The Master Plan Steering Committee set an “aggressive” timetable tonight to complete that document before the Annual Town Meeting in May.Judi Barrett of Community Opportunities Group, the Town’s lead consultant, said it was critical for all the relevant bodies, including the Planning Board, to get their comments on the drafts in soon.
Steering Committee Chairman Jay O’Brien said some members of the Planning Board, on which he serves, may believe that they will be getting a draft that they can make substantial revisions to.The Planning Board has not discussed the substance of the draft to date.
“The Planning Board needs to be told that there are deadlines,” Barrett said, “and this document will not be ready for Town Meeting unless those deadlines are met.”
Barrett told the Committee that they had been charged by the Planning Board to work with the Steering Committee.If there were any disagreements between the documents the various subcommittees had produced and the vision of the Planning Board, the two groups would have to work them out.
“The only real disastrous Master Plan I’ve ever worked on,” Barrett said, “was one in where the Planning Board appointed a steering committee and then walked away from the project.Then they came in at the 11th hour and made some major changes.”
Stanton Lyman asked if the document had to be ready by the May 18th Town Meeting.“All we are doing is standing up at Town Meeting and telling them what we have done,” he said.“Why are we killing ourselves to meet these dates and maybe have the end product suffer as a result?”
Town Meeting will not vote on the document, but other Committee members wanted it presented to the body anyway.
“This is an historic event in the life of the Town,” said vice chairman Shaw McDermott.“The comments should be short and succinct, but they should be powerful.”
The implementation of the Master Plan was also discussed.Barrett said her office would be ranking some of the goals by priority, but that the Committee should feel free to change them.She also discouraged the Committee from assigning dates the goals should be accomplished by.
“The problem with dates is that people get too rigid on them” even when circumstances change, said Barrett.“Local government needs to go after opportunities as they present themselves.”
Committee member Jonathan Briggs also told the Committee that Town Environmental Coordinator Ginny LeClair had reviewed the draft goals and offered some comments “to green up the entire document.”The effort, he said, was to integrate sustainable measures into each of them, rather than have them separate and apart from the other goals.
