Londonderry’s Master Plan Steering Committee met on July 25 to kickstart the process of developing a new, comprehensive Master Plan for the town. The Committee was meeting for the first time and was composed of officials from a variety of different town committees, representing various areas of experience.
“We started discussing putting a committee together over the past month or so now,” said Committee member, Jake Butler. “Some of us are from boards, we’ve got a handful of people from the public, this is our first meeting.”
At the first meeting, step one was to nominate and elect officers for the Committee. Without debate on any nomination, Jeff Penta was elected Chair, Jake Bulter was elected Vice Chair, and Kristi Mynhier was elected Secretary.
Sylvia Von Aulock, Executive Director of the Southern NH Planning Commission (SNHPC), was also at the meeting to “steer the Steering Committee” by providing guidance and advice through the development of an updated Master Plan. She expected the process to take at least six months and likely much longer owing to staffing shortages. Every Steering Committee member was encouraged to take an extensive look at the existing 12-year-old Plan to come up with improvements.
“What is it that is missing? What sort of recommendations happened those 12 years ago?” asked Von Aulock. “You don’t need to look at every single one, but please, in the ‘hat’ you’re wearing, take a good, thorough look.”
The goal was to determine what chapters and focus areas are relevant after 12 years of change in Londonderry.
There were 82 recommendations in the last Mater Plan, 24 of which Town Manger, Mike Malaguti, deemed “substantially complete.” Seven are still in progress and ten were “moot or impractical” based on later developments.
“Roughly half have been addressed in some way,” said Malaguti. “The fact that we accomplished almost half of those in a decade, from one standpoint that’s impressive. From another standpoint, having 82 recommendations is almost like having no recommendations because it lacks focus and I would encourage the Committee to achieve what is achievable.”
One recommendation was to look towards other towns in the state for recommendations on format to make things shorter and more straightforward while focusing on attainable goals.
“In actuality, if you go to the RSAs, a master plan only requires a vision and a land use section. All the rest is up to the community to decide what is important,” said Von Aulock.
With that in mind, the SNHPC Executive Director wanted to have a survey for the Master Plan complete by Old Home Day on Aug. 17.
“That gives us a challenge, that’s about two weeks in time,” she explained, originally hoping to have the survey results back by the end of July. “By the end of September, I would love to have survey results to the Planning Board.”
She also wanted to conduct interviews with every committee to get an idea of what they thought would need more focus in the years to come.