WASHINGTON PLANNING BOARD

Master Plan Update Subcommittee – Working meeting Minutes

June 4, 2014

Committee members present: Lolly Gilbert, Jean Kluk, Annie Bissonnette, Steve Terani, Jim Crandall and Nan Schwartz.

Visitors: Dan Reidy

1.0 The meeting was called to order by Jean Kluk at 2:00 PM, in the Town Hall.

2.0 Kluk asked if there were any changes suggested for the minutes of May 13^th. There were no changes.

3.0 Kluk reviewed the status of our communications plan:

All the mailings have been done and the articles sent to the Messenger and the Villager papers. Schwartz needs to check with Michael Pon because she didn’t hear back from him. Crandall will make an announcement at the senior lunch. We need someone to man a table at the Farmer’s Market for the next two Saturdays. Gilbert volunteered to do this Saturday, the 7^th and Bullock said she would do the 14^th. Schwartz will update the town website and put a link to register online. She will send out an announcement to the news list.

4.0 Student recruitment – Kluk said we lost one of our student facilitators, but we still have 5. We all discussed and suggested a few more students to ask. Schwartz and Crandall will reach out to the list. Bissonnette asked what we do if someone drops out at the very last minute? Reidy said that he can bring one extra person but they will be floaters. Kluk said worse case one of us jumps in.

5.0 Focus Group Materials – Kluk explained that Reidy has concerns about our previous version of the materials so she attempted to draft a new Land Use and Zoning sheet. Schwartz passed them out to the group. Reidy said it should help us come up with a vision or action item to prioritize and figure out feasibility. He thinks we are being too specific and directing the conversation too much. He feels we can dig deeper through conversation. This is face time for ideas and input. He feels our challenge is that the survey usually follows the forum and we are doing it opposite of that. He feels we can reaffirm the survey through conversation. We need to get a clear direction for priorities out of all the 6 topics, not for each topic. Reidy said we should hand out a combination of things from the survey, not questions just prompts for conversation.

Dan walked us through a small group role-play so we could understand better the process. He said the process is the same with all towns. We are looking for strengths, weaknesses and a 10-year vision list to come out of each group. He uses an “Impact/feasibility” grid to prioritize, the large group votes by using sticky dots to get a consensus.

Kluk took us back to her rewritten sheet for the small group. Reidy said to keep the percentages we previously had included and suggested a few questions to delete. Each focus group should have 5 or 6 statements of any survey question that had over 50% response (good or bad). He thinks we should do an overview of the highlights of the survey for presentation before the small groups break out. Bissonnette asked about posters for display. We decided on the Cultural/Historic map, a map showing the Town Forests and land use, Wetlands map, Trail map and we need a map for pinpointing where the participants live (we will use the tax map overlay for this).

Kluk and Schwartz will do an edit on the focus group materials to conform to Reidy’s ideas.

6.0 Crandall is concerned that if we have 100 people we will need to stagger the lunch crowd so the wait doesn’t become a problem. We will think about how to do this within Reidy’s schedule for the event.

Note: Our next meeting will be June 10^th, Wednesday at 6:30 PM.

Meeting adjourned at 4:20 PM.

Respectfully submitted,

Nan Schwartz

Planning Board Secretary