SCC MASTER PLAN 2030

CSGSCC Supporters - IMPORTANT! 

St. Charles County is reviewing it's 2030 Masterplan at this time and requesting input from Citizens like yourself.  Please ensure to contact your county representatives to ensure rural St. Charles County is preserved and development incorporates Smart Growth principles. 

UPDATES AS OF JULY 8th 2026

The Draft 2030 Master Plan prioritizes future development over protecting rural St. Charles County and green spaces. 

Although the plan discusses preserving rural character and natural resources, the plan lacks enforceable standards and instead leaves key decisions—such as zoning, density limits, and development regulations—to a future Unified Development Ordinance (UDO).

A primary concern is the plan's treatment of sanitary sewer expansion. The plan indicates that extending sewer service beyond the Urban Service Area will allow land to shift from Rural Residential to more intensive land-use categories, such as Suburban. Based on history this will encourage higher-density development in currently rural areas.  This Plan calls to open up 30,000 acres surrounding the New Melle area to dense development with this sewer overlay.  This would be catastrophic for the rural County and New Melle area.

The draft also uses broad land-use categories—including Suburban, General Urban, Commerce, and Mixed-Use—without clearly defining important standards such as maximum density, building height, lot sizes, buffering, traffic impacts, or compatibility with neighboring properties. This leaves too much discretion and purposely leaves ambiguity for future officials and developers to leverage to their needs.

Additional concerns focus on the Commerce and General Urban designations, which allow a wide range of residential, commercial, and mixed-use development while providing few objective limits on where or how such development should occur.

While the plan mentions conservation, open space, watersheds, and responsible growth, these notes are not backed by enforceable protections or regulations such as rural preservation standards, density caps, transition zones between development types, or infrastructure requirements that ensure roads, schools, utilities, and emergency services can support new growth.

Overall, this Elhmann 2030 Plan establishes a broad framework to facilitate future higher-density development while ignoring the most significant policy decisions to protect green space, responsible smart growth, and the rural county.

UPDATE FROM THE JULY 17th 2025  County MasterPlan Steering Committee Meeting.

The meeting objective was to present a high-level summary of the current draft update and obtain committee member views and inputs on it. Though this was a public meeting, the public was NOT allowed to ask questions or provide comments.The presentation addressed the draft vision, goals, and key recommendations for the following topics:

• Land Use and Development
• Housing and Neighborhoods
• Business and Commerce
• Transportation
• Community Facilities
• Natural Resources

In addition, the committee discussed "development considerations and constraints" and "land use character areas".

Key takeaways from the meeting were:

1. The update provides very little to no protection for rural county residents from overdevelopment. The only things that appear to limit the county's "the more rooftops, the better" philosophy is topography and flood plains.
2. The updated vision statement includes "St. Charles County will CONTINUE to balance reasonable growth with conservation of its natural ... assets." Continue?
3. A goal for Land Use and Development is to "promote development that create vibrant communities for NEW residents ..." As Councilman Swanson pointed out during the meeting - what about EXISTING residents?
4. County Executive Ehlmann made several "handwringing" statements about the state's annexation statutes and how they are exploited by municipalities. However, he didn't offer any solutions or commitment to work with the legislature to correct the statutes. He simply stated the county must "compete" with the municipalities or, in other words, offer developers better deals, e.g., higher density developments, to avoid more annexations.
5. The steering committee's recommendations for housing and community facilities highlight continued expansion of water and sewer to the west along the I-70 corridor, more mixed-use housing of diverse types, and zoning updates to expand housing accessibility. All of this is likely enabling of higher density housing. A key requirement missing from these recommendations, and the plan as a whole, is the concept of transitional spaces between differing land use areas and housing density/types. Again, the impact of development on existing residents seems to be a non-issue for the committee.
6. A goal for Natural Resources is to "integrate habitat and biodiversity conservation into planning". Really? Like was done when the county ignored MDOC's recommendation for a 100 ft buffer between the "Highlands" development and the Busch MCA?
7. There was a very high-level discussion of the "Land Use Character Areas". These are the categories that align with the county's Unified Development Ordinances to establish zoning districts/types. When discussing the "Suburban" category, the lead project consultant highlighted that category will be made "more flexible". Flexible requirements have been a strong, longtime desire of the developers.
8. At no point in the discussion was the topic of public input, via the online survey and online map, discussed in terms of what was received nor how it was addressed by these updates.

The "future land use map" central to the master plan is still in-work and won't be available for another 2 months. The master plan update effort is planned for completion this fall. 

We'll continue to monitor their efforts and keep you advised. In the meantime, please share your views on future development within SCC with your Planning and Zoning Commission representative and your County Council member. Thank you.