Rockville 2040 Comprehensive Plan

Rockville 2040 Comprehensive Plan Adopted

On August 2, 2021, the Mayor and Council adopted an update to the city's comprehensive plan that establishes new, and retains many existing, policies to guide the city's growth, development, and quality of life over the next twenty years, including in the areas of land use, transportation, housing, recreation and parks, the environment, and historic preservation, among other topics.

The adopted Comprehensive Plan is comprised of 10 citywide topical Elements and 17 neighborhood-scale Planning Areas. Both sections derive from feedback gathered throughout the Rockville 2040 process, which included numerous listening sessions, citywide forums, open houses and other meetings, as well as analysis and discussion by staff and the Planning Commission.

View the Adopted Comprehensive Plan

The City of Rockville Comprehensive Plan describes the broad vision for the city’s future. It is the core philosophy that guides development, conservation, and capital improvement projects to improve the quality of life in the Rockville community. During the life of the plan’s 20-year time frame, decisions are made on land use issues and budget priorities and these decisions are guided by the extent to which they correspond with the plan. The current plan was adopted in 2021 to replace the previous citywide plan adopted in 2002 and many of its subsequent amendments.

View the Comprehensive Plan*

*Note: This document link is for a single-page, 11"x11" format of the complete Comprehensive Plan that is best for online viewing. If you have difficulty downloading the large file size (63 MB), click here to view individual sections and printable page formats of the plan.

Comprehensive Plan Annual Reports

To provide transparency to the Rockville community, the Comprehensive Planning Division issues annual reports to demonstrate progress made towards implementing the Rockville 2040 recommended actions. The first annual report, which chronicles progress from plan implementation in August 2021 through to the end of Fiscal Year 2023, can now be viewed below. CPDS plans to issue an Annual Report aligned with the end of each fiscal year moving forward. As time passes, this page will be the repository for all annual reports, allowing members of the community to track progress over time.

FY2023 Annual Report

What is the Comprehensive Plan?

Rockville’s Comprehensive Plan is the citywide guiding policy document that sets the vision and goals for the future of the city with practical policies and actions that will get us there. The Comprehensive Plan, includes recommended policies and action among 10 elements, or chapters, focused on:

Land Use and Urban Design
Transportation
Recreation and Parks
Community Facilities
Environment
Water Resources
Economic Development
Housing
Historic Preservation
Municipal Growth

In addition to these ten policy elements, the Plan includes a focus on policies and projects particular to each of the city’s 17 neighborhood-scale planning areas, as they are defined in the Comprehensive Plan.

About the Rockville 2040 Process

The community engagement effort to update the city's Comprehensive Plan, Rockville 2040, engaged the Rockville community in a discussion about the current state of the city and desired future on critical planning issues. The public outreach component included 35 listening sessions, four citywide forums, and three open houses. In addition, planning staff met with a wide variety of stakeholders and neighborhood groups to get feedback on the Plan as it was being drafted. The public process and its resulting input was summarized and presented to the Planning Commission along with a draft of the Comprehensive Plan in two phases, the Elements section in 2019 and the Planning Areas section in 2020. For each section, the Planning Commission held a series of public hearings and work sessions to consider edits to the draft Plan and recommended a complete revised version to the Mayor and Council in early 2021. After holding their own series of public hearings and work sessions and making further revisions to the draft Plan, the Mayor and Council adopted the Comprehensive Plan at their meeting on August 2, 2021.

Review Background Trends Reports Prepared for the Comprehensive Plan Update

To understand conditions in the city, city departments prepared a scan of key topics through several trend reports that informed the Comprehensive Plan Update. The following reports have been completed:

Review Previous Meetings, Documents, and Testimony

Results from the Planning Commission and Mayor and Council's work to prepare, receive comments on, and revise the Comprehensive Plan prior to its adoption can be found on the Community Meeting Results page. This page provides videos, materials and results from past meetings, citywide forums and listening sessions.

Rockville 2040 Comprehensive Plan