Planning the Future

"We should know what we want and be clear about it and not have some vague idea about it,"

So spoke longtime municipal gadfly Nancy Rice, arguing at a recent public hearing that the Randolph Town Plan should contain more regulatory teeth.

Changes made by the Selectboard to the first draft of the plan, Rice said frankly, make the document "just kind of nice…pretty wishy-washy."

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In her usual straightforward way, Rice hit the nail on the head. However, in our view she demonstrated exactly the pitfalls of the planning process and why town plans should not be used as regulatory documents.

The problem is that even if towns SHOULD know clearly what they want, they don’t. Not even close. Each of Randolph’s 4800 people has a different idea of what he or she wants. Some are very definite about it, and you can find these folks on all sides of all the issues. Our guess is that a big majority are pretty "wishy washy" on what they want for their town, except in a few pet areas.

As a generalization, we’d say that the people who are most definite in their opinions are the ones that want everything to stay just the same. They want their town to stay the same, their road to stay the same, and their neighborhood to stay the same. It’s easy to be definite about that. But this is a strikingly conservative position that would shackle the organic change that is necessary to make Vermont a living work-in-progress, not a museum piece.

Most people in most of our towns have a more progressive view, realizing that many unthought-of opportunities may come our way in the next few years that cannot be predicted, aren’t even conceivable just now. Any good town plan should be more philosophy than prescription, open to the possibility of change and reflective of the variety of opinions and interests that inevitably exist in the town.

Town plans can be written to cast a tough regulatory net on the future. But when this happens it inevitably means that one segment of the population has taken control of the planning process, to the exclusion of diversity. This happens more often than it should, because certain folks are just more articulate, have more time and more education than their neighbors and more tolerance for public hearings. These advantages can allow these folks to impose their civic views on the rest.

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That’s exactly what didn’t happen, for the most part, in Randolph’s planning process. The Planning Commission was unusually diverse, and its chair, Julie Iffland, didn’t push through a personal agenda. Then the Selectboard added another valuable perspective.

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Because using the town plan as a regulatory instrument is a bad idea, both Royalton and Sharon have been on somewhat shaky ground by trying to defeat development proposals based on non-conformance to the town plan. Neither of these towns has been able to form enough of a consensus even to pass a zoning ordinance, so the opposition to these projects likely reflects a minority position.

Sharon’s effort to defeat self-storage units was unsuccessful, but so far Royalton’s plan-based challenge to a restaurant and tourist outlet has prevailed.

"It is probably counter-productive to use the town plan as a zoning ordinance," one Act 250 expert told us recently. "People who opposed zoning will see the town plan to be over-reaching."

In looking to the future, our valley towns would do well to favor possibility over proscription.