After more than two years of study and work, the Planning and Zoning Commission quietly adopted a Plan of Conservation and Development last week. The document, if used properly by the commission and other local boards and commissions charged with making decisions about Newtown’s future, is a blueprint for protecting the community’s character, open spaces, and natural resources for the next decade — we hope.

As we have seen in the past decade, market forces can completely overwhelm a town’s best intentions to control and direct its growth. The population of Newtown grew more than 20 percent between 1990 and 2000. The combination of low interest rates and local real estate prices that still draw “bargain” hunters from lower Fairfield County and Westchester County has continued that growth spurt. Add another 20 percent by the year 2010, and the town’s population grows from 25,000 to 32,500. Imagine what that kind of growth will do to the morning commute on Routes 34 and 25.

Most of us are well practiced at complaining about how growth erodes the quality of life in our community. We are fortunate, however, that Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission committed its time and resources over the past year to try to actually do something about it. In the past, town development plans have been long on vision and short on practical strategies to achieve that vision. It used to be that the decennial town plan, once completed, was easy to put on the shelf and forget until the next revision was due.

This time around, however, the commission has come up with a document that not only codifies its vision, chapter and verse, for controlled growth in the coming decade, but issues specific goals and strategies for meeting those goals across the full spectrum of community interest, including community character, conservation and natural resources, parks and recreation, open space, transportation, housing, economic development, and community facilities. Wisely, the commission has decided to share the responsibility for achieving these objectives with other town boards and agencies settings goals and suggesting strategies for the selectmen, the Legislative Council, Board of Education, other land use agencies, the Parks and Recreation Commission, the Economic Development Commission, and even the town historian.

Newtown’s new Plan of Conservation and Development is only an advisory document to be used as a guide for our town’s leaders as they make the day-to-day decisions that move the community along incrementally toward its future. Whether or not Newtown reaches that future with its character and natural resources intact depends in large part on whether they take that advice or leave it on the shelf for another ten years.