Providing for the smooth and affordable growth of city services while keeping as much rural area open as possible - that’s the general direction of talks for the new comprehensive plan that will guide growth in Warren County for the next 20 years.

A task force and consultants from Wallace, Roberts & Todd have been working on a future land use map for months, and Thursday night they shared their first draft with the City-County Planning Commission board and staff. That effort is part of an overall revision of the 1990 comprehensive plan, which guides decisions on what growth planning commissioners should allow. The final result is still perhaps a year away, and must be approved by city and county governments.

Planners expect Warren County’s population, already 100,000, to grow by 40 percent in 20 years. That’s almost 16,000 new households. The future land use map won’t change current zoning, but will give general guidelines for where development is preferred to house those people and to site the businesses where they’ll work and shop.

There’s already enough appropriately zoned land to hold those new people, consultant John Femsler said. The problem is that people will not necessarily want to live in those specific spots. Current residents, in a series of public meetings held to gather local wishes for the plan, said they want to keep an open choice of urban and rural lifestyles, he said.

The biggest threat to that is uncontrolled sprawl, letting developments pop up randomly and demand far-flung services, Femsler said.

To deal with that, the land-use map calls for gui ding growth into three phased “tiers.”

The first tier would just be filling in holes and notches in current urban development, where there won’t be need for extensive infrastructure to reach city-level services.

Tier two expects growth in 10 or 20 years around Plum Springs and the Kentucky TriModal Transpark, and extending evenly south of Bowling Green. Tier three shows further extension in those same areas, fringing much of the city. The plan keeps just about everything not directly connected with the city as zoned for agriculture.

Marked on the maps are the proposed courses of a southwest parkway, an eastern outer beltline looping from Scottsville Road up to the transpark and proposed Interstate 66.

“If these were to become real in the next 20 years, that changes everything,” Femsler said.

The map doesn’t mean that no other sorts of development would be allowed outside of designated areas, but that developers would have to offer justification for the exception, planner Jonathan Britt said.

Task force and commission members wanted a variety of language changes, and both planners and consultants said those would be made frequently. Femsler said he expects to return monthly, each time presenting revisions and another chapter regulating aspects of development. Next up is transportation planning, he said.

Planning commission member Tim Huston voiced a concern for many present: ongoing, large-scale residential development along Cemetery Road, threatening to draw commercial development and heavy traffic in its wake. Femsler said planners need to discourage the extension of urban services into that area. He noted that the “urban” description doesn’t mean the same density development as downtown; it means city-level services, which get much more expensive to provide further out.

Planning commission member Linda Dickerson asked whether the map’s authors had considered whether county volunteer fire departments will be able to recruit enough to handle the development. Rich Pond, Plum Springs and Alvaton departments already assist each other on calls since none has enough volunteers, she said.

“That’s a very serious question,” Femsler said. Firefighters have told him that they soon won’t be able to recruit enough volunteers to meet the work load, and so the county will have to go - at least in developed areas - to paying firefighters, he said.

Dan Preston of the Bowling Green Area Chamber of Commerce noted that the map shows industrial sites only in current industrial areas. Consultant Silvia Vargas said industries would also be eligible for mixed-use zoning, but Britt said that in general they expect new industry to locate in the same areas as such current businesses.

Preston said the transpark already owns land beyond the industrial area shown on the proposed map, and noted that rapid growth could follow the construction of a new connector road from I-65 to U.S. 31-W. That’s on the state six-year road plan for 2011, he said.

The state’s budget troubles make that uncertain, Britt replied.

“The Natcher Parkway extension has been on and off the six-year plan for as long as I can remember,” he said.

Alice Burks, city Housing & Community Development director, noted that the WKU Farm and Bowling Green-Warren County Regional Airport are still marked on the future map for government use, but there’s a good chance that one or the other may become available for development within the next 20 years.

Femsler said they could be relabeled as “development opportunities” rather than labeled for a specific use.