The long-awaited 2025 revision of the Hartland Town Plan has moved one critical step closer to fruition.
The Hartland Planning Commission (HPC), which has been navigating an at times laborious path toward a new town plan for nearly three years, held the first of two public hearings on the draft of the 2025 plan at Damon Hall on Wednesday evening, Oct. 22. A small contingent of about a dozen concerned residents listened to a presentation about the draft plan led by HPC co-chairs Daniel Jerman and John Magliocco. The HPC hearing focused nearly in its entirety solely on one aspect of the 13-section 2025 Hartland Town Plan — the first and most critical segment, which addresses overall land use in the town.
Other portions of the plan remain largely unchanged from the last iteration of the townwide planning blueprint, which was last enacted by the Hartland Selectboard upon the recommendation of the HPC in 2017. Beyond the land use recommendations contained in the plan, other subject areas address topics such as natural, historic, and scenic resources, water resources, housing, energy, transportation, and economic development.
HPC co-chair Jerman kicked off the Oct. 22 public hearing with an overview of the process for drafting the revised town planning document for 2025, highlighting key aspects of the changes made to the 2017 plan it will replace. “Just as a matter of introduction — and I think most of you understand — the town plan is just that: it’s a plan. It’s not an enforceable document. It’s not an ordinance. It’s just really a statement of where we want to go as [a town],” Jerman said.
HPC member Kate Donahue and Jerman both called attention to a 2023 survey of town residents related to the redrafting of the town plan, which is required by state statute at least once every eight years.
“One of the striking things, at least to me as someone who’s been on the [HPC] a while, is how little the opinions have changed over the course of the years,” Jerman offered. “Most people just want to keep it the way it is — they’re pretty happy with the town — and that’s the way we feel on the commission. The biggest change that we picked up on in the survey was the recognition that more affordable housing is needed, so in my mind, the major change in this town plan, as opposed to past ones, is that we’ve pretty much taken away anything that we would ask Act 250 to enforce in terms of residential development. No more lot size [restrictions, for example]. Act 250 doesn’t begin until there’s a development that’s going to develop 10 or more housing units. So most people will just probably never see Act 250 and never even have to know about the town plan with anything they’re going to do on their property.”
One aspect of the draft of the 2025 Hartland Town Plan that drew comments from the sparse audience at the hearing related to the HPC’s recommendation that the town selectboard seriously consider developing enforceable zoning ordinances that would be consistent with the spirit and recommendations of the town plan, which, as Jerman noted is basically an advisory planning document and not a legally enforceable regulatory measure. Jerman responded to a query from Hartland resident Amy Ashline about the wisdom of establishing zoning ordinances governing land use and other matters within the town.
“What we’re trying to convey is that this plan is not zoning,” Jerman reiterated. “There’s nothing you can enforce in here and say you can’t do it because the town plan says you can’t do it. But we, as a planning commission, would support [the adoption of ordinances by the selectboard]. Hartland is one of the very few towns now that doesn’t have any land use ordinances. And our position is that we think some well-thought-out and targeted ordinances are a good idea, so that we’re not in a position of relying on only Act 250 and so that we can take some more control over things.”
The HPC was slated to give its final approval to its recommendations for the 2025 town plan revision at a commission meeting at Damon Hall on Nov. 4, thereby passing the document on to the Hartland Selectboard along with citizen comments from the Oct. 22 meeting. The selectboard will then schedule one or two of its own public hearings on the revised plan before passing it as is or amending it and adopting a revised version.
For more on this, please see our November 6 edition of the Vermont Standard.
