A plan being finished by the Downtown Partnership over the next month lays out a new focus to guide improvements in downtown Colorado Springs during the next decade.

The Experience Downtown Master Plan is receiving its first update since 2016. After a year of public surveys and conversations with local businesses, the partnership gave a public preview of the plan to the Colorado Springs City Council during a work session Monday.

Partnership Executive Director Chelsea Gondeck said downtown has successfully reached the goals outlined in the current master plan. The update will refocus on new goals and figure out the effects of COVID-19 that the city is still feeling five years later.

“The environment and necessities for downtown has changed across the market, so it seemed like a really good time to do a refresh to make sure what we’re doing and where we are spending our resources aligns with the needs for today,” Gondeck said.

The full draft of the new plan will be released in December in two volumes. The first volume, which the partnership is required to complete as a downtown development authority, will focus on the specific tools the organization can use to steer developments. The second volume will look at what Gondeck called “thematic priorities,” such as supporting the arts or the local sports economy.

Under the current master plan, downtown Colorado Springs has doubled the number of hotel rooms and built thousands of apartments and other housing units. The new plan will be more selective about what types of housing are still needed. Gondeck said the focus will likely be on affordable housing and building in areas like north Nevada Avenue that have seen less construction.

The Downtown Partnership received the most questions on Monday about the section of downtown without building height limits. One slide in the presentation showed three potential new tall buildings: the 84-foot-tall Catbird hotel, a 170-foot-tall office building at the corner of Sahwatch and Cimarron, and the 312-foot-tall OneVela apartment building approved earlier this year.

Councilmember Dave Donelson said that residents who had complained about the unprecedented height of OneVela had been told to wait for the city to address it through this process.

“Wait until we do this downtown master plan rewrite, that’s when we will look at it and have a vigorous discussion about it. Did that happen? Has that happened?” Donelson asked.

Gondeck and city staff said the process has included multiple conversations and focus groups about building height. While the final plan will likely include some suggestions, the Downtown Partnership is unlikely to seek any specific changes to downtown’s form-based code that covers issues like height limits.

In a later interview, Gondeck said it was a question of balancing the public interests in controlling building height and adding density. In a public survey done at the start of the master plan process, nearly 80% of residents listed local small businesses as one of downtown’s greatest assets. She argued that many of those businesses benefited from having people living and working in large nearby buildings.

“They have to have good foot traffic. They have to have people consistently patronizing their business for them to be successful. And how do you do that? You increase density,” Gondeck said.

The same public survey found that 47% of respondents were in favor of downtown Colorado Springs constructing buildings over eight stories tall, while 41% opposed them.

Two specific additions that the master plan will discuss are a big-box grocery store and public bathrooms. Restrooms have been a popular request from groups advocating for the area’s homeless population and from the general public, especially after Acacia Park received an improved playground in 2022.

“Having some place that’s open, that families feel safe going to and that’s cleaned consistently is something we have heard a lot from the public,” Gondeck said.

Councilmember Nancy Henjum was highly supportive of the public restroom effort when it came up Monday, while she acknowledged that the city Parks Department played a large role in the issue. Gondeck said the authority was still figuring out how hands-on they would be in creating or maintaining the bathrooms.

A final, extensive round of public comments will be received once the full master plan is released in December. It will then go to the city’s Downtown Review Board, Planning Commission and the City Council for approval in early 2026.