How GIS Powers All In Allen, a Multijurisdictional Collaboration

Allen County and the City of Fort Wayne have a unique relationship, offering residents and visitors the best of two worlds: a lively urban environment and a quintessential agricultural setting. The community is one of the fastest growing in Indiana, with major employers, nationally recognized schools and institutions, and world-class hospitals. Situated on the Maumee, St. Marys, and St. Joseph Rivers, Fort Wayne truly embodies a big city with a small-town feel.

Despite the typical challenges that city and county governments across the United States face, planners from the City of Fort Wayne and Allen County, Indiana, came together to find an innovative solution to rapid population growth and unexpected land annexation. By working together and leveraging ArcGIS technologies, they developed a data-driven joint comprehensive plan that encompasses the entire county and several of its municipalities, including Fort Wayne. The project’s success has brought it recognition as an award-winning plan that can serve as a model of collaboration for others.

All In Allen is the second joint comprehensive planning effort between Fort Wayne and Allen County. The first joint plan, Plan-it Allen!, was initiated in 2003 without the use of advanced geographic information system (GIS) tools. At the time, the city and county’s comprehensive plans were over 20 years old and outdated for the region’s needs and opportunities. Constant annexation of suburban developments had caused conflicting plans and ordinance standards, leading to project delays, duplicated efforts from the various planning teams, and other challenges.

In response, city and county leaders created a joint plan to standardize land-use policies. Adopted in 2007, Plan-it Allen! led to the merger of the city and county land-use management departments and the alignment of zoning ordinances. This reduced conflicts between jurisdictions and saved time and money. The plan prioritized regional impact assessments, but required manual analysis due to the lack of GIS.

More than 10 years after the plan’s adoption, both Fort Wayne and Allen County are among the fastest-growing areas in Indiana. The county has experienced 13 percent population growth, outpacing the state’s 10 percent between 2000 and 2018.

This growth has resulted in rapid community change. A significant increase in Hispanic and Burmese populations, combined with other demographic changes and market factors, has resulted in higher demand for mixed-use and multifamily housing. Consequently, the city and county hired Houseal Lavigne, a leading planning firm and Esri partner, to create an up-to-date plan using GIS to address evolving demographics and market trends. 

Community feedback was crucial to the development of All In Allen. Typically, a planning team gathers information through methods like conducting surveys, town halls, and in-person meetings. But the All In Allen project started during the COVID-19 pandemic, which made in-person meetings impossible. The city and county’s planning team had to come up with innovative strategies to engage the public virtually. Collaborating with Houseal Lavigne, the team created an engagement process that utilized GIS. This ensured that community members could actively voice their opinions and participate in shaping the community’s future.

At the start of the project, the planning team used ArcGIS Hub to create a one-stop resource for all comprehensive plan-related activities. This hub site provided access to project documents, participation opportunities, event updates, and progress reports.

The hub site was also used to share links to the online community questionnaires, which was created using ArcGIS Survey123 and Houseal Lavigne’s map.social. Survey123 questionnaires were used to get feedback on various topics, such as housing, commercial, and industrial development; parks and recreation; and the community’s strengths and weaknesses. The team used map.social to gather location-based feedback on issues, opportunities, and assets.

To enhance inclusivity, the team analyzed survey responses and participation data spatially by ZIP code in ArcGIS Pro to identify areas with limited engagement. This allowed the team to plan outreach efforts in underrepresented areas.

These outreach efforts resulted in remarkable participation, with more than 3,300 points of interaction in the community. Representatives from over 140 organizations, including neighborhood associations, nonprofit community service providers, and local businesses, were involved. This high level of involvement demonstrated the community’s commitment and active engagement.

“We strived to engage people by meeting them where they were, in a way that was comfortable for them, and it paid off in our engagement level,” said Sherese Fortriede, senior planner from the City of Fort Wayne.

After the feedback was analyzed in a spatial context, a handful of major needs and concerns emerged as priorities. These priorities established the foundation for the vision, goals, and strategies of the comprehensive plan. The key takeaway included these top concerns:

• Access to public transportation
• Maintenance of agricultural land, a major industry in Allen County
• Bike and pedestrian connectivity
• Development of downtown Fort Wayne as a place to visit
• Access to food systems
• Increased housing supply mix
• Plans to capitalize on existing amenities
• Improvement of infrastructure and services
• Cooperation across city lines
• Steps to ensure that the community can support growth
• Support for a diverse community
• Preservation of community identity

Once a foundation for the vision, goals, and strategies of the comprehensive plan was established, Allen County and Fort Wayne’s project team needed to analyze the region at a more granular level. With the help of Houseal Lavigne, the team utilized ArcGIS Online to digitally review all 657 square miles in the county at a parcel level. By examining the parcels individually, the team has a detailed understanding of the land-use patterns, ownership, and characteristics of each parcel.

Analyzing the parcels in GIS helped the team evaluate the community’s land-use plans more precisely for the future. The team reviewed over 350,000 individual parcels in the county, considering key factors like developed versus undeveloped land, its value, farmland productivity, and current use. These factors were chosen based on results from community outreach.

By analyzing the current land use of each parcel, the team members could easily model different growth scenarios. This allowed them to identify where growth and development would benefit the community and what type of land use would be required to facilitate these changes. This led to the creation of two maps: the Future Growth and Development Framework of Allen County and the Future Land Use Map of Allen County.

Both maps, created in ArcGIS Pro, illustrate the plans for Allen County down to the parcel level. They guide future development and inform planners on day-to-day decisions about the community’s physical growth while being easy to update as the community changes.

“It’s really great for us to move forward and take advantage of the amount of detail we now have access to in our database, combined with GIS tools to analyze changes in the community,” said Nathan Law, planner II for the City of Fort Wayne.

Upon completion, draft policies and maps were shared with the public through the hub site. The final draft of the comprehensive plan was presented at multiple community open houses throughout the county before going through the adoption process. After the plan was adopted, the project team published All In Allen as an interactive story using ArcGIS StoryMaps, a web-based application that allows users to share maps in the context of narrative text and multimedia content.

The story provided a summary of essential information, including important dates, the plan’s goal, and final documents. Additionally, it featured interactive maps for stakeholders, such as community members, elected officials, and developers, to engage with the plan. This accessible format offers data that’s more relevant and digestible when compared to the conventional online PDF. Stakeholders can understand the plan’s implications without combing through pages of documents. 

The All In Allen plan was successfully adopted by Allen County, Fort Wayne, and four additional municipalities. In 2024, the Indiana Chapter of the American Planning Association recognized the plan with the year’s Hoosier Planning Award for Outstanding Comprehensive Planning. The award was given in recognition of the comprehensive plan’s innovative outreach strategy and multijurisdictional collaboration.

The success of All In Allen continues to inspire the planners of Allen County and Fort Wayne. Considering the great strides that were made between Plan It Allen! and All In Allen by using advanced GIS tools and applications, the team is even more excited about what can be achieved in the next comprehensive plan. Looking to the future, city and county planners would like to partner with all municipalities in Allen County as part of a future update, and perhaps create a 3D digital twin with ArcGIS Urban to further explore development impacts on the community.