Comprehensive and Small Area Plans
Transportation Planning
Strategic Planning
Environmental Planning

Welcome

Listen:  Planning Director's Podcast with the National Town Builders Association on Growth and Development in Butner

News: Butner Gateways Ordinance Changes

​Umstead / Town Center Small Area Plan
To view the changes, click here: Ordinance Changes - see parts in Red Text....these are the changes and additions to the existing Land Development Ordinance for these areas:
1 East Butner Gateway
2. Butner Cove Gateway
3. Butner Cove Village
A presentation addressing the changes is located here:​ click here.
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The map shown below shows the areas where the zoning applies.
Documents Associated with the Town Center and Umstead Project Areas
Project Planning Visuals
Additional information on Town Center / Umstead

Imagine Butner in 2040 -
Ongoing Developments

​​Strategic Plan - the Comprehensive Plan is a long-range vision that helps us to articulate our vision and aspirations for the Town in the future.  A strategic plan brings us down closer to Earth and is used to layout the steps to achieving our goals and objectives and visions, within the practical analysis of our existing staff and revenue resources.  ​
BUTNER LONG-RANGE COMPREHENSIVE PLAN
Approved Plan Components Comprehensive Plan Background Information

Butner Town Planning Customer and Resident Information

  • Planning And Zoning Applications, Guidelines, Instructions, Etc. (Coming Soon)
  • Stormwater ​Applications, Guidelines, Instructions, Etc. (Coming Soon)
  • Planning Studies including Comprehensive Plan 
  • Maps and Data (Coming Soon)
“If you don’t know where you are going, you could wind up someplace else.”
Yogi Berra

Butner 2040:  Why Having a Vision Matters

Picture
Peering into the future is a favorite exercise for planners and designers. From the Chicago 1893 Columbian Exhibition to New York City’s two Worlds Fairs (1939 and 1965) and beyond, the future was optimistic and filled with cool technology and architecture.  What do we think the future will look like 20 years or so from now? And what will Butner be like in 2040?  The quality of our Town's future depends on the choices we make today.  The foundation of the Imagine Butner 2040 Comprehensive Plan is the Mapping and Suitability Analysis which is a GIS-based build-out model that estimates potential future growth in the Butner. ​

What is a Comprehensive Plan?

Imagine Butner 2040 is the town's comprehensive look at itself.  Required by state statute, a Comprehensive Plan is fiscally neutral (basically as fancy way of saying the Plan requires no commitment of funds to implement any part of the Plan).

A Comprehensive plan, may also be known as a general plan, master plan or land-use plan, is a document designed to guide the future actions of a community. It presents a vision for the future, with long-range goals and objectives for all activities that affect the local government. This includes guidance on how to make decisions on public and private land development proposals, the expenditure of public funds, availability of tax policy (tax incentives), cooperative efforts and issues of pressing concern, such as farmland preservation or the rehabilitation of older neighborhoods areas. Most plans are written to provide direction for future activities over a 20-year period after plan adoption. However, plans should receive a considered review and possible update every ten years.  In 2009, Butner completed its first Comprehensive Plan.  A copy of that plan, the 2020 Butner Comprehensive Plan may be found here.

A community comprehensive plan serves the following functions:
  • The plan provides continuity. The plan provides continuity across time, and gives successive public bodies a common framework for addressing land-use issues.
  • It is the means by which a community can balance competing private interests. John Public may want to store oil drums on his property. Jane Citizen, his neighbor, would like to open a restaurant on her property. Planning seeks to strike a balance among the many competing demands on land by creating development patterns that are orderly and rational, provide the greatest benefits for individuals and the community as a whole and avoid nuisance conflicts between land uses.
  • It is the means by which a community can protect public investments. Planning is the means by which a community avoids digging up last year’s new road to lay this year’s new sewer pipe. Well-planned, orderly and phased development patterns are also less expensive for a community to provide with public services than low-density, scattered development.
  • It allows communities to plan development in a way that protects valued resources. Planning can identify environmental features like wetlands, agricultural lands, woods and steep slopes and suggest strategies for preserving those resources from destruction or degradation by inappropriate development.
  • It provides guidance for shaping the appearance of the community. A plan can set forth policies that foster a distinctive sense of place.
  • It promotes economic development. The plan contains valuable information that drives the location decisions of prospective firms.
  • It provides justification for decisions. Plans provide a factual and objective basis to support zoning decisions and can be used by communities to defend their decisions if challenged in court.
  • Through public dialogue, citizens express a collective vision for the future. Last, but certainly not least, the planning process provides citizens an opportunity to brainstorm, debate and discuss the future of their community. A plan developed through a robust public input process enjoys strong community support. Subsequent decisions that are consistent with the plan’s policies are less likely to become embroiled in public controversy.​
Historically, visions and master plans may begin as two-dimensional drawings, but they have had little to do with specific architectural styles, land uses, or regulations.  These visions ultimately succeed because they recognize the three-dimensional wholeness of a community and the ways the community functions.  Often overlooked and frequently disregarded outright, it is the imperative of a community's leaders and planners to consider the three-dimensional framework of a town.  If this is done, then the community grows up and becomes timeless.  

Great towns were not expensive to build; they grew not in one fell swoop but over time.   They incorporate the nature environment into the built environment.  Our community's growth can be directly attributed to its proximity to the economic engine of Durham, Raleigh, Research Triangle, and other Triangle assets like North Carolina State University, Duke University and the University of North Carolina.

What are the elements then that come together to make a three-dimensional, great town?  First, the seed, or vision must be planted and spring to life in the minds and hearts of citizens.  Next, the Town must cultivate an environment for the healthy growth of this entity; it must lay the foundation upon which the private sector can contribute to the healthy development of the Town.
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Vision Ingredients Based in Reality...Building a road map for the future we have to consider:
  1. Population growth and changing demographics (i.e. aging population)
  2. Transportation (i.e. changing technologies, funding limitations, fuel)
  3. Future transportation plans (i.e. NC Department of Transportation 2040 Plan)
  4. Development trends (i.e. neo-traditional and mixed-use developments)
  5. Regional cooperation and public finance (i.e. Butner has to compete for funds and is compelled to plan in collaboratively with her neighbors)
  6. Federal and state regulations (i.e. changes to regulations related to air and water quality affect funding)
  7. Utilities and public services (where will these be available; should they be available everywhere?)
  8. Natural features and natural resources (i.e. preservation of significant, sensitive, and threatened natural systems we want to retain)
  9. What You Told Us (in informal interviews and conversations)
  10. Visual preference survey 
  11. Public workshops 
The Vision Helped Us Create Long-Range and Capital Plans:
  1. Comprehensive and Small Area Plans
  2. Open Space, Parks, and Greenway Plans
  3. Transportation Plans for Roads, Bikes, and Pedestrians
  4. Utilities Master Plans
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
Winston Churchill

Plans Impacting Butner's Long-Range Planning
Plans from surrounding jurisdictions are especially important to our future.  Links to these are located below.  One, the NCDOT Plans, impact funding for new transportation infrastructure (hint, the future is not bright); while the other, Granville County's long-range plan "Comprehensive Plan" lets us know where the County will be looking to encourage development, investment in open space, etc..  Since we are practically surrounded by Granville County land, what they imagine their future to be is something about which we need to be aware.  Creedmoor's Comprehensive Plan is important for the same reasons, as is Stem's and Durham County.  To learn more, click on the links below:
​NC Department of Transportation 2040 Plans
Granville County Comprehensive Plan
Creedmoor Comprehensive Plan
Durham Comprehensive Plan
Stem Comprehensive Plan (in progress)

A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.
James Howard Kunstler

2040 Comprehensive Plan Pages

Planning and Zoning Department Pages

VISITORS

Location

Butner Planning Department
Attn.:  Michael Ciriello, AICP, Planning Director
415 Central Avenue, PO Box 270
​Butner, North Carolina 27509