Communities update land plans

At least five Rochester-area towns are updating their municipal master plans or starting the process.
 
Others have recently completed the task that experts say is essential to the effective operation of the communities.
 
"Usually people update their master plan when they sense something is amiss," said Monroe County Planning Manager Paul Johnson.
 
Signals that a community needs to update its plan include "a lot of applications for a particular type of use, or in locations where they didn't see it before," Johnson said.
 
Efforts to update master plans also are prompted by "an increased awareness of environmental issues and the need to protect open space and have space available for parks and recreation and even passive use or just preservation," Johnson said.
 
Master plans, sometimes called comprehensive plans, allow government officials to consider all the land in a community and decide on the best uses for particular areas, while balancing issues of traffic, open space preservation, and commercial and residential development.
 
In Webster, a committee started working on a new plan in January. The 20-member panel of residents and town officials, which meets every two weeks, is working its way through the existing six-year-old plan page by page, said Supervisor Ronald Nesbitt.
 
"It's the bible for the planning board. Whenever there's a controversial issue, you know that everybody will turn to that as the guideline," Nesbitt said.
 
A big issue dealt with in the 2000 master plan in Webster was open space. It expressed the community's desire to protect land from development. That led to a public referendum to spend $5.9 million to preserve open space. So far, the town has protected about 1,000 acres by either buying the land or the rights to develop it.
 
With an aging population and an increasing number of developments to serve the elderly, Nesbitt expects that the new master plan will include guidelines for the design of housing geared toward seniors. He also hopes the plan covers larger lot sizes, which will maintain at least the appearance of open space. And he wants commercial development restricted mainly to the corridor between Route 104 and Ridge Road.
 
Chili, Gates and Hamlin also are updating their master plans, and Victor intends to do so. Sweden and Ogden recently completed new plans.
 
The town of Hamlin is updating its nine-year-old master plan with monthly meetings open to the public, Supervisor Dennis Roach said.
 
"It sets forth a guideline or a template of what the residents want the town to look like 10 years down the road, and it really guides your development and your zoning," Roach said.
 
He expects the plan will reflect changing issues facing municipal officials. In the same way towns had to scurry about 10 years ago to address concerns over cell phone antenna towers, town officials today must prepare for new concerns, such as wind turbines and solar panels.
 
"If you're not looking at it, you're leaving yourself wide open," Roach said. "I think you've put yourself at risk to have something develop in the town that perhaps you didn't really want there because you hadn't thought about it."
 
Hamlin resident Peter Tonery was pleased that the process to develop a new master plan has been opened to the public.
 
Tonery, a former supervisor candidate and leader of the Democratic committee in Hamlin, believes citizens should take a greater interest in their community's master plan.
 
"It's vital to what happens in their immediate neighborhood and for the future of the town as a whole," he said.
 
That advice usually goes unheeded. People seem to go to municipal government meetings to complain about development only when it is much too late, Tonery said.
 
"They don't understand that the foundational concepts which enabled the change they're now concerned about took place a long time ago in the development of the comprehensive plan."