Morristown to revisit rejected town plan

It cannot regain that status without regional approval of its town plan.

“It’s an opportunity that we’re missing, and I think it would be a shame for us not to really drill down and take another hard look at that,” Palermo said during an Oct. 24 joint meeting between the selectboard and village trustees.

Town officials scuttled their chances of regaining that designation last year when they rolled the dice and adopted a town plan that contained a small passage objecting to attempts by other Lamoille County towns to lower their speed limits, forcing Morristown commuters to drive slower through those towns.

The 2022-2030 town plan was approved by the selectboard and the village trustees in May 2022 after a grueling months-long adoption process that saw residents come out of the woodwork to offer feedback on innumerable aspects of the plan — it went through more than 30 revisions before finally crossing the finish line.

However, the two boards signed off on the plan despite being warned that the Lamoille County Planning Commission’s board of directors would likely vote it down because of speed limit language.

And it did, on a 9-3 vote held in late July 2022.

“I think having a municipal plan which codifies, as a matter of policy, opposition to another town’s efforts to reduce the speed limit, is the antithesis of working creatively together,” Brian Leven, vice chair of the regional planning board and representative from Stowe, said after the vote.

This week, Leven said he is pleased that some in Morristown are willing to come back to the table. He said that even when Morristown is acting in its best interests, it also plays an important role in the region, as the hub for industry, large retailers and social services.

However, he said the town was given ample heads-up about the language the regional planners found objectionable.

“They elected to keep that language in there without changing it, so it really shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the board ended up voting the way it did,” Leven said Tuesday.

Regional planning board chair Caleb Magoon is also bullish on helping Morristown get its plan updated.

“Quite frankly, we want their plan to go through,” Magoon said Tuesday. “It’s in the county’s interest for that to happen and we want to collaborate with them to make that happen.”

‘Cutting room floor’

Laura Streets, another first-year selectboard member who last month got the ball rolling on revisiting the town plan, said she was flummoxed that no one else had taken the initiative in the past 15 months.

“Part of what I’ve encountered as a new selectperson is that the previous selectboard left a lot of things unfinished,” Streets said. “It’s a fairly easy thing to finish, and I was somewhat appalled that it was just left dangling.”

It isn’t that hard to amend, according to documents from the Lamoille County Planning Commission. It would just require an amendment to the plan, which is permitted by state law. It would still be a months-long process, though, with no guarantee the state would approve its re-designation.

After consulting with the regional planners in October, Jason Luneau, Morristown’s interim town administrator — he’s also the town police chief — urged town planning director Todd Thomas to amend the problematic town plan so the document could satisfy the regional planners’ calls for more collaborative language.

“The town is losing out on lots of money by not having the downtown designation,” Luneau wrote in an Oct. 14 email. “This includes funding for sidewalks, which we all know are in rough shape at various spots in town.”

However, Thomas, who authored the town plan with help from the planning council at the time, dug in his heels and resisted calls to amend it, going so far as seemingly threatening to quit if made to do the work.

“I brought this idea to a couple planning council members last week, and they laughed at it,” Thomas wrote in reply to Luneau. “The only thing administration can really do to move a new town plan forward is unappoint planning council members. You might need a new planning Director as well. I’ll talk to the council about this again, but this idea as dead as a doornail.”

Thomas, in an Oct. 16 email exchange with planning council chair Etienne Hancock, said even if the selectboard is united in pursuing town plan amendments, he said the trustees “are 99% likely to be completely opposed” to a new town plan.

“The Trustees are long tenured and they’re not going to jump just because a few new green Selectboard members are demanding it,” Thomas wrote.

But while trustees chair Tom Snipp, during the Oct. 24 joint meeting, expressed some concern about downtown designation and how it relates to Act 250, neither he nor his fellow trustees expressed outright opposition to it.

Hancock, one of only two council members on the five-person board who worked on the current town plan, was far more amenable to amending the plan. He said in an Oct. 16 email to Thomas that he was fine with some things in the plan being “left on the cutting room floor.”

“I want it to be completely transparent when, where, and why a good idea was not acted upon, and who rejected it,” Hancock told Thomas. “The planning council will not be the body that rejects amending the town plan as Jason has requested.”

In an email to the News & Citizen this week, Hancock inferred, however, that he didn’t think the language was as offensive as the regional planners made it out to be, not enough to tank years’ worth of work by Morristown planning officials.

“I can say that the segment of text in question within the town plan perhaps does not hold value commensurate with two rejections by LCPC and all the work which lead to those moments,” Hancock said this week. “That train of events has left a lot of ill will in its wake.”

According to minutes from the planning council’s Oct. 25 meeting — neither the planning council nor the development review board record their meetings — the council conditioned any work on the plan on getting pre-approval from the selectboard, the village trustees and the Lamoille County Planning Commission.

However, Gary Holloway, the state’s downtown program manager, said that kind of pre-approval is not legal.

“LCPC cannot offer approval prior to receiving the revised town plan, but this suggests that it’s conditioned on prior approval,” Holloway wrote in an Oct. 27 email to Luneau. “The law does not allow for this type of process.”

Hancock this week said he and the planning council simply want to make sure that any work they do updating the plan isn’t in vain.

“It is my hope that we can all align around the idea that a regionally approved town plan is a positive step forward for all parties,” he said. “But it is not worth the work if it faces last minute rejection by any of the four voting boards over concerns that are not clear at the start when they can be properly addressed.”