Bruce Hyman, the planning consultant Waldoboro hired to facilitate the visioning process they’ve been working this year, presented the final draft of the Waldoboro Community Visioning to the Board of Selectmen at their regular meeting Oct. 26.
The report is the culmination of months of public meetings, surveys, focus groups and committees.
“The designs and ideas in this report are ways to emphasize and build on what’s there, not make Waldoboro something it’s not,” Hyman told the board.
In building the report, the town formed a Community Visioning Steering Committee, which helped drive the process. They then held three regional visioning meetings, one town-wide meeting and received hundreds of responses to a paper survey. All this asked the question, “What do you want Waldoboro to look like in 2030.”
Respondents on both the surveys and at the public meetings were asked to come up with specific projects and themes they would like Waldoboro to focus on in the coming years.
Economic development, establishing the downtown village as a destination, and improving the town’s connection to the Medomak River were the three most common threads throughout the process, Hyman said.
The report then sets out specific possibilities for the village and the Rt. 1 corridor.
In the downtown, residents said they wanted better signage, more creative uses of public space, better street lighting and building façade and streetscape improvements, according to the report.
“Right now the downtown kind of turns its back to the river,” Hyman said. To help deal with this problem, the report calls for a river walk – a public trail system along the river.
For the Rt. 1 corridor, residents said they wanted to “create a welcoming and memorable impression,” Hyman said. This could be accomplished with better signage directing people to the downtown and to sites in North Waldoboro, better pedestrian facilities and better use of the curbs and medians, according to the report.
The report calls for three projects that Hyman described as “catalytic projects.”
“These projects have the chance to jump start your work on the town,” Hyman said. “They’re the projects we think will give the most bang for the buck.”
Those three projects are the creation of the river walk, downtown streetscape and building façade improvements and the creation of farmers’ and crafters’ markets.
The markets are a chance to both increase business for local artisans and farmers and create a marketable draw for visitors to come to Waldoboro.
The Waldoboro Community Visioning report will be used in conjunction with the bicycle/pedestrian and downtown master plans currently in the works to create a comprehensive plan for Waldoboro.
That comprehensive plan will give town officials a better picture of what Waldoboro residents want and help them govern in the years to come, said Town Manager William Post.
The comprehensive plan will also be compared with the regional plan for Gateway 1, to help the town determine which parts of Gateway 1 work with Waldoboro residents’ visions and which might be in conflict, Post said.
The policy will put a cap on which purchases need to be approved by the selectmen, and govern when projects must be put out to bid.
Review of the policy was tabled and will be resumed at the board’s next meeting on Nov. 9.
Waldoboro resident Craig Lewis thanked the board for their timely work in starting the purchasing policy, which was called for at their previous meeting on Oct. 12.
“It had been on the list of goals for the two years that I’ve been here,” Post said. “Then it got pushed to the top of the list.”
In his comments on the purchasing policy, Lewis also called for the town to investigate an idling policy that would prevent town employees, such as police officers, from leaving their vehicles running for undue amounts of time.
