Talking About The Future Here And Now

After eight months of immersing themselves in surveys, reports, and technical research on municipal planning, some members of Newtown’s Long Range Strategic Planning Committee came up for air last week at the meeting of the Board of Selectmen. They reported on their progress toward formulating a vision of what Newtown should be in 10 or 20 years and long-range goals that will help guide the town along the sometimes treacherous path that leads from vision to reality. While their collection of facts, figures, and case studies was impressive, committee members stressed that the real benefits of strategic planning will not come from the rigorous research of a few dedicated volunteers, but from the interest and engagement of the community as a whole.

Time and events keep unfolding whether we make any specific plans for the future or not. So it seems rational and right to try to exert a positive influence on the future. Since we may only work on the future in the workshop of the present, however, clearly assessing whether our influence will be positive or negative requires some foresight, and foresight is notoriously blurry more than a year or two out. The voters of Newtown, for example, tried to exercise some foresight in 2001 in appropriating a large amount of money for the purchase and development of Fairfield Hills without a definitive plan. The details of the development of Fairfield Hills filled in over the course of the next seven years have gone a long way toward dividing the town and seasoning its politics with negativity. Good intentions. Not-so-good results.

The Long Range Strategic Planning Committee is wisely recommending that an “action team” of a dozen or more townspeople be charged with reviewing short-term goals for their compatibility with a long-term vision statement describing the town we want to become. That vision statement would itself be reviewed and, perhaps, revised at five-year intervals.

Ultimately, the success of strategic planning depends on how well it reflects the will of the community. As we have seen lately, however, determining the will of the community can be emotionally fraught with contention, discord, and occasionally outright discourtesy. It is not always a pleasant process, so there is a great temptation to push the reconciliation of fundamental differences off into the future. Unfortunately, we now know the hazards of that. The hard work of creating a better future will always take place in the here and now. The more people involved, however, the lighter the work. We hope the work of the Long Range Strategic Planning Committee will bring more and more people into dialogue about where we are going as a town.