Newfield Planning Board Starts Town Plan

The Town of Newfield Planning Board spent the first few months of its existence attending training sessions and learning about the job at hand. Now that the board is eight months old, its members are beginning work on the town’s comprehensive plan.

Gary Goff, chair of the planning board, said the group was formed to first create a comprehensive plan for the town and later to deal with other issues regarding building in Newfield.

“That’s always been our goal,” Goff said. “From day one it’s been write a comprehensive plan. That’s the only thing we’re working on.”

Goff said creating the comprehensive plan and researching how the town functions are vital to being able to address bigger issues. Right now residents could attend planning board meetings to bring an issue to the board’s attention but its members would not know about details or how to fix it.

“Someone can come and want to talk about traffic issues but we don’t even know about that yet,” Goff said. “We’re not ready to tackle an issue.”

All planning board members in any municipality must attend state mandated training sessions. Since the board itself is new to Newfield all five members had to spend time learning the ropes, which delayed actual work for a few months. Now the planning board has begun work on the comprehensive plan and is in the middle of researching the area and gathering basic facts.

“We call it the baseline document, just full of facts and stats,” Goff said. “It’s not even outlining the issues.”

The board has already decided on chapters or sections it plans to include in the comprehensive plan. Each member of the board is responsible for researching a specific topic and outlining the information for the chapter. Though the plan is still in a very basic form, the board has already reached out to the community for help.

“We have a few volunteers, and we’re seeking out more, select people in the community, people who have experience and expertise in the different topics,” Goff said.

He predicts that the planning board will be busy working on the document for the next three months but hopes to have the baseline completed by mid-year.

“We’d like to have the baseline document done by early summer so the rest of the summer can be spent with the community looking at the facts and stats,” Goff said.

Once the document is presented to the public Goff said the planning board would solicit opinions, do public interviews and possibly put out a survey. Comprehensive plans in surrounding municipalities have attracted a lot of public comment and concerns and Goff does not expect Newfield’s process to be perfect. Right now, though, he’s not sure what to expect.

“I’m sure there will be problems but I’m not sure what they’ll be until someone tells me,” he said.

After the general goal of presenting the baseline document this summer, no timeline has been set for the completion of the comprehensive plan. Goff does expect the board to move fairly quickly.

“Let’s say by a year from now I’d like to think we’ll have our comprehensive plan draft probably completed,” he said.

Goff stressed that the public will see forms of the plan before the draft is submitted to the town board and that the document is a “living document” and will open to change during the drafting process.

If residents are interested in the process before the baseline document is released they can attend planning board meetings the first and third Wednesday of every month. Goff said the meetings aren’t that interesting at the moment since the board is doing research but there is a public comment time set aside at the second meeting each month.

“They can listen to us ponder these weighty issues,” he said. “A couple three people have shown up over the months, they’ve been congenial and were just curious about what’s going on.”

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