Falls Village plan for regional oversight in line for state funds

FALLS VILLAGE — The Northwest Corner is now one step closer to a thorough study of regional planning, thanks to a multi-million-dollar allocation by the state Legislature.

At the close of its special session last month, both houses of the General Assembly passed a regional planning line item for $10 million.

The funds will come out of a state budget surplus totaling more than $900 million.

But it is not yet clear whether local supporters of regional planning will receive any of those grant funds from the state Office of Policy and Management (OPM).

Officials at OPM are looking at various proposals to decide which deserve support, including one put forth earlier this year by two Falls Village officials, First Selectman Patricia Mechare and Planning and Zoning Commission member Ruth Skovran.

“It will be a competitive process to evaluate the proposals that were submitted,� said state Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30), who has led much of the legislative efforts for plannning support in Hartford.

Roraback added that he is not aware of how many other proposals are before OPM or whether there is a timetable for deciding which programs deserve support. But he is confident the Falls Village proposal, which requests funding for a two-year pilot project, will receive serious consideration since he, Mechare, Skovran and other Litchfield County lawmakers traveled to OPM headquarters to meet with two officials, Richard Van Ausdall and David LaVasseur, who described the Falls Village proposal as “ahead of the curve.�

They requested a state grant totaling $175,000 over the two years of the program, whose goal is to show how shared planning services can be delivered effectively in small communities.

 If secured, those funds will be used to hire a planner to deliver services to the Litchfield County towns within two small regional agencies that already exist: the Northwestern Connecticut Council of Governments and the Litchfield Hills Council of Elected Officials.

In order to fund the preliminary six-month project that led to the proposal before OPM, Mechare and Skovran approached John Perotti, chief executive of Salisbury Bank & Trust.

Perotti, a former member of the Sharon Planning and Zoning Commission, took an immediate interest in the project. Tom McGowan, an experienced planning consultant from Litchfield, was also brought on board to help.

In addition to securing a donation from his bank, Perotti succeeded in lining up financial support from six other local banks. Donations, which are tax-deductible, are being made through the Nature Conservancy, which was an early supporter of the plan. Several other nonprofit organizations, including the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, have stepped forward to donate services and funds.

McGowan noted that in 1980, when he headed the Northwest Regional Planning Agency (now the Northwestern Connecticut Council of Governments), the agency had a staff of four professional planners providing land use, economic, transportation and water-quality planning assistance to the nine towns it served.

Today both the Northwest and Litchfield Hills regional agencies have a total of two planners serving 20 towns.Since county government was eliminated in the 1950s, the state’s 169 municipalities have been essentially on their own in the area of development.

By contrast, most of neighboring New York’s 62 counties have their own legislatures, along with tourism, economic development and planning departments.

Critics complain that Connecticut’s lack of regional planning has led to the unchecked proliferation of suburban sprawl and a dearth of what planners and conservationists call “smart growth.�

McGowan said he thought it was good news that the General Assembly had appropriated the funds for regional planning, but he cautioned that urban regions have typically received “substantial and sustained support� while rural areas often have not.

“It’s been long overdue for rural areas to get the grant funds they deserve,� McGowan said.

Skovran said that since initial expenses were low there are plenty of resources left for the initial six-month pilot project. A Web site for the project will be up and running soon.

“We’re waiting to hear how OPM is going to divvy up the money and what hoops we have to jump through,� Mechare said.

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