2020 Charlestown Comprehensive Plan Is Accessible, Inclusive And Best-Advertised And Promoted Plan

The following letter was submitted to local newspapers and is reprinted here with permission of the author Ruth Platner. Ruth is the current Chair of the Charlestown Planning Commission.

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Since the kick-off meeting for the rewrite of the Charlestown Comprehensive Plan in July 2014 until the public hearing on April 14, 2021, there have been 117 Planning Commission meetings with the plan on the agenda. The majority of those meetings were workshops—entire meetings devoted to the plan. All these meetings have allowed, and encouraged, public comment and participation. All these meetings have minutes available online and most have videos. Throughout the entire process, draft chapters have been available at the town’s website for the public to review, comment on, and effect change.

I was involved in the 1991 Comprehensive Plan, its 2006 update, and now this recent rewrite. This is the most accessible, inclusive and best-advertised and promoted plan.

It was a different world 30 years ago, in 1991. There was no Internet. Email was just beginning for people with dial-up connections. There were no Facebook and Twitter. In 1991, nearly every Charlestown home had a newspaper-delivery box out front. If you needed to get a message out, you only had to get a story in one of the three local papers. But if you wanted to participate, you had to show up in person to every meeting.

In 1991 there wasn’t a website where you could watch a video of the meeting, or download the draft materials. People were directly involved because that was the only way to participate. In 1991, as a member of the public, one had to attend every public meeting of the 1991 Plan in person. My husband and I had volunteered to be members of two of the committees working to create the plan, but we didn’t get appointed. We didn’t have access to drafts of what was proposed in the committee meetings. When there were public meetings, we had to listen carefully to what was said and speak up to make sure the things we cared about were protected.

By the 2006 Comprehensive Plan update, the world had changed, and citizen engagement had steeply declined. The introduction to the 2006 Plan notes that only one member of the general public attended a meeting of the plan.

This newest plan has been developed entirely in the Internet age, and we have fully used those tools. The agendas, minutes, and videos of the meetings are available online. Drafts of chapters have been available online as they were first written and as they changed. A Comprehensive Plan survey was mailed to every household in June 2015. In October 2020 a brochure describing the finished draft was sent town wide with easy instructions on how to access the final draft and how to make comments. The plan has been advertised repeatedly in the newspaper, and on several email lists, various websites, different Facebook groups, Twitter and Nextdoor.com. And, yes, we even did go door to door, asking thousands of people in Charlestown what they like most about our town and where they think change might be needed.

Could we have done more to engage the public? It’s hard to imagine how, short of paying participants. As a society we are paying a price for not supporting our local newspapers. Part of that price is that to inform and engage the public, one must now go to extraordinary lengths to spread a message across multiple platforms.

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You can learn more about the author, Ruth Platner, at her profile page.

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Banner image is a photo of one of Charlestown’s residents, a Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly, by Cliff Vanover.