About Envision Burlingame

Envision Burlingame is the community-led planning process that guided development of the Burlingame General Plan. When the City initiated the Envision Burlingame process in 2015, it had not comprehensively updated the General Plan in over 30 years. Envision Burlingame presented the unique opportunity to engage the entire Burlingame community and ask: “How do we want Burlingame to look, function, and feel 25 years from now?” The process had three broad objectives:

1. Develop a vision for Burlingame in the context of an evolving and increasingly dense San Mateo County and Bay Area, with particular attention paid to opportunities for focused change that responds to local and regional needs.

1. Update policies and regulations to ensure they address all applicable regional, State, and federal requirements. 

1. Create an updated and digital General Plan that is easily accessed, understood, and applied by residents, property and business owners, and decision makers.

Envision Burlingame was a robust community-driven process that included multiple community workshops and surveys, a Community Advisory Committee (CAC) that met 18 times over the three-plus-year process, and extensive input from the Burlingame Planning Commission and City Council. The effort also made a priority of engaging the “next generation” with involvement from local Burlingame high school students, as well as students from University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University. A summary of the Envision Burlingame community engagement process is included in Chapter 2: Community Context.

The community process resulted in a series of Guiding Principles that helped structure policy objectives throughout the General Plan. These Guiding Principles, outlined below and presented in detail in Chapter 3: Plan Principles, were shared at Community Workshop #2 in May of 2016 and were refined throughout the process:

• Balanced and Smart Growth
• Community Character
• Connectivity
• Economic Diversity and Vitality
• Healthy People and Healthy Places
• Great Schools and Life-long Learning
• Civic Engagement

The Burlingame General Plan is structured around topics that emerged through community conversations. General plans are required to contain a minimum of seven State-mandated elements, but municipalities have flexibility in the organization of the elements to reflect local sensibilities. Table INT-1 indicates how the General Plan chapters and themes relate to the State-required General Plan elements.

TABLE INT-1
GENERAL PLAN CHAPTERS