The Redding Planning Commission is updating the Town Plan of Conservation and Development, which is an overall plan for the future development of the town.
According to Planning Commission Chair Toby Welles, members have been meeting weekly to go over the plan, and by the end of the summer they’ll have chapters to send to various town bodies for their feedback.
One of the Connecticut General Statutes mandates a municipality update its plan every 10 years. Redding’s was last updated in 2008.
“Every town has a sort of plan that is used as a baseline for establishing an ethos for the different aspects of planning in the town,” said Welles, who has been on the Planning Commission for 15 years and was involved with the creation of the 2008 town plan, which is available to download on the town website.
The plan consists of chapters, each containing a set of recommendations for areas to work on for the next 10 years.
There are nine chapters in the 2008 town plan, each chapter 10 to 20 pages long.
The Planning Commision, made up of eight members, has been working on updating the town plan since November 2017. Since it’s such a large project, it requires the input of all Planning Commission members.
“We break into teams of people with certain areas of expertise to review the current town plan, and parcel those chapters out to those people,” said Welles, who has lived in Redding since 1992. “They present their ideas for which chapters in the existing plan should be amended or edited for the new town plan.”
The purpose of the town plan is to give a broad look at all the different attributes of the town: “The trends, the influencing factors, the areas for concern, the areas in need of special attention, and a creation of an ethos to guide decision-making as issues arise,” Welles said. “It’s our guiding set of principles for the town.”
After all chapters have been revised, a draft of the plan will be sent to other members of the town’s government to get their feedback.
In the fall, there will be a public hearing where residents may give feedback on the plan, and vote on it. Once it’s approved by the majority of voters who come out to vote at the hearing, “it becomes a statement of purpose in all the different aspects of town government over the next decade,” Welles said.
Welles said 10 years is a good interval to update the town plan because “things change economically in terms of real estate and so it’s good to redraft it from time to time, and make it apropos of what is currently the situation.”
Longtime Redding resident John Hayes is the hired certified planning consultant who is gathering statistical data for the plan. He has worked on prior Redding town plans.
However, in updating the majority of the plan, “we are using our knowledge of the town,” he said.
The new town plan will primarily be digital, except for a small number of printed editions that contain town maps.
Updates to 2008 plan
About 30% of the town plan has virtually no changes since the 2008 plan was created. This includes chapters that cover the history, environment, and typography of Redding.
Another 50% of the plan has minor changes, and 20% contains substantial changes on the topics of housing, economics, and Georgetown development.
One of the most significant changes in the 2018 plan from the current one concerns the former Gilbert & Bennett wire mill property in Georgetown.
The Gilbert & Bennett wire mill, once a manufacturing company in Georgetown that closed long ago, left a contaminated site classified as a brownfield.
Redding is suing to foreclose millions of dollars in unpaid tax liens on the property.
“When we last wrote the plan, we didn’t really know what was going to happen to the site,” Welles said. “After we wrote it, the developer went bankrupt.”
He said this time around, the Planning Commission decided to devote an entire chapter to Gilbert & Bennett alone.
“Because so much is unknown about the future of Georgetown, all we can do is to try to establish guidelines for what will benefit the town, and what some of the dangers or pitfalls would be if the town were to be developed in a hasty or thoughtless manner,” Welles said.
Another part of Redding that has changed since the 2008 plan was created is its demographics.
“We have people who are aging, so we have a larger proportion of older residents,” Welles said.
In addition, real estate values have shifted and housing prices have fallen, so these facts will also be reflected in the new town plan as well.
According to Welles, going forward, one of the chief concerns facing Redding is protecting its watershed, which makes up 89% of its land.
“We have the pressure for protection of the water that supplies [us] with drinking, and we have at the same time, pressure with the real estate market heating up,” Welles said. “We need to balance our stewardship of the watershed verses pressures for development and the impact that this might have on the watershed.”
Taking stock
In developing the 2018 town plan, Planning Commission members are looking at the pressures that are on the town, potential areas for concern, and what residents need to pay attention to as a town to keep things functioning well.
“Creating the town plan is the heart of what we do as planners. The town plan is the blueprint of how we should think about all the decisions that have shaped the town in the next decade,” Welles said. “I think it’s always interesting to take stock so it causes us to stand still for a time and look at where we have been and where we are going, and to take a long view for the health of Redding.”