Standish residents have only three weeks remaining to inspect the draft Comprehensive Plan before its final scheduled public hearing on May 4. On June 6, the Standish Town Council will vote on the plan’s adoption.
Charged with updating and improving the existing plan, which was created in 1992, the Comprehensive Plan Update Committee has been hammering out the plan’s details for nearly two and a half years.
According to Committee Chair Carol Billington, the biggest changes reflected in the new plan are stronger incentives for targeting new growth into recognized growth areas, which include Steep Falls, Standish Corner (the intersection of routes 35 and 25) and Sebago Lake Village.
Implementing a two-tier growth cap, the committee seeks to guide projected growth by allowing smaller lot sizes and diverse housing types, such as apartments or elderly housing, in growth and transitional areas. Architectural design, buffering and appropriate access would guide new commercial development and retail and service-oriented businesses would be encouraged.
In low growth areas, subdivisions would be required to preserve open space and any commercial development on highway corridors would be limited to businesses that support “nature-based tourism” or that “help sustain the rural resource production economy.”
A total of 85 building permits would be issued per year. Of those, 60 would be in the growth area, with 25 issued in the rural area.
Also in the new plan, is a proposal for a village center design study to upgrade the center and “avoid the Gorham and North Windham-type traffic patterns.”
The purpose of a town’s comprehensive plan, Billington said, is to “make its zoning legal.”
“It follows the state-mandated guidelines that the town has to embrace,” she said. “If you don’t have a comprehensive plan approved by the state, you lose the ability to apply for grant money and it puts your zoning regulations into question.”
Though it has since dwindled to a dozen, when the committee was first appointed, it was 52 members strong. Billington said that those first meetings were overwhelming and a bit frustrating.
“There were a lot of people with a lot of different interests,” she said. “It was hard to keep focused. We had monthly meetings and month after month I’d come back asking ‘how are we ever going to get there from here?'”
But with help from the Greater Portland Council of Governments, contracted by the town to assist the committee, and from various guest speakers, the group’s members began to educate themselves and the immense task became less daunting.
The committee held four public outreach meetings, which were met with poor attendance – a total of 31 participants. Next, it designed a survey to obtain residents’ feedback on what they felt was most important for Standish.
Once the survey results were tabulated, the committee held two public forums, with a total of 25 people attending.
“Although Standish is a town of about 10,000, only 21 people attended the first meeting and four, the second,” Billington said.
Even though the seeming lack of public interest has frustrated Billington, she’s trying to look at it positively.
“Maybe that means the good news is there are no hot issues in Standish – taxes are low, we’re not under tremendous growth pressure,” she said.
But she hopes residents will take the time to review the updated Comprehensive Plan, available both at the Standish Municipal Center and on the town’s Web site, and to attend the final public hearing, Thursday, May 4 at 7 p.m. at the municipal center.
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