Scenario planning, fiscal impact, and consequence analysis

Learning objectives

• Evaluate plan alternatives against goals using a transparent, weighted method, and compare them with benefit-cost analysis.
• Explain when scenario planning is the right tool and how a scenario process works.
• Describe a buildable lands (land capacity) inventory and how it's compared with projected demand.
• Compare fiscal impact analysis methods, including the per capita multiplier.
• Explain what health impact assessments and other impact assessments add, and when to do them.
• Distinguish funding from financing and match funding sources to the plan's actions.
• Describe how a local greenhouse gas inventory is built, and how pilots and best practices can be tested before full adoption.

Key concepts

Comparing alternatives

Once a planning process has two or more alternatives, it needs a fair way to compare them. Good evaluation is:

• tied to the plan's goals: each goal becomes one or more evaluation criteria;
• measurable where possible: acres of farmland consumed, households within a 10-minute walk of transit, infrastructure cost, vehicle miles traveled;
• transparent about weighting: if housing affordability counts twice as much as traffic delay, say so; and
• honest about uncertainty.

A goals-achievement matrix is a table that rates every alternative against every plan goal, often weighting the goals that matter most, so the alternative that does the most for the goals overall stands out. The method is associated with Morris Hill, who proposed it in 1968. A related classic, Nathaniel Lichfield's planning balance sheet, lists the costs and benefits of each alternative separately for each group affected (residents, businesses, the city, future occupants), so decision-makers can see who gains and who loses rather than only the net total. Multi-criteria analysis is the broader family of methods for this. Sensitivity analysis tests whether the preferred alternative changes when weights or assumptions change. If a small change in weights flips the result, decision-makers should know that.

9 more sections follow in the full lesson.