Hurray for a newspaper able to print in color proposed land use and zoning maps for a town. As someone who knows Dummerston a bit through teenage residency in Putney and continuing but occasional visits to the Brattleboro region, I have the following questions or thoughts:
• There are other Vermont towns in which the center is not on a major contemporary corridor, and one wonders how they create - should it be considered a public good or aim - a sense of centeredness.
• There are other Vermont towns with two main travel corridors, or parallel but separate ribbons of somewhat-more-intense commercial development, and one wonders just what this bifurcation means, over time. A population (even of transients) primarily knowing just eastern Dummerston or just western Dummerston?
• Without ski developments, presumably higher land is less developed, or undeveloped, and lowlands with better agricultural potential compete with denser real-estate pressures. Such patterns are to be seen as enduring?
• Just what are the policy, even intellectual, implications of designating a seeming majority of town as “conservation” rather than using the term “forest lands,” which presumably those tracts are? Does that mean logging is not a predicted, or welcome, use?
• Could a greater sense of reality be achieved by issuing a map showing sizes of land ownership, with color designations for lot sizes predominating in less-than-one-acre parcels versus, say at an opposite polarity, parcels larger than 100 acres?
Regardless of what colors appear on official maps, many land-use decisions occur through family change, whether death, old age, children leaving town, changes of mind - such as retiring to Florida. Quite how these socioeconomic decisions could be mapped, I don't know, but some approximations might be made, through acreages.
• One purpose of an exercise, such as your Dummerston Planning Commission news coverage reports, is to guide future growth and change. There might be no need for planning if everything remained static into the future. But that is unlikely, as the inheritance of vast agricultural (or pastoral?) abandonment, attested by all those stone walls coursing through the town, demonstrate.
Is there a way by which predictable changes could be mapped, so townspeople might visually discern what the various zones imply or might look like, say a decade hence?
I like to think of the nearby town of Stratton as one example of change. What planner there in the 1920s could possibly conceive that 50 years hence the major growth node in the town, a ski resort with just over 1,000 condominium units, would develop as it has, if all one had known, from the slopes of Stratton Mountain, was the gradual withdrawal of human occupancy and consequent reforestation?
And who in Brattleboro 50 years ago could have predicted that a major employer in town, and hence a commuter traffic destination, would be on the rural setting of what had been the Zeke Persons estate? (I'm thinking of SIT/World Learning.)
Cheers to the town planners and to The Commons for enabling citizens and readers to ponder the future and possible scenarios of change. Such ponderings are a recondite undertaking. Just who knows what 2024 will bring to Dummerston?