Contributed by Nat Prentice
Philipstown is updating its Comprehensive Plan, written in 2006. The committee coordinating the update is asking residents who live and work in town to participate in the process by completing a survey questionnaire. The more people who complete the survey, the better the updated Plan will reflect the needs of the community.
What is a Comprehensive Plan?
A Comprehensive Plan is a framework for the future. Local officials look to it for guidance. It is an easy-to-read guidebook for making day-to-day policy decisions. However, to be useful, a Comprehensive Plan must reflect current realities. The political, social, and environmental shifts that have taken place since the adoption of Philipstown’s last Comprehensive Plan in 2006 have altered the Town’s planning priorities. As such, an updated Plan is required to set forth goals and actions that will enable Philipstown to navigate these shifts and continue to thrive as a desirable place to live and work for the next 10 years and beyond.
Since its adoption, the Comprehensive Plan has been used often and contributed meaningfully to the high quality of life we enjoy in Philipstown. For example, the Plan inspired the simplification of the Town’s zoning code and the creation of an Open Space Index, which identified the properties in Philipstown that are important to preserve so that the character of the town can be maintained. The Plan also led to the creation of a Natural Resources Protection Plan, which is now in the process of being updated.
Without “road testing” by the public, the goals and actions laid out in the Plan would not have been as useful. The active engagement of the town’s residents, who provided their insights and opinions in an initial charette and in many other forums in the period leading up to the Plan’s adoption, was critical to its success.
Things have changed since 2006. Maintaining a supply of affordable housing and preserving the historic character of the town remain challenging issues. Calls for increasing climate change mitigation efforts, improving the health and well-being of our citizens, and instituting visitor management measures have grown louder.
The need for more education in the form of “best practice” guidelines for improving our resilience to a growing list of environmental threats is increasingly clear. Our planning tools need to be re-sharpened and the Comprehensive Plan needs to reflect the changes that have taken place over the last 14 years.
Given how much the residents of Philipstown have already told us in recent years and what we have learned from previous Comprehensive Plan public engagements, the Update Committee is opening the new survey to fill in the gaps in our understanding of how the people who live and work here envision the future.
Please visit www.philipstown2020.org to learn more and click the button below to complete the survey. Your opinion matters. We look forward to sharing the final Plan with you by the end of this year.
Putnam County Business Council Secretary Nat Prentice, CFA, CAP®, is a board member of the Cold Spring Chamber of Commerce and principal of Prentice Investment Management, LLC.
