Members of the Shepherdstown Planning Commission listen to the presentation on April 30.
On April 30, Shepherdstown’s Planning Commission held a hearing at which a special committee’s recommendations to update the town’s comprehensive plan were presented to the public.
Shepherdstown’s Mayor and Planning Commission chair Jim Auxer (image – right) turned over most of the meeting agenda to members of the town’s Comprehensive Plan Review Steering Committee. The all-volunteer review committee had previously delivered its 69-page report to the Planning Commission on February 26 after logging more than 1,100 hours of work.
The review committee’s charge was to assess whether the town’s 2014 comprehensive plan’s recommendations had been implemented.
Progress Noted – But Plan Mostly Ignored
Progress was noted in historic preservation, noted committee member Karene Motivans. But the review committee concluded that the 2014 plan had “been mostly parked on the proverbial shelf” by the town government. “What good is a good plan if no good comes from it?” review committee Phil Baker-Shenk (image – left) asked rhetorically.
To avoid a similar fate for the updated plan, the review committee recommended procedural changes to promote accountability for its implementation, such as assigning responsibility to specific town leaders and annual reporting by the town administrator.
Although the Planning Commission specifically did not task the review committee with actually updating the comprehensive plan, the review committee included recommended updates in its report for most sections of the plan to make it more realistic and to reflect changes that have taken place in the past 10 years.
The Town still needs to formally begin the process of actually updating the plan. State law requires this update process to be completed by December 2024.
Multiple members of the audience asked how the community’s input will be considered by the Planning Commission and Town Council during this update process. In response, Mayor Auxer, as well as town council members Leah Rampy and Marty Amerikaner, indicated that several public hearings will be held on specific topics, but no specific timetable for the public hearings was provided at the meeting.
By Staff Contributor