Norco City Hall

At their regular meeting on June 7, the Norco City Council approved a contract to retain a multidisciplinary consultant team led by Sargent Town Planning to help the City prepare the first comprehensive update its General Plan since the 1990s.  Since that time, various Elements of the General Pla

n have been updated one at a time, and the City Council determined that it is now time to update them all in a coordinated and integrated fashion, including the recently adopted Housing Element that will help to inform updates to all the other elements. To complete this ambitious program, the STP Team includes several other consulting firms, including specialists in community engagement, traffic and mobility planning, economic development, hazard mitigation, and environmental planning and analysis.  The entire STP team is honored to be given this opportunity to collaborate with the City and community of Norco to prepare a visionary and practical plan that will help ensure that as Norco's population and economy grow and flourish in the coming decades, its essential semi-rural "Horsetown USA" character and lifestyle are preserved and enhanced. 

STP Pasadena Studio

After 13 years in Downtown Los Angeles, we have moved our main studio to Old Town Pasadena.  In LA we leased a floor of a historic office building which we shared with three other firms, but as everyone's post-pandemic office needs evolved we concluded that a smaller space just for our company wo

uld be best.  The new address is 87 East Green Street, Suite 205, Pasadena, CA 91105, at the corner of Raymond and Green in the heart of Old Town.  We are one block off Arroyo Parkway and one block off Colorado Boulevard - both of which were Historic Route 66 - and midway between the Del Mar and Memorial Park stations on the Metro L Line, formerly Gold Line.  We are within easy walking distance of many restaurants and shops and biking distance to a number of our staff's homes.  We also now have satellite offices in the Bay Area and Sacramento Area to better serve our Northern California clients.

Redhill Gateway from Upland on Historic Rte 66

On Tuesday, April 4, at the 23rd National Planning Conference in Philadelphia, the Sustainable Communities Division of the American Planning Association announced the six winners of the 10th annual awards for excellence in sustainability.

These awards honor projects, plans, policies, individuals and organizations whose work is dedicated to supporting sustainable communities, and represent extraordinary achievements in six sustainable planning categories.  The Rancho Cucamonga General Plan and Climate Action Plan received the Community-wide Award, having previously received awards from the Inland Empire and California Chapters of the APA.  As part of a large, multi-discipinary team of City staff and consulting professionals, Sargent Town Planning was a principal author of the Vision Volume, Built Environment Volume, and the Placemaking Toolkit in the Implementation Strategy Volume.  The Plan lays out a series of strategies to chart a path toward building a 21st century world-class community that is grounded in the City Council's foundational core values of health, equity, and stewardship. The intent of the Plan is to enhance the community with a wide variety of housing, recreation, arts and culture, entertainment, and employment opportunities that are well-connected and accessible to everyone, and to preserve the character, history, and quality of life that continue to make Rancho Cucamonga a special place to live.

Watsonville City Hall

At their regular meeting on November 15 , the Watsonville City Council selected a multi-discplinary consultant team led by Sargent Town Planning to prepare the first comprehensive update to the City's General Plan since the 2005 General Plan was prepared in 1993.  Since that time, the City has un

dertaken many planning studies, including a draft General Plan Update approximately 15 years ago that was never adopted due to a number of technical and legal challenges.  The new 2050 General Plan will be based on that good previous work, on a robust, inclusive community engagement process, and on extensive community design visioning and technical analysis and will bring the City's General Plan into compliance with current State law and 21st century best practices.  Under a separate contract, the City has retained Kimley-Horn Associates to update the Housing Element of the General Plan, and STP will work collaboratively with that team to ensure good coordination among all Elements of the updated General Plan.  Over the past several years - as the urban design lead for the Watsonville Downtown Specific Plan team - STP had the pleasure of getting to know and admire the community.  The entire STP team is honored and pleased to be given this opportunity to continue working collaboratively with the City and community of Watsonville to prepare a visionary and practical plan to guide Watsonville's growth and change over the coming decades. 

We are very pleased to announce that Gregory Tung is joining Sargent Town Planning as an Associate Principal and core member of our senior management team.

 Greg is an urban designer with over 35 years’ experience working with cities throughout California and the West to craft successful community-based revitalization strategies, and to implement high-quality, human-scale placemaking at all scales.  He will work closely with our principals and senior associates to guide and direct the firm’s work, contributing his wide experience to our constant innovation in design and documentation techniques and processes, coordinating the work of our in-house and consultant teams, and managing selected projects.  Greg and our senior principal David Sargent will lead our recently re-established Bay Area/Sacramento Area branch operation to better serve our northern California clients. 

As a principal with San Francisco-based Freedman Tung & Bottomley – later Freedman Tung & Sasaki – since 1986 Greg’s work has spanned master plans and specific plans for downtowns, arterial corridors, infill neighborhoods, and workplace and transit-oriented districts.  In this work Greg has designed many distinctive, human-scale streets and other public spaces, accented by gateways, landmarks, landscape, and furnishings.  He has prepared development standards and design guidelines to predictably implement the community’s vision, and has provided ongoing infrastructure implementation support, and design review and training services for development project review.

Greg’s work and collaborations have significantly contributed to successful downtown and corridor revitalization and public realm designs in Mountain View, Redwood City, Oakland, Livermore, Tracy, Lodi, Shafter, Ventura, San Fernando, San Fernando, and Cathedral City in California, and in Bothell, Washington, Phoenix, Arizona, and Ames, Iowa. He has served as a Peer Reviewer for the General Services Administration Design Excellence Program and a resource member for four sessions of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design.  He has been a speaker at the Congress for the New Urbanism, American Planning Association, and U.C. Berkeley College of Environmental Design.

Blvd 111 Strategies

At their meeting on September 21, the Indio City Council unanimously adopted the new Highway 111 Corridor Specific Plan, prepared by a multi-disciplinary team led by Bay Area Economics and Sargent Town Planning.

 The Corridor Plan is based on the community’s vision to transform old Highway 111 to “Boulevard 111”, and evolve the highway strip development and large tracts of vacant land flanking it into a significant City Center Corridor of new, walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use community activity centers, and employment districts.  That overall vision had been defined by the recently adopted General Plan Update and Downtown Specific Plan, for both of which Sargent Town Planning led the urban design vision work in collaboration with City staff, the community, and others. The Plan includes a detailed vision for each segment and sub-area of the 4-mile Corridor, form-based development standards for private development and public improvements.  It also includes a robust, market-calibrated implementation plan for attracting new private investment, and incentivizing funding of public improvements, to systematically generate significant amounts of new housing, new employment, and new commercial and civic amenities for the community, in the form of complete, walkable places of long-term value.

Foothill Blvd (Historic Route 66) as Transit Boulevard

At their meeting on December 15, the Rancho Cucamonga City Council unanimously and enthusiastically adopted PlanRC, a comprehensive update of the City’s General Plan.  The Plan – based on extensive community engagement and outreach –  envisions and provides policies.

implementation strategies and procedures for transforming a number of major street corridors from suburban arterial thoroughfares to multi-modal city center boulevards that balance accommodation of vehicular traffic with new transit facilities and high-quality sidewalks and bikeways.  Along these boulevards, new mixed-use and residential development will be mixed with and interconnected with existing retail and commercial facilities to form mixed-use community activity centers and infill neighborhoods that provide residents, workers and shoppers with robust and equitable access to goods, services, jobs and a wide array of housing choices.  This was in response to the clear community request for "more nice places to go, and more ways to get there." The Plan also prioritizes the conservation of existing neighborhoods and natural open spaces, and the creation of new employment districts that offer residents expanded local job opportunities.  Sargent Town Planning was a core member of the large team of City staff and consulting firms who worked together with the community over nearly two years to craft PlanRC.  STP is providing ongoing General Plan implementation services to the City.

"Real Downtown" as requested by the community

At their regular meeting on November 10, the Rancho Cucamonga Commission unanimously and enthusiastically recommended that the City Council approve the multi-volume General Plan Update, prepared by City staff with support from a large team of consulting firms. 

The Plan was prepared over the course of just under 2 years, including an extensive PlanRC online public engagement process during most of 2020, followed by drafting of the Plan documents and further public review and input in 2021.  In close collaboration with City staff and other consulting team members, Sargent Town Planning led the conceptual urban planning and design work for the Plan Update and was a principal author of the Vision, Built Environment, and Implementation volumes of the Plan. General Plan Update | City of Rancho Cucamonga (cityofrc.us) The City Council will consider adoption of the Plan at their meeting on December 15.