(Host) Thursday evening the Windham Regional Commission, the planning authority for the southeast corner of Vermont, is holding a public meeting in Townshend to discuss rural sprawl and how to prevent it.
Windham County has a mix of towns, some with zoning ordinances and some without. Jim Matteau is the commission’s director, and he says even towns with zoning can be surprised by the building patterns allowed by those zoning laws.
(Matteau) “One of the things we’re doing is we’re taking some of those town ordinances, and take the buildings that have gone in, in the last ten years, the last twenty years and the last thirty years, and then project the same development pattern in the same parts of town over the next three decades. And it creates a picture that’s pretty startling. It’s like watching your own children grow, you don’t see it but if you could jump ahead twenty years and take a snapshot, and look at it today, you’d see something quite different.”
(Host) Thursday evening’s Windham Regional Commission meeting on rural sprawl begins at 7 at the Town Hall in Townshend.