§ 8.1. Introduction

The Capital Improvements Element (CIE) provides guidance and policy related to the provision of public facilities and services. The public facilities and services are defined in this Element as central water and sewer infrastructure, stormwater infrastructure, solid waste and public school infrastructure and services, recreation and transportation related infrastructure. As discussed previously in the Future Land Use Element of this Plan, the provision of infrastructure is one of the most important functions of local government. These facilities and services are a necessary compliment to economic development and the need for these facilities and services at certain levels is based on the general growth of the County. As such, decisions must be made regarding the construction, timing, extension, and increase in capacity of public facilities and services.

This goals, objectives and policies of this element include standards to ensure the availability of public facilities and services including the adequacy of those facilities to meet established acceptable levels of service. The CIE also has a key relationship to the Future Land Use Element, which is mandated and strengthened through the concurrency requirement stipulated in state regulatory policy. This requirement, simply stated, says that certain facilities and services must be available at their adopted service standard concurrent with the impacts of development. This mandates that decisions concerning the planning of capital improvements and land use correlate with each other. The CIE provides for the continued maintenance of the Concurrency Management System (CMS) to ensure that new development will have adequate infrastructure capacity and that the adopted LOS standards will be maintained.