Newtown Already Among State’s Best For Long-Range, Planning

By John Voket

(This is the third part in a series examining Newtown’s efforts at strategic and long-term planning.)

When it comes to long-range or strategic planning, Newtown appears to be among the state’s best and most responsive communities. Only two towns ­— Redding and West Hartford — have moved beyond the planning programs in place locally.

According to the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, an agency that tracks the operations of city and town governments in the state, only Redding maintains a Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) overlaid with a municipal strategic plan.

But those parallel efforts are limited to a five-year horizon.

West Hartford maintains a ten-year CIP, but maintains no integrated or formalized townwide strategic or long-range planning program beyond what is required by the state — a Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD), the same as Newtown.

Most of the sources and local officials approached to comment on efforts to integrate communitywide long-range or strategic initiatives to guide capital planning say Newtown’s various department-based long-range and strategic planning programs are and have been successfully serving their purposes — in some cases for decades.

But a number of political candidates seeking office or reelection this November say that Newtown is either not doing it, or approaching planning in an unorganized or ineffective fashion.

The Independent Party of Newtown’s “Better Government” platform takes aim at a lack of planning, according to the group’s chairman and candidate for first selectman, Bruce Walczak.

“Many of us live in Newtown because of its rural, small town character, which we want to maintain,” he said in a recent position paper tied to the campaign.

“We want Blue Ribbon schools, well-maintained town facilities and reasonable town services. We want prosperous local businesses. We want accomplish all this while keeping Newtown affordable and creating a climate of tax stability,” Mr Walczak wrote. “To accomplish this, we need to have a government with the appropriate processes in place.”

Don’t Push It

While acknowledging that the IPN program to improve the town’s planning practices “does not reinvent the wheel,” Mr Walczak stated, “We do some planning. We have started to modernize our processes. But there remains significant room for improvement. Our plan builds on the positive things town government is doing.”

Individuals who have made planning their career, and who have familiarity with both the benefits and, yes, drawbacks of long-range planning, say there is a lot more to consider than stretching integrated financial and long-range or strategic planning practices beyond the town’s current five-year CIP and POCD, which is required by law to undergo updates every ten years.

George Benson, who heads up Newtown’s Land Use Department, warns that even looking out five years with a capital/strategic overlay, given the current state of the economy, could be “pushing it.”

“The CIP fluctuates with the economy,” Mr Benson said. “So [overlaying] even a five-year strategic plan is pushing it. It might lock the community into something we don’t want to do.”

The land use director and elected officials like Lilla Dean, chair of Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission, want to jump-start the POCD overhaul ahead of its ten-year requirement, and hope to make the document more “user-friendly.” But both also suggest that the farther out in time an official planning process extends, the more flexible it must be.

“Our yearly CIP is tied to the budget process,” Mr Benson said. “But the POCD is just a plan. People [can’t] use this as a punch list or a road map. We can always get better, but we have to watch getting too locked into a plan that can paralyze” local officials and staff.

Flexibility Is Crucial

Mr Benson said a call for better planning in the context of a political campaign “may sound good, but it shouldn’t define whether a town can or can’t do something. Long-range planning needs flexibility.”

Ms Dean believes the public will benefit, and understand a lot more about how the POCD serves as an almost daily tool for local planning, if the town is permitted to jump-start its revision process early and make its completion the new benchmark for ongoing ten-year revisions.

Currently the plan is up for review in 2014, but Ms Dean and Mr Benson both want to revise the POCD as soon as possible. The P&Z chair also believes the POCD should not mandate or drive future capital spending.

“It shouldn’t integrate, overlay, or underscore,” Ms Dean said. “It should complement [ongoing capital planning].”

Barry Bernabe, who helps more than 50 state municipalities, including Newtown, handle municipal bond offering, recently spoke before the Board of Finance saying the town’s level of capital planning meets, and in most cases exceeds, that of the other communities he works with. Mr Bernabe said Newtown can attribute its “excellent bond rating in great measure to capital planning processes that have been in place for years.”

“Bond rating agencies like to see a CIP. It’s always been a big positive for Newtown,” he said. But when it comes to sanctioned long-range or strategic planning, Mr Bernabe said, “Most towns have three- to five-year capital planning. West Hartford has a ten-year CIP, but most towns don’t put the kind of work into it that Newtown does.”

Mr Bernabe told The Bee that beyond the 52 communities he directly serves through Webster Bank, he has not encountered a single community in Connecticut with an official or integrated strategic or long-term plan, never mind one that is integrated with, or overlays a capital planning process like Newtown has.