WASHINGTON PLANNING BOARD

Master Plan Subcommittee – Working meeting

Minutes

June 17, 2013

Members present: Nan Schwartz, Jean Kluk, Steve Terani, Jim Crandall

The meeting was called to order by Nan Schwartz at 10AM.

Nan turned the meeting over to Jean Kluk who explained the purpose of the meeting is to figure out where we go from here and to come up with a project plan. We need to come up with a team with members of the community. Nan mentioned adding Annie Bissonnette to our list of people to contact. Jean said we should put out a public call for people to help after we make our initial contacts. Jim wants to ask for volunteers. Steve asked how do we get this out to the public? It was decided we will put it on the town website, send a Nixle announcement, get it in the Selectmen’s minutes and post on the website banner. We need wording for this announcement, we also need to have a realistic date and what we are asking the volunteer to do.

Jean said that looking at her Master Plan Update process document she sees Phase I 1-9 as the part requiring community input. Phase II 10-13 is where we compile and write the update.

Nan mentioned that the Energy Committee has expressed a desire to write an energy chapter. She will speak with Johanna Young about them doing a chapter.

We need to educate the public on what the Master Plan is and what we use it for.

Jean suggested recruiting for Phase I and we should have a time frame. We discussed timing for the parts of Phase I. We decided 3-5 (community survey) could be done summer 2013, we would plan to tabulate (6) in fall 2013 and solicit Department, Board and committee input (7) during winter 2013/14, community outreach and workshops (8) could be done early summer 2014, summarizing (9) would be done fall of 2014. Jean will update her process sheet to reflect these dates.

We then discussed the chapters and looked at Jean’s sheet that compared Washington’s MP chapters to other local towns. We thought maybe we should add a chapter on community facilities, recreation, housing and energy. Nan said the Hazard Mitigation Plan that was done recently could be used or added for a chapter.

Jean will work on a recruitment statement to be used as an announcement. Including what the Master Plan is, why it is important and request volunteers. It should explain the time commitment and responsibilities. She will email it to committee members and we can edit it. We divvied up the list of people we came up with to ask if they would like to join the subcommittee and we will contact them over the next couple of weeks before putting out a general call for volunteers.

We will contact Mike McCrory to see if he could conduct workshops for us when we get to that point.

We discussed how to send out the community survey – by mail on paper with an option of doing it online. Nan will look at Survey Monkey and see if it is possible to key the surveys for unique answers. We want it to be anonymous but give the chance of filling it out only once. We discussed using an incentive for upping participation and decided we could give a quart of maple syrup to 5 participants that were randomly chosen from the returned surveys.

We will all look at the surveys from Goshen, Dorchester, Washington, that we have on hand, to see what we like about them. We discussed public events where we could reach the community to raise awareness about the MP update – Flea Market, July 4^th weekend, Auxiliary Dance at Camp Morgan, July 30^th and the FD Chicken BBQ in early August.

We will meet again on July 1^st at 10AM.

Meeting adjourned at 11:10 AM.

Respectfully submitted,

Nan Schwartz

Planning Board Secretary