Planning

Tighe & Bond helps communities guide the future actions of their neighborhoods through community visioning, long-range goals and objectives preparation, and action implementation to provide direction for growth and development, investment priorities for public infrastructure, and resource protection over a 10 to 20-year period.

Our experienced AICP-certified planners have significant experience in conducting virtual and in-person engagement to develop a community’s vision and goals, including development of surveys, use of ArcGIS online decision-support tools, and other virtual engagement platforms. Our landscape architectural staff can provide graphics, renderings, and 3-D imagery to help a community visualize both existing and future development patterns.

Making great places to live, work, and play is achieved through collaborative community and urban design that assesses the existing fabric, engages a broad range of stakeholders, and creates plans that invigorate people’s experience and enhance their surroundings. Whether planning transit-oriented development, infilling a former industrial site or reimagined public spaces, Tighe & Bond’s planners, urban designers, landscape architects, and engineers bring experience planning projects in the private, institutional, and municipal environment to the creation of new places and spaces.

Society places great demands on its open spaces, whether they are parks, streetscapes, campuses, or multi-modal transportation corridors. We want our open spaces to satisfy a wide range of needs—and be designed to facilitate those specific interests or demands—while remaining flexible and programmable destinations able to host a variety of events. These spaces also must reflect the values of our neighborhoods, protect our communities from the effects of rising heat and the impact of increased storm events, and serve both symbolic and interpretive functions by creating a sense of place through the art, environmental graphics, or incorporation of natural landscape features or historic elements.

Great open spaces must not only satisfy complex programmatic demands, they must be imaginatively crafted, well-constructed, safe, and sustainable.

A community’s character and quality of life are highly influenced by its natural environment, including open spaces, viewsheds, farmland, and public parks. Open Space and Recreation Planning sets a blueprint for a community to identify strategies for protecting and preserving the natural environment, assess recreational needs, and develop new recreational facilities to meet the unique needs of the community. Tighe & Bond planners have worked with communities to inventory their protected open spaces, conduct public outreach to identify local needs, and prioritize actions for further protection and enhancement of the critical open space and recreational resources.

With the impact of climate change experienced more readily in our waterfront communities, resiliency is of great concern. However, true resiliency is much more than protection and risk reduction. While these are indeed important concepts that need to be employed as we respond to climate change and sea-level rise, we must also consider resiliency to work in harmony with the environment and communities to create a vibrant, thriving public realm.

Tighe & Bond addresses these challenges through innovative thinking and a collaborative team approach. We bring a depth and diversity of experience in resilient design—ranging from coastal to upland solutions, including flood barriers, living shorelines, and stormwater conveyance and storage systems. We understand both the natural and ecological aspects of these systems, as well as the engineering and design considerations that ultimately create a complex system of adaptations to protect and enhance the community.

As thought leaders in resilient design, we are on the front line, developing adaptive measures that respond to sea-level rise and storm events, integrating solutions to mitigate coastal flooding, and exploring district-wide resiliency solutions to further protect our communities.

Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness

The devastating impact of storm damage on infrastructure experienced in recent years, combined with the promise of stronger, more frequent storms in the future, have resulted in communities placing increased importance on hazard mitigation and resiliency planning and action. Tighe & Bond has the experience and resources to help your community. We can help update existing Hazard Mitigation Plans (HMP) to correlate with the ever-changing environment and community-specific planning needs by identifying funding strategies and pinpointing the projects to implement that will keep systems operating and residents safe.

Our team of certified planners, professional engineers, floodplain managers, and environmental scientists work with municipalities to improve resiliency and break the cycle of repetitive damage and costly repairs of critical infrastructure.

We base our planning on the latest climate science and reasonable expectations for future conditions and incorporate our understanding of evolving resiliency-based regulations, design standards, and permitting requirements. Tighe & Bond has supported many communities with the development of and updates to sustainable HMPs; our municipal HMP work ranges from larger cities to rural towns and the villages within them.

Integrated Water Resource Management Planning (IWRMP) is a holistic analysis of water related infrastructure as it relates to our impact on water resources. IWRMP recognizes water quality needs across wastewater, stormwater, and drinking water infrastructure. By assessing a municipality’s water-related infrastructure needs at one time, a municipality is better able to prioritize water quality improvements across an extended planning period and allows phased implementation based on observed water quality improvements and a community’s financial capacity.

Tighe & Bond has worked with communities of all shapes and sizes on the implementation of the EPA’s General Permit for Stormwater Discharges from Small Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems (MS4s) since its inception in 2003. We are trusted advisors to these communities with our in-depth understanding of the permit and our desire to work with municipalities to better plan for their future.

We support municipal clients in all aspects of the MS4 program, including bylaw development, Illicit Discharge Detection and Elimination Plans, stormwater sampling, employee training, engineering peer review for local departments and boards, and development of Stormwater Utilities.

Carefully crafted zoning and land use regulations allow communities to properly implement the goals and vision of their community-wide plans and create a framework to allow smart growth within a community. Zoning and land use regulation shape the built environment and economic development opportunities within the community. With new and emerging land use trends, such as alternative energy, cannabis, and alternative forms of housing (e.g., accessory dwelling units and tiny homes), it is necessary to educate the community in the new areas of land use while engaging stakeholders to develop community specific zoning and land use regulations. Our team of planners and engineers work closely with municipal officials and their legal counsel to prepare thoughtful land use regulations.