Our Story

Fifty years ago, in July 1956, the political and business leadership in the greater Lansing region came together to form the Tri-County Regional Planning Commission. Those community leaders recognized that with the projected growth that was to come to the Capital region over the next few decades, an organization was needed for communities to come together and work out the inter-jurisdictional issues that new growth would generate at both the local and regional level. This three-county region is made up of 78 separate units of government. This includes 27 cities and villages, 48 townships and the 3 counties. Fifty of these seventy-eight governments have their own zoning and land use powers to help manage growth and development, but there is no real mechanism in place to coordinate all these plans between individual governments. In addition, we have many special districts, such as drainage districts, school districts, road commissions, health districts, soil conservation districts, transportation authorities, and sewer and water authorities, who all play some role in managing and providing services for new development and growth. With this complex governmental structure, the job of coordinating development and solving its related infrastructure and service problems is immense. In the early years of the Commission, much of its focus was on helping smaller units of government in the region put in place the planning tools they would need to manage growth properly. Early efforts also included the first regional plan, “The House We Live In,” which projected where new growth was likely to occur and the transportation and infrastructure network that would be needed to support this pattern of growth. Most of this early regional/local planning was done before the federal and state mandates that were legislated in the later 1960's and early 1970's. The Tri-County Regional Planning commission has changed some since 1956, but its main purpose of providing planning and technical solutions for local governments, especially multi-jurisdictional issues, continues today.