Photo used under a Creative Commons license with Awiseman.

Are you ready for some consideration of proposed amendments to the Comprehensive Plan of the National Capital? Well, I sure hope the Council was. This afternoon, the Council’s Committee of the Whole considered amendments to the Comprehensive Plan that have been submitted over the past fiscal year — and those amendments number in the hundreds.

So what is the Comprehensive Plan? Well, in short, it’s the federally-mandated, 20-year blueprint for the city, handled by the D.C. Office of Planning, which establishes a vision for most everything that goes on here: housing, economic development, neighborhood planning, transportation — look, if you can name something that affects the governance of the District, chances are its got a section about it in the Comprehensive Plan. The last major revision of the Plan took place in 2006, but every year, the District accepts proposals for amendments from anyone who wants to add something in. As you can imagine, the number of submissions can get a little high; basically, anytime you’ve ever started a sentence with “this neighborhood would be much better with,” that’s something that could conceivably be amended to the Plan.

Of course, revising the Plan is an arduous, lengthy affair. But the Plan is supposed to be a living document, and there are a lot of new policies and circumstances that are introduced every year which might be cause for making slight tweaks to the document. So many, in fact, that between the first public meetings on the amendment process to the deadline for proposals, the Office of Planning received 300 ideas for amendments and 225 official proposals. A group of government officials, including representatives from the District Department of the Environment, the District Department of Transportation, the Department of Housing and Community Development, the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) met and sifted through the amendments (striking down those “beyond the scope of the amendment process,” so those of you asking for D.C. to buy us all jet packs, prepare to be disappointed.)