clear they see this work as consequential.

What struck me was how quickly the conversation got substantive.

Two instincts surfaced early that I think will define how this committee operates. The first: “coordinate and advocate” isn’t just procedural language. Several members pushed on what it means in practice — and the consensus was that the committee needs to be visible and active in the community, not just productive in a conference room. Public engagement is part of the job.

The second instinct: structural questions matter. How does the CPIC interact with other advisory committees — the Zoning Ordinance Rewrite Committee, the Fiscal Sustainability Committee, and the Connections Committee? How does information flow between them? How does the annual Work Plan connect to the Township’s actual budget? These aren’t glamorous questions. But they’re the ones that determine whether a committee functions or just meets.

Both of those instincts are exactly right. I’m glad they surfaced in the first meeting.

Much of Meeting One focused on the draft 2026 Work Plan, and specifically on housing, which Township staff identified as the area where implementation has the most significant gaps.

The numbers that came up weren’t abstract. Entry-level ownership options in the Township are starting well above half a million dollars. Rental costs for even modest units are out of reach for teachers, first responders, and young people trying to stay in the community where they grew up. The market is producing housing — just not the kind most residents can afford.

Two dynamics help explain how the Township got here. First, Manheim Township is one of the most desirable places to live in Lancaster County. That desirability drives prices. Success, in this sense, has costs. Second, the Township has a significant jobs-housing mismatch — more people commute in to work than residents commute out. That imbalance pressures both the housing market and the road network. Refer to Appendix H - Housing Analysis, Page 261 in the Com Plan.

The question of density came up directly — and yes, it’s politically sensitive. But the committee engaged with it honestly, including acknowledging that well-designed higher-density development often looks nothing like what residents fear when they hear the word. The committee agreed that an early priority should be bringing outside expertise to the table: affordable housing developers, county housing organizations, and economic development partners who can speak to what’s actually possible and what barriers stand in the way.

That kind of informed, structured conversation is exactly what the committee should be facilitating.

One of the most clarifying moments in Meeting One was taking an honest stock of where implementation stands.

The good news: several significant efforts are already underway. The Zoning Ordinance Rewrite is in progress. The Fiscal Sustainability Committee is developing a multi-year financial management plan that will include a housing needs assessment. An Active Transportation Plan RFP is coming later this summer.

A Comprehensive Plan Implementation Dashboard: The comprehensive plan’s public-facing implementation dashboard is now live on the Township’s website. — a dynamic, publicly accessible tool that tracks progress on Rooted & Renewing 2035 across all goal areas. The Future Character Area Map is published alongside it. Both support transparency and resident engagement.

That’s real progress, and it’s worth saying so publicly.

The gap: housing and redevelopment are the areas where nothing meaningful is yet moving, which is why the staff’s draft Work Plan focused there. The CPIC’s job in its first annual Work Plan is to help close those gaps while staying connected to the full breadth of the plan.

We discussed that the annual Work Plan needs to be explicitly tied to the Township’s budget cycle. A plan that can’t tell you how implementation gets funded is more aspiration than roadmap. That connection needs to be built in from the start, hence the work of the Fiscal Sustainability Committee is so critical.

The April 22nd meeting had one central objective: discussion of the draft 2026 Work Plan — translating a month of conversation into something actionable.

In advance of that meeting, I circulated a memo to fellow committee members with a few observations. The staff’s drafting exercise was a useful starting point, but it addressed roughly half of the eight action strategies identified in Rooted & Renewing 2035. Two were absent: the strategy for coordinating with PennDOT and the Lancaster County MPO on major corridor congestion and traffic safety — for which the CPIC is specifically named as a lead partner — and the historic preservation strategy, which includes a short-term call to hire a consultant to update the Township’s historic resource survey.

Three of the five topics in the staff exercise were housing-related. Housing deserves serious attention — the data demands it. But the first Work Plan sets a tone for how the committee understands its full mandate. Transportation and historic preservation are part of that mandate, too.

Perhaps use Table 5 Implementation Table ( Page 136-143) — the full action strategy matrix in Rooted & Renewing 2035 — as the organizing backbone of the Work Plan. That approach is consistent with what staff described as the goal of this first plan, and it makes the committee’s work legible to elected officials and residents alike.

The April 22nd meeting opened with some good organizational news: the committee now has a Chair and Vice Chair, appointed by the Board of Commissioners. Leadership structure matters.

The bulk of the meeting focused on housing — and it got complicated in productive ways.

The committee is waiting on a housing needs study to be conducted by a firm already selected through a competitive process. The study will provide hard data on housing supply, demand, demographics, and market conditions in the Township — exactly the kind of foundation the committee needs before recommending major policy steps. The study is funded in part by a state grant that has been delayed by state budget issues. There is no confirmed start date. Once the grant arrives, the study could take six months to a year to complete.

That timeline creates a real tension. Zoning changes — which are central to most long-term housing solutions — are future-focused by definition. But residents are struggling with housing costs right now. The committee wrestled openly with that gap: what can be done in the short term, while the long-term work catches up?

The answer the committee landed on was learning before acting. Rather than forming new subcommittees or recommending policy changes before the data exists to support them, the committee voted to invite housing experts — including affordable housing developers and county housing organizations — to the May 27th meeting. The goal is to understand what’s actually happening in the Lancaster County housing market, what barriers developers face in building in Manheim Township, and what other communities have done that might serve as a model.

That instinct is right. The Fairfax, Virginia, Affordable Housing Strategic Plan came up as a reference point — a community-specific document built on real data, with concrete recommendations that led to actual zoning changes. That’s the kind of output the committee should be working toward.

Transportation also emerged as a second major focus area. Road safety and congestion rank among the top concerns in public feedback on the comprehensive plan, and the CPIC is specifically named as a lead partner on the corridor strategy involving PennDOT and the Lancaster County MPO. The committee acknowledged that residents would rightly wonder why transportation action items show no movement on the implementation dashboard year after year. The committee confirmed that the 2026 Work Plan will address both housing and transportation — not one at the expense of the other.

By the end of the meeting, the shape of the Work Plan had become clearer: a near-term focus on learning and expert engagement on housing, paired with active coordination on transportation.

Participating is different from observing. I knew that going in.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was how much of the early work is definitional — not just what to do, but how to think about the committee’s role. Tracking body? Advocacy body? Convener? The answer seems to be all three, depending on the issue. Working through that ambiguity with a group of people who bring genuinely different backgrounds and perspectives is harder than it sounds, but it is needed and interesting.

What I’m watching: whether the committee develops the discipline to stay connected to the full breadth of Rooted & Renewing 2035, rather than gravitating toward whatever feels most urgent. Housing matters. So does historic preservation. So does transportation. So does agriculture.

The May 27th Committee meeting will be housing expert discussion will be the most substantive meeting yet — the first time the committee hears directly from people working on affordable housing in Lancaster County. That conversation should sharpen both the committee’s understanding of what’s possible and its sense of what the Work Plan needs to say.

By the next installment of this series, the committee hopes to have a finalized 2026 Work Plan in hand. That document will be the clearest signal yet of what the CPIC intends to prioritize and how seriously it’s taking the full scope of Rooted & Renewing 2035.

Stay tuned. And if you’re a Manheim Township resident, this committee’s work affects your community. Meetings are open to the public. You can attend. You can weigh in. That’s the point.