For municipalities & the firms that plan for them
Your plan shouldn't sit on a shelf.
You spend years writing a comprehensive plan — then run the city from spreadsheets. Lattice connects your adopted plan to the departments, budgets, capital projects, and measures that deliver it.
Who built it
Built by the people who write these plans.
Lattice was built by planners — people who have spent decades writing comprehensive plans, land development codes, and neighborhood master plans, carrying them through adoption, and then watching what happens next.
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We write them
Comprehensive plans, land development codes, and master plans for cities of every size, over more than two decades. Lattice is shaped like a real plan — elements, goals, objectives, policies, and the implementation actions beneath them — because we have written that structure, not inferred it from a template.
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We present them
We have stood at the podium through adoption hearings and answered elected officials directly. Nearly every question they ask is an implementation question: who owns this, what does it cost, when does it happen. Those answers should exist before the meeting.
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We make the promises
Charrettes, workshops, and outreach that has put thousands of residents in the room. An adopted plan is a public commitment made to the people who showed up — and once the document is printed, almost nothing tracks whether that commitment was kept.
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We watch them stall
Long enough in practice to be hired to update plans we helped write, and to find the same unbuilt commitments carried into the new document a decade later. That is not a problem anyone notices from outside the field. It is the reason this exists.
The scale
Cities pay for plans, then pay again for work the plan never directed.
- ~$3.7B* spent writing comprehensive plans, cumulatively, nationwide.
- ~$284B/yr† local capital investment — the money the plan was written to direct.
- ~19,500‡ municipalities, of which an estimated 8,000–12,000 keep a plan — most five to ten years stale.*
Cities spend on the order of $40–50 implementing for every $1 spent planning* — and almost never check the two against each other. The money is real. The plan is real. They simply don't talk to each other.
The gap
Your plan is the only thing not connected.
Cities aren't short on software. Budgeting, GIS, permitting, dashboards — each does its job inside its own lane. Nothing is organized around the plan. So the document that took years to write, and that the community actually voted on, ends up as the one input nobody's system is accountable to.
Ask the simple question — is the city building the vision residents adopted? — and no system can answer it.
The idea
Make your plan the city's operating system.
Not another silo — the connective layer above the tools you already have. Every goal and policy carries an owner, funding, and an outcome, and stays attached to the budget, the capital program, and the projects that deliver it.
What changes
Seven things that change when your plan runs the city.
Lattice does a great deal more than seven things. These are the seven that change how a city works.
01
Your plan runs the city, instead of describing it.
Most software treats a comprehensive plan as a document you go and look at. Lattice treats it as the thing the city actually runs on — departments, budgets, capital projects and measures all hang off the plan you adopted.
Nothing is retyped or summarised into someone else's format. The adopted document itself comes in, one plan is live at a time, and everything that happens afterwards stays attached to it.
02
Every policy becomes work that someone owns.
A policy that says protect agricultural and open space lands turns into named actions and capital projects, each with a department responsible and a status anyone can see.
Staff stop guessing which parts of the plan are theirs. Every department opens to the commitments it answers for, what is at risk, and what is funded — with the plan's own words sitting next to each one.
03
It finds the work that already delivers your plan.
Most cities already have projects, programs and studies underway that satisfy adopted policy — nobody has ever mapped which is which. Lattice reads both sides and proposes the matches, with a plain reason for each one.
It compares meaning, not just wording, so it still finds the link when the policy asks for low-impact development standards and the project is called a Future Land Use Map Update. It never invents a project or a number — it ranks what you already have and a planner confirms every match. A week with two spreadsheets becomes an afternoon of yes and no.
04
The words your council adopted stay exactly as adopted.
Adopted language is locked. Staff add status, notes and evidence around it, but nobody can quietly reword what was voted on.
If a new version of the plan would change adopted text, Lattice stops and asks someone with the authority to approve it. That is the difference between a working record and a document that slowly drifts away from the one council passed.
05
The money sits next to the plan, not in another system.
What each commitment is expected to cost, what has actually been funded, and what is still short — commitment by commitment, tied to your budget cycle and capital program.
Nobody keeps a funded checkbox up to date either: Lattice works that out from the money actually attached. When budget season starts, the unfunded commitments are already a list, with the department and the policy attached to each one.
06
Nothing is lost when the plan is amended.
Plans get amended. Policies get renumbered and reworded. In most systems that means starting over. Here the funding, the owner, the status and years of evidence follow each policy to its new number on their own.
Split one policy into three and the record follows all three — and the money is never quietly duplicated, it waits for someone to divide it deliberately. This is the part nothing else does.
07
See what an amendment does before you vote on it.
Before it goes to council, run the change against your real data and watch exactly what it moves: which commitments re-attach, which money shifts, what needs a second look.
It is not a forecast. It is the real update, run for real and then undone — so what you saw in the rehearsal is what happens on adoption.
For planning firms
Your work shouldn't end at adoption.
Firms author or refresh the plan in Lattice, hand the city something it can actually run, and stay in the loop for the update and amendment cycles that follow. Per-seat pricing, your own workspace, and a clean handoff of ownership when the city takes it over.
Adoption isn't the end of the cycle, it is one point on it. What gets built, what gets funded, and what falls behind all feed the next amendment — so the update is evidence you already hold rather than a study that starts over.
The equity layer
Center for Comprehensive Planning
Our nonprofit arm carries the same tools at no cost to under-resourced cities, and publishes the research, training, and case studies that come out of the pilots. A good-government project, first and foremost.
If your community needs help with its comprehensive plan, take a look at the Center's work at comprehensiveplanning.org and get in touch — helping cities that could not otherwise afford it is exactly what it is there for.
Pilot program
Be a pilot city.
If you're starting a plan update, a periodic review, or an implementation program, tell us where you are and we'll show you the system against your own plan.
Or write to contact@civiclattice.com.
Sources
- * Civic Lattice estimate.
- † U.S. Conference of Mayors and U.S. Census Bureau, local government capital investment, 2024.
- ‡ U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Census of Governments.