Conventional wisdom in Connecticut holds that our towns are fiercely jealous of their rights to self rule and want nothing to do with regional planning. Given that we eliminated county government altogether about 40 years ago and bled our former regional planning entity out of existence through underfunding, those sentiments were not without some foundation. But times have changed in the Litchfield Hills, and communities which only a few years ago were grumbling about the "green noose" of land protection around their fiscal throats are now calling for better coordination among towns and land trusts on issues of mutual concern and at the regional level.
Last night, over 120 people gathered on an icy October meeting in the senior center meeting hall in Falls Village to hear a small panel of conservation professionals - myself among them - talk about what our landscape will look like in the next twenty years of conservation and development and whether we saw opportunities for more formalized, effective collaboration on growth and land preservation from town to town and across the Litchfield Hills. The meeting had been convened by the new 1st Selectwoman Pat Mechare of Canaan/Falls Village and was co-sponsored by the town planning and zoning and inland wetlands commissions. Mechare said:
“The goal of this forum is to begin exploring ways that our towns can work with each other and with local conservation groups to retain the landscape we treasure."
Four 1st selectmen and members of town boards from Salisbury, North Canaan, Norfolk, Sharon, Falls Village, Cornwall, Kent and Washington Connecticut attended, as well as many local citizens, planners, and realtors.
The overwhelming sentiment of those in attendance was that we needed better information to inform land use decision making, more contact with each other and collaboration on regional threats and priorities, and in the vacuum left by the absence of regional planning at the state or county level, we were prepared to work together toward those ends. We talked about affordability and our diminished agricultural land base. We spoke about the need for viable rural economies. But no one, even those who have in the past been champions of private property rights and highly resistant to and skeptical of the motives of conservation entities, argued against such an effort. On the contrary, it was so welcome that the 1st selectwoman of Kent stood up and offered to host the next forum in her town and move the process forward.
I've been in the conservation business long enough to realize that this momentum and energy will flag unless we stoke the furnace, but the energy is there and it bubbled up from the communities themselves. The Litchfield Hills Greenprint has extraordinary local and regional data and tools that can help inform this process, but through self-determination, the seeds of a regional approach have been planted.
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