About 90 people turned out at Netherlands Inn and Spa in Strasburg for the first of nine public meetings scheduled as part of the planning commission's update of the 13-year-old countywide growth-management plan.

The plan, which is one component of the overall county comprehensive plan, maps out a strategy for growth in Lancaster County.

The original plan created the county's urban growth areas, which are places the plan suggests should be the focus of development.

While 76 percent of all housing built between 1994 and 2002 was built inside the urban growth areas, those areas accounted for only 40 percent of the land that was developed during that time.

The remaining 24 percent of the new homes were built on 60 percent of the land developed, and those homes are outside the urban growth areas.

"What you have is more people living on less land inside the boundaries and less people living on more land outside," said David Hamme, a consultant working on the update of the growth-management plan for the planning commission.

In the update, the planners hope to establish a strategy for protecting the county's rural areas through farmland-preservation programs and by offering incentives to focus development inside the urban growth areas.

"We need to invest in our urban areas and our villages to make them healthy, or people will want to escape them and live outside," said John Blowers of East Lampeter Township.

Several people who attended Monday's meeting complained about traffic congestion in the county. They said they'd like to talk about fixing traffic problems before providing for future growth.

"The traffic here is terrific and we're already talking about building new houses?" a Strasburg woman said. "The traffic is not a problem some of the time; this is a daily problem."

Chris Neumann, the planning commission's chief transportation planner, said improving road systems is part of the growth-management plan update.

"One of our goals is to try to reduce congestion," he said. "But we can build houses a lot faster than we can improve roads, so we certainly have a challenge facing us."

Strasburg resident Pat Hunt urged the planners, when thinking about future housing and economic development, to be mindful of existing businesses that already provide jobs, especially tourism-related businesses, such as Sight & Sound Millennium Theatre in Strasburg Township.

"They have 24,000 people coming in there every week when they're running shows, and those people don't just come to see the shows," Hunt said. "They also come with little bags of money to spend in the area."

Another public meeting on the growth-management update is scheduled for 7 tonight at Ephrata Public Library.

Others will be held through the end of April.

Planning commission member Lois Herr said the commission hopes to have a final draft of the growth-management update completed by June.