Baileys Harbor Smart Growth Plan Nears Completion

After two years, a referendum, and a series of meetings, the amendment process for the Town of Baileys Harbor’s Smart Growth Plan is nearing its conclusion.

A Smart Growth Plan is a comprehensive document that spells out a municipality’s future land use and development strategy. The state of Wisconsin required every municipality and county to have a Smart Growth Plan in place by 2010.

Baileys Harbor adopted its plan in 2005 and chose to amend it in 2010 after residents voiced concerns about the boundaries of the town’s core area, or area of major commercial development.

While the 2005 Smart Growth Plan defined what the core area was, its actual boundaries weren’t set until after the plan had already been adopted. The town board chose to extend the core area from County Q out to County E, but a number of residents thought the core area should be more compact, narrowing in on where the town already had businesses.

The debate led to a non-binding referendum in April 2011 in which residents chose a smaller core area.

“The core area is set now to the way people thought it was originally,” says Doug Smith, town clerk/administrator for Baileys Harbor. “It’s about from County Q to Summit Road.”

Smith says there are three meetings left before the amended Smart Growth Plan, which includes the new definition of the town’s core area, becomes finalized. The first is an intergovernmental meeting that will be held Sept. 17 at 6 pm at Baileys Harbor Town Hall.

The town then plans to hold an informal meeting sometime in early October where residents can comment on the Smart Growth amendments before a final public hearing which must be scheduled with at least 30 days notice.

“During the hearings, anyone can provide testimony for or against the plan,” says Jeff Sanders of Community Planning and Consulting, who has been working with the town to amend the plan. “After the last public hearing, the plan commission either revises the plan or just recommends it to the town board.”

While the core area discussion was a large part of the 2010 amendment process, it’s not the only thing in the plan that’s changing.

“We’re trying to make the plan a lot more approachable and doable for the town, so there aren’t so many things that we get distracted,” says supervisor Peter Jacobs. “We’ve had to change some timelines and things like that.”

An example, says Jacobs, is the town’s plan for the creation of a historical preservation district. The 2005 plan had the creation of the district set to be done within two or three years, but it has now been pushed back to 2014-15.

“There’s just not the resources in a small town like this to get a committee together, and all of the groundwork that has to be done for something like that plus the legal work and the coordination,” says Jacobs.

Sanders, who has worked on a number of communities’ Smart Growth Plans, says he’s seen some towns regard the plan as a binder which simply sits on a shelf and others embrace the document.

“People at the meetings in Baileys Harbor said we want the plan to mean something, we want it to do something,” he says. “It’s up to every local community to pursue their plan as aggressively as they want to.”

While a majority of the 2005 plan’s goals are still ongoing, the town has accomplished a number of things not included in the original document, such as the creation of the new publics work building at the Baileys Harbor Recreational Park, the acquisition of land adjacent to the park, and renovation of the town’s storm sewer system.

“[Those projects] usually fit in because it was something we felt there was an immediate need to do…or there was a window of opportunity,” says Jacobs.

Baileys Harbor Town Board Chairman Don Sitte says there are a number of items in the Smart Growth Plan he’d like to start work on in 2013.

“We can only take on a couple projects at a time to cut down on costs,” says Sitte. “If we do a little at a time we can keep doing these. We’re in real good fiscal shape right now.”