Public Comment Sought On Plans For Newtown’s Future

By Andrew Gorosko

Residents will have an opportunity to sketch their visions of Newtown’s future when the Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) starts work next week on formulating the town’s decennial 2003 Plan of Conservation and Development. The session is scheduled for 7:30 pm, Thursday, March 29, at Booth Library, 25 Main Street.

The meeting will be one of many sessions to be conducted through the year 2002, at which P&Z members will define goals for the long-range physical preservation and development of Newtown through the year 2013.

The planning project will update the town plan that the P&Z approved in August 1993. Since 1993, P&Z members have amended the town plan twice. In 1998, the P&Z added a detailed development and conservation plan for Hawleyville. In 1999, P&Z members added a section on preserving local scenic views.

Through this June, P&Z members will formulate the scope of the 2003 town plan, said Elizabeth Stocker, director of community development. Ms Stocker will shepherd the plan’s creation, with the assistance of a planning consultant.

A town plan serves as a conceptual framework for accomplishing community goals. A town plan is a public policy guide for P&Z decision-making on development applications. A town plan sets the agenda for future action.

P&Z members often cite whether a particular development application adheres to the concepts in the town plan, or violates those concepts, in approving or rejecting the application.

 The 1993 town plan contains sections on population, natural resources, the environment, land use, development, circulation, the economic base, housing, utilities, open space, and recreation. That plan analyzed existing conditions, set goals and objectives, and made planning recommendations. That plan also described how its goals could be implemented.

During the past eight years, the P&Z has done much to implement aspects of the 1993 town plan, Ms Stocker said. “I think they [P&Z] have used it as a guide. The commission has been very active in implementing” the 1993 town plan, she said.

That town plan implementation has included “upzoning,” in which the P&Z upgraded the zoning designations of extensive residential sections of town as a water quality protection measure in September 2000; strengthening the P&Z’s aquifer protection regulations in June 1999; rezoning the state’s Fairfield Hills property in May 1998; and creating Sandy Hook Design District (SHDD) zoning in Sandy Hook Center in 1995.

The P&Z is seeking $60,000 in the town budget for fiscal 2001-02 for consultant services in preparing the town plan. If that sum is approved by voters, the P&Z would seek between $40,000 and $60,000 for additional consultant services in the 2002-03 fiscal year to complete the town plan, Ms Stocker said.

Public Involvement

Ms Stocker said the P&Z will seek public involvement in formulating the 2003 town plan.

“This process will be very public. Public involvement will be encouraged,” she said.

Continuing comments from the public throughout the plan’s development process would aid the P&Z in formulating the document, she said.

The town plan will have three major aspects, Ms Stocker said. It will describe present conditions; it will state goals for the future; it will describe how to achieve those goals, she said.

The long-range planning effort is intended to evaluate how the physical growth of the town is proceeding, she said. “It really is an evaluation process of the physical and economic development of the municipality,” she said.

The upcoming plan will focus on housing development, economic development, open space, recreation, transportation, the road network, and public facilities, she said.

“There are a lot of different issues… There’s more to planning than just [physical] development,” Ms Stocker said. The town plan seeks to integrate a variety of issues in the context of long-range planning, she said.

In formulating the 2003 town plan, P&Z members will have the benefit of using the recently released 2000 US census figures, Ms Stocker said.  

The census indicates that Newtown grew rapidly during the 1990s, increasing in population by 20.5 percent during the decade, rising from 20,779 to 25,031 residents. The residential development boom reached its peak in Newtown in 1998.

The new census will provide the P&Z with valuable current demographic information useful in forming the town plan, Ms Stocker said.

“What we need to concentrate on is stopping sprawl,” Ms Stocker said of the town’s need to plan to prevent all local land from being developed.

Such intensive development uses up the landscape, eliminates the potential for open space, jeopardizes farming, and threatens water purity, she said.

Ms Stocker said she views “redevelopment” as a key to stopping “overdevelopment.”

The 2003 town plan will address future uses of Fairfield Hills, Ms Stocker said. The town is considering buying the 185-acre Fairfield Hills core campus from the state. The former state mental institution closed in December 1995. Town officials have been pondering how the more than one million square feet of enclosed space at the campus can be put to new uses.

Ms Stocker noted that in the early 1990s P&Z members formulated the 1993 town plan during a economic downturn, when a slow development rate had allowed them adequate time to work on such planning.

Similarly, development applications have decreased during the past several months, allowing P&Z members to take time for some long-range planning, she noted.