The Hartland Selectboard will hold the first of two public hearings on the proposed 2026 Town Plan on Monday, June 1, at 6 p.m. at Damon Hall.
By state statute, town plans in Vermont are supposed to be readopted by local governing bodies every eight years. Late last year, the Hartland Selectboard readopted the municipality’s 2017 Town Plan, allowing six months beyond the earlier plan’s expiration date for the local Planning Commission to deliberate regarding the recommended provisions of the 2026 blueprint for the future development of the community. At its regular bimonthly meeting on Monday, May 4, the town selectboard voted 4-1 to move a draft of the 2026 Town Plan forward to the public for its consideration at the upcoming public hearing.
Depending upon what the selectboard members hear from the public on June 1, the proposed plan could be amended to reflect the sentiments of local residents, including homeowners, renters, businesspeople, and more. In any event, the 2026 plan will be subjected to further scrutiny at a second public hearing, which must be warned 15 days in advance following the June 1 hearing. The upcoming gathering will be devoted solely to discussion and consideration of the newly proposed 2026 Town Plan, with the regularly scheduled bimonthly selectboard meeting that evening postponed until Monday, June 8.
The distinction between strong verbiage, such as the use of the word “shall” in a town plan, and more conciliatory wording, such as “should” or “consider,” was the subject of considerable discussion as the Hartland Selectboard moved forward with the latest draft of the 2026 plan on May 4. Bryan Kovalick, a planner with the Two Rivers-Ottauquechee Regional Commission (TRORC), worked on the latest revisions to the Hartland Planning Commission-recommended version of the new plan, focusing on inserting less directive language into the plan that will be presented to the public at the first hearing before the selectboard. Kovalick reviewed his modest changes to the document in a brief presentation to the board members last week. Selectperson Jim Rielly voiced his opinion that Kovalick’s final edits to the draft should be returned to the Planning Commission for its review, but other members of the town governing body demurred, contending that the review process had gone on long enough and that it was time for the proposed 2026 Town Plan to be subjected to public review and comment.
“We are going to take all the comments we [receive] at the public hearings, and then at a future selectboard meeting we can discuss [them] and make changes if that’s what we decide to do,” Hartland Selectboard vice chair Thomas Kennedy offered. “We can ask the Planning Commission to please come to the [June 1] public hearing with suggestions regarding the changes that have been made, and the selectboard can consider those changes. We may not agree with them, but we can consider them.”
Coincident with the ongoing work on the new town plan, the selectboard and the municipal planning commissioners have been working in partnership with the TRORC since late last year to craft the municipality’s first-ever unified development bylaws, which will incorporate detailed, proscriptive zoning regulations that will be legally binding but will flow from the less specific verbiage of the yet-to-be-adopted 2026 Town Plan. Carefully defined zoning regulations carry much more weight in Act 250 land use and Vermont Environmental Court deliberations than the looser, more discretionary language typically contained in town plans.
For more on this, please see our May 14 edition of the Vermont Standard.
