Community planning, with all the talk about setbacks, lot sizes and permitted uses, can be a little off-putting.
So the town of Standish is testing a more engaging approach that could become a model for other Maine communities.
Residents are invited Thursday to the third and final public forum to help shape the official vision for Standish Corner Village, the town's central growth area.
Town officials and planning experts from GrowSmart Maine will present the latest photo simulations of what the village could look like in about 20 years, depending which zoning and planning options the town chooses.
"When you see something, you can react to it," said Carolyn Biegel, who chairs the Standish Corner Implementation Committee. Otherwise, she said, "it's really words on paper."
Along with having a chance to speak and ask questions, residents who attend the meeting also will be able to give instant feedback using a handheld keypad.
The more visual and interactive process is the result of a partnership between the town and GrowSmart, a nonprofit anti-sprawl group in Yarmouth. GrowSmart chose Standish as the test case for a Model Town project and this summer will begin working with other communities using lessons learned there.
Showing residents what their planning decisions could look like in 20 years is often too expensive for a town planning committee. The photo simulations created by GrowSmart include aerial and street-level images of the area where routes 25 and 35 cross.
Some show the village based on current zoning, with buildings and large parking lots set back from the highway and dead-end roads with single-family homes. Others show the village the way residents have said they want to see it, with sidewalks and smaller buildings along the roads, and interconnected streets and neighborhoods behind them.
"Usually, you don't really get to choose between the future you want to create. You just create an abstraction in terms of zoning and codes, and rarely does that meet what people want," said Bruce Hyman, a planner with GrowSmart. "We're just being much more deliberate about showing what choices they have. Most communities don't even realize they have these choices."
The public workshop on Thursday will be held at the Standish Municipal Building and begin at 7 p.m., following an hourlong open house.
Once residents have expressed their vision for the village, planners will create zoning and ordinance changes – new setbacks and lot sizes, for examples – that would lead to that kind of development.
Residents will also be asked whether the community should adopt form-based codes, which could essentially use the community vision to guide what the appearance of future development in addition to uses, setbacks and other standards.
"(Standish) would be really the first potential municipality to look at that," said Mitchell Rasor, a Yarmouth-based planning consultant who has helped develop the town's village plan. "The way (a community) looks and feels is more based on form. You're aiming more to replicate what people want."
Whether form-based codes are part of the new codes or not, the committee hopes to have new zoning and ordinances in place by year's end, officials said.
In the end, Biegel, the committee chair, hopes the exercise translates into giving the town better control over development. Until now, development has spread out along the highways and into the rural parts of town, she said.
"Here we said we wanted to maintain our rural character, but all the growth was occurring sort of sprawled throughout the town" instead of in the villages, she said. "I think that's why the past ordinances haven't achieved what we thought they were going to achieve, because it's hard to visualize how it will work."
Biegel and others also said the use of visuals and the game show-style keypads also are making the planning process more interesting and fun. And the broader participation will end up producing a plan that has more authority, they said.
The process has been anything but dull, Biegel said. "It's thinking about what could be. It's really exciting."
Staff Writer John Richardson can be contacted at 791-6324 or at:
jrichardson@pressherald.com
