The job before the town is to figure out what kind of town we have now and how we got here; what kind of town we want, and how to get there. Harvard’s town board members, volunteers, and citizens have about 18 months to sort out issues as complex as Devens and revenues, housing and Chapter 40B implications, the changing demographics and the economic development of small towns, and then to set policies and directions that will guide town personnel and boards through the next 10 years.
In an interview with the Press last week, Kara McGuire Minar, chairwoman of Harvard’s Planning Board—the town board responsible for the development and publication of the Master Plan—said that in the last Master Plan cycle, people were focused on town center and “looking for a sense of community and a place to gather.” Pointing to some of the successes that resulted from the work of planning for the growth of the town, Minar said, “We now have a new library; the sewer project in town center is a major accomplishment set up in the Master Plan 10 years ago; the General Store sat empty a few years ago. We are, overall, on the right track on town center,” she continued, “so now we need to figure out what people want to see in the commercial district. How do they want to go about developing it … what the extent of development should be.”
Minar said the challenges for the upcoming 2012 Master Plan will likely “involve how we [Harvard] meet our fiscal responsibilities. … Ten years ago we were looking at the Ayer Road special village permit; the next step is to address what is going to happen in the commercial district.” She said the town needs to figure out “the kinds of things that we’d like to see in a commercial development and, more importantly, how we want them to be done,” warning that “You can end up with something you were not planning for and can’t control.”
In the area of town character preservation, Minar said she believes work remains in town center. “The Municipal Buildings Committee has done a lot of work,” she said, “and we need to choose how we’re going to continue to revitalize town center based on that work.”
Some of the questions she has are, “How do we connect town center out to McCurdy track? How could we walk from the Hildreth House all the way down to the pond? How could we change the Common to make it more pedestrian friendly? Could we build a bike path to connect town center with McCurdy and maybe even to the rail trail in Ayer?”
Demographics will also be an important topic for the 2012 Master Plan, with the “boomer generation” population growing in all towns across the nation, even here in Harvard. “We now have more elderly residents,” said Minar. “How you connect them to the track? How do you let them across the street to get on the track? We don’t want to end up with a strip mall where you take your life in your hands like those over on 2A in Acton.”
Related to demographics and housing, Minar said, “The town needs to take some time to really think hard and really be strategic about affordable housing … try to plan this more concretely so that the town is not hijacked by some developer and, because it hasn’t met its housing production goals [from the state], getting 40B developments that really don’t work for the town.” She said, “The 42 units behind Dunkin’ Donuts gives us a little time, but we need to figure out what our strategic approaches are for affordable housing.”
Master Plans are policy documents and don’t regulate land use, but their ideas and directions based on the sense of the community get turned into bylaws that can regulate. The Master Plan is important as a guide to the future character and development of the town and, Minar says, “You may not have the prescriptions for the nuts and bolts,” of exactly what should happen in a 10-year plan, “but you sure can tell what the look and feel needs to be like.”
