The Hartland Planning Commission (HPC) will continue with its longstanding consideration of a new town plan indefinitely in the wake of the recent Vermont Supreme Court decision allowing the construction of the large-scale Sunnymede Farm outlet store in a rural area just north of the I-91 interchange at the gateway to the town, half a mile from the village center.
The HPC opted to embrace the cautious, go-slow approach to adopting a new town plan and sending it on to the Hartland Selectboard for its consideration after meeting for the first time last week with Kevin Geiger, the director of planning for the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission (TRORC), to discuss in detail regional and statewide land use policies and the process of crafting a new town plan in particular.
HPC interim chair Dan Jerman, who replaced former chair Dave Dukeshire last week after Dukeshire stepped down from the planning body because of his strong discontent with the Sunnymede decision, spoke Tuesday morning with the Standard about the process for developing a new version of the Hartland Town Plan moving forward.
“We’ve had a good, working relationship with the TRORC for quite a few years, but on this particular town plan draft, this was the first real meeting we’ve had with them,” Jerman said. “We’ve sort of muddled through the process for the better part of the last two years. We were concentrating on fixing things up with Sunnymede, and that was no easy task: if you are relying on the town plan to dictate land use, it is quite a bit more iffy than if you have zoning ordinances.”
“What we have to decide fairly soon is whether we’re going to continue using the town plan as sort of our only land use guidelines in terms of Act 250, in which case given the decisions that we’ve had with Sunnymede we really have to spend a lot of time shoring things up so there’s no mistaking from future courts looking as to whether the plan is prescriptive rather than aspirational, which is the term the courts have used for Sunnymede.
“The other avenue we could take would be to tailor the town plan pretty much along the lines of the regional plan. And then if we approve that, that could be the basis of ordinances and zoning bylaws,” Jerman stated.
For more on this story, please see the June 26 edition of the Vermont Standard.
