WASHINGTON PLANNING BOARD

Master Plan Subcommittee – Working meeting

  Minutes

July 15, 2013

 

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

 

1.0   The meeting was called to order by Nan Schwartz at 8:30AM.

 

2.0   We discussed the minutes from the July 1st meeting and all approved. They were corrected after the Planning Board meeting and posted on the website.

 

3.0   We went over our recruiting progress.  Two people had written to us by email asking if they could help part time because they are only here on the weekends. We all agreed that as the process moves along we could use their help. We discussed the definite commitments from four people that want to work with us on the Master Plan update. They are Carolyn Bullock, Bob Williams, Annie Bissonnette and Lolly Gilbert. We are very pleased to have their assistance for the project. We decided that no more recruitment is needed at this point. We talked about having a consistent time for meetings or being flexible. We will need to ask all our volunteers what will work for them but we decided that Monday mornings at 9AM or Monday evenings are good for us and we will float those possibilities to our volunteers.

 

4.0  We need to get contact information from all our volunteers, we will get addresses, phone numbers, email addresses for all and make a master list. Nan will send Jean what she has and she will contact those that we need information from.

 

5.0  We made a list of the information we will put in the package for our volunteers. Schwartz will make copies of the four surveys we are using to help update ours – Washington 2003, Goshen, Dorchester and Tamworth. We will include a copy of the timeline and the Chapter comparisons sheet. We will point people to the Master Plan on the town website and not include it at this point. Schwartz will work on putting together copies for the packages and we will mail them to our volunteers.

 

6.0   We discussed determining the first full committee meeting date and agenda. Kluk had two approaches that we discussed. We are doing the survey process first and want to get it done and ready to go out by Labor Day. We plan on having the survey input back from departments/committees by August 1^st and will begin work on the survey at that point. We will email out the project plan and other materials before the first meeting when we will have a “meet and greet” and question answering session. We need to get email addresses and mail addresses for everyone. We will send a package by mail prior to this meeting. The next meeting will be after August 1^st when we have the input back from departments and committees. The second meeting will be to work on the survey questions. We thought that we could have all committee members email questions they like and we could compile them into a draft or a second approach would be to divide into teams and each take a couple of sections to work on. We will print a page for each section to make it easier to work on that section. Everyone liked the second approach. Crandall commented that we should be able to work on sections we are interested in, all agreed. Kluk and Schwartz will compile everything into a draft survey. Our third meeting will be to review the work that has been done and re-edit. We hope to get this done before the September Planning Board meeting to get approval by the board before we mail it out.

We discussed what formats we like, and all agreed that the table format that Tamworth has, gathers a lot of information in a small amount of space and is good.

We set tentative dates for these meetings – 1^st meeting July 29^th at 9AM in Town Hall

Work session August 12^th, Review August 26^th.

 

7.0   We discussed the survey categories and questions and how they will be used in the future. Schwartz explained that information we get from the survey is used to drive what the Planning Board works on for ordinances and things in the LUO. We need value questions that can direct the PB for action. We discussed whether the LUO should be included in the documents for the volunteers and we decided to point them to the LUO on the website but not provide the document.

Kluk gave us a sheet with the proposed categories that related to the chapters we are interested in covering in the Master Plan. Terani suggested Communication should be a category because he feels the town needs a better way to communicate with the community. Schwartz said that the website is being used in that way but Boards and Committees need to get their information out. Goshen’s survey had a question about communication. We decided it won’t be it’s own section but will be included, maybe under services. Transportation section should be renamed “Roads”. We will include “Vision” and “Land Use”, Facilities/equipment and Services. Terani asked about education and this is included in services. Crandall asked about historic districts or preservation and we will see where that fits in.

 

8.0   We went over our process sheet and checked off what was done (composition of team) and updated a few tasks that are ongoing (prepare survey).

We resolved that Kluk will be the chair of the Master Plan Update subcommittee and Schwartz will fill in when she is away. Schwartz will continue to take minutes and notes for the committee.

 

 

Meeting adjourned at 9:40 AM.

 

Respectfully submitted,

Nan Schwartz

Planning Board Secretary