City of Chiloquin Comprehensive Plan Update

This work was done as part of the Spring 2025 UVA MUEP Capstone Course.

The City of Chiloquin is a small rural town in southern Oregon, located in Klamath County, nestled where the Sprague and Williamson Rivers meet. It is a small rural town with a population of just under 800, the members of whom come together in a community with a rich and complex history.

Oregon has a statewide planning program which requires all counties and incorporated municipalities to have a comprehensive plan, which is to be built on a set of 19 statewide planning goals that are to be implemented as applicable on the local level. 14 of these 19 goals are applicable to the City of Chiloquin.

The most recent Comprehensive Plan for the City of Chiloquin was completed 45 years ago in 1980. Still, some of the issues identified in the plan still remain present in the community. In the nearly half a century since this plan was adopted, funding and facilitation presented significant barriers towards implementing the policies and strategies outlined in the 1980 Comprehensive Plan. An updated comprehensive plan would go a long way towards supporting the incredible work and ongoing city planning efforts in Chiloquin by aligning all ongoing efforts into one cohesive narrative and vision, captured in an official policy document. Such a document would guide future efforts and help Chiloquin residents to better see their community and envision their long-term thriving within it.

The capstone course runs for one semester, or approximately 3.5 months. The typical comprehensive plan process might take around 18 months, with extensive community engagement and participation throughout. Because of our shortened timeline and lack of ability to directly engage the Chiloquin public, the document our group produced is intended to be a preliminary research document, which we hope provides an understandable, useful, and actionable basis for an actual comprehensive plan udpate. Our intended audience for the document is city officials in Chiloquin who would likely be the ones to take a comprehensive plan update process forward. Over the course of the semester, we conducted two hour-long virtual meetings with Robert Cowie, a Chiloquin City Councilmember and Executive Director of local non-profit Chiloquin Visions in Progress, and Cathy Stuhr, the City Project Manager of Chiloquin, who both provided valuable insight and guidance for our work.

For this report, I contributed the primary background research for 7 of the 14 state planning goals. My fellow group members contributed the primary background research for the 7 remaining sections. Our capstone instructor, Will Cockrell, contributed the Scope of Work section. I wrote, edited, formatted, and laid out all sections of the document. The full pdf can be found here.

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