While serving on the Planning Board, including six months as its chair, I learned a lot about the right way to get things done, and the wrong way. The bottom line is:
- Strategic planning is an ongoing process, not a once-in-every-10-years activity.
- The need to constantly address new planning issues and the complexity of those issues tax the limited experiential knowledge and the limited time availability of volunteers. Devens disposition, commercial development of the town’s C-district, and addressing our affordable housing shortfall are obvious examples.
- Consultants are a cost-effective, but time-ineffective, way to manage these planning challenges.
I didn’t know all this when I started. In the summer of 2011 I was asked by the planning board to serve on the Master Plan Steering Committee (MPSC). At the time I was told, and believed, that the only way to get a Master Plan completed was to hire a consulting firm that specialized in making Master Plans. I went into the planning process hopeful, ready to work, and with no negative feelings regarding consultants. As the year progressed and the MPSC worked with the team of consultants, I became increasingly aggravated and disillusioned with the process of educating them, re-doing their work, re-educating them, and editing their work. I asked my fellow MPSC members repeatedly if this was “normal” since I had not been through this process before. No one had a satisfactory answer. There was little flexibility in the consultants’ time for us and anything we had not prearranged from day one of the contract was quite difficult to change, even if it made more sense based on data we had gathered to go in a different direction. I felt as if we had paid for a Master Plan In-a-Box and that the seven or so committee members then spent hundreds of hours tailoring it specifically to Harvard and our unique situation with regards to Devens. The MPSC did an amazing job. The consultants cost the town thousands of dollars, but it was the MPSC members who were responsible for that success at the cost of many hours of volunteer time.
In October 2012 I signed up to take a class on making Master Plans in order to become informed on the best way for the Planning Board to move through the final Phase II of Master Plan completion. This class was taught by Judi Barrett, the Director of Planning at Community Opportunities Group. Ms. Barrett is a highly regarded consultant who makes Master Plans and who coincidentally also happened to make Harvard’s 2002 Master Plan. Since only three citizen planners attended the conference, we were able to discuss in depth the topic of planners doing Master Plans and since Ms. Barrett had spent so much time in Harvard, she was able to discuss with me Harvard specifically.
Ms. Barrett told me that since she is a consultant she would love to say that only consultants make, or should make, Master Plans, but that this is simply not true. She said that each town looks at its own resources and does as much as possible in-house. If a town employs a planner, then the planner and a committee might get the bulk of the work done and then hire out a small portion of the plan, or if the town’s planner is busy with other work, they may hire a consultant. Smaller towns especially have town planners who wear many hats: making master plans, writing grants, planning for economic development, housing, open space and conservation and so on. Glenn Eaton, the Montachusett Regional Planning Commission (MRPC) Director, was also present at this meeting and affirmed what Ms. Barrett was telling me. Additionally, a citizen planner from Westminster who was present informed me that Westminster had just hired a town planner who was tasked with developing and implementing a Master Plan for Westminster.
Ms. Barrett was quite surprised that Harvard had not already hired a professional planner, given the strong recommendation of the 2002 Master Planning Committee to do so, and observing the ever-mounting planning challenges that were overwhelming the volunteers on the Planning Board and Economic Development Committee, and the Devens Economic Analysis Team. After our conversation, I was convinced that, given Harvard’s particular planning challenges, unique culture, and track record of working with consultants, our town would be much better served by an in-house planner that would meet the ongoing need for retained institutional knowledge and professional objectivity. And most important, the town could make long-term use of the significant investment of time and energy it invested in making the personal connections and educating an in-house planner about the town.
Looking back, I was initially a believer in an all-volunteer Planning Board leveraging consultants as needed to get specific tasks done. Through my involvement in Phase I of the Harvard Master Plan, my six months as Chair of the Planning Board, and my two-year stint as the town representative to the MRPC, I have become convinced that investing in a town planner who will both develop and implement a living, breathing Master Plan is in the best interest of the town.
Michelle Catalina, former chair of the Planning Board, is a resident of Old Littleton Road.
