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Date: 10/4/2022
WESTHAMPTON – Residents rarely get the chance to redesign their town, but on Oct. 26 at 7 p.m. locals will get together for a visioning process.
The Westhampton Master Plan Work Group (MPWG) wants feedback from seniors, business owners, conservationists, farmers, and parents on how the town should evolve in the future.
They especially want to hear from teenagers.
“We’re actually going to be setting up a youth focus group before the first public meeting,” said Teri Anderson, project manager for the resilient master planning process. “We’re encouraging teenage residents to attend. We think it’s important to hear the youth perspective.”
Anderson anticipates, after project completion, the town will be able to access pots of cash currently out of reach.
“The kinds of projects we’re looking at doing for implementation and follow up, we would definitely need to get grant funds to implement those,” Anderson said “But doing this master plan and vulnerability planning project, it makes us eligible to receive state grants for implementation.”
Two meetings are scheduled.
The Oct. 26. session will feature a slide show highlighting the data gathered by surveying the local folk, their likes and dislikes around town, followed by a summary of the data collected in focus groups. Groups met at previous meetings to discuss energy, climate change, transportation, economic development, land use, housing and other topics. Attendees will break out into groups to further explore the issues with, hopefully, an even larger set of residents offering input.
Each group will also be pushed to write a vision statement for the town, about the group’s topic, and goals for the next 10 and 20 years.
“We were asking people, what are they concerned about,” Anderson said. “They’re concerned about energy costs and availability. They’re concerned about invasive species. They’re concerned about severe weather and storms, and how that can affect flooding and washout of roads [and] electricity service. People have a pretty broad knowledge of what their concerns are right now.”
There is significant concern about the commercial atmosphere in Westhampton. Anderson’s committee heard interest in locally grown small businesses in tourism, arts and culture, but especially agricultural businesses of a manageable size. The implementation grants Anderson intends to tap will pay for infrastructure necessary for those businesses.
The second meeting, scheduled for early November, will be geared toward generating specific strategies and actions that the town can take.
“People know what they need in their town, what they like in their town, what’s working, what’s not working,” Anderson said. “We definitely want to hear from people on all those topics. We got some very good feedback and information sharing in the focus groups and now we want to hear from a wider population of residents.”
The first session of the Workshop to Envision the Future of Westhampton will take place on Oct. 26, from 7 to 9 p.m., in the cafeteria of Westhampton Elementary School, 37 Kings Hwy..