In 2012, the “Seacoast Forecast” series looks at how our region is planning for economic, environmental and social change.
Dover’s city-wide visioning sessions run with the theory that planning a community’s future should start with the citizens.
Dover is the Granite State’s oldest continuous settlement. But though the Garrison City will turn 400 in 2023, city planners are encouraging residents to get creative when they think about their future, and get involved in shaping what the city will be like 10 years from now. They recently launched “Dover 2023—Building our Tomorrow,” a community-wide project aimed at engaging residents in the process of shaping Dover’s destiny.
Similar initiatives have taken place in recent years in cities like Portsmouth and Rochester. Municipal planners have become increasingly receptive to organized public feedback on operating budgets, capital improvements, economic development, housing, education, sustainability and all the other issues communities must address.
“The approach toward planning is evolving nationally as well as right here in the Granite State,” says Robin LeBlanc of Plan NH, a non-profit that helps communities identify their goals and create a road map to acheive them. Nearby, they’ve worked with Lee, Hampton, Exeter and Stratham.
“There seems to be a yearning to be involved and be connected as an individual to your community. People seem to be looking at their community and seeing how the built environment affects how we can walk, how we live, how we work, how we play, and what it means economically as well as environmentally,” LeBlanc says.
The Dover 2023 project started with a city-wide conversation at the Dover Middle School on March 10 and continued with three neighborhood workshops.Three more workshops will take place in April, followed by a final city-wide meeting at the Middle School on May 5.
Jeremiah LaRose acted as spokesperson for his group during the neighborhood workshop at the Woodman Park School on March 14. His group proposed a phone app that would combine a historic walking tour with a guide to current businesses, as a tool for economic development. They also recommended adding more extracurricular programs to the city’s education system, launching a summer theater program in Henry Law Park, and installing a telescope on Garrison Hill.
Dana Lynch, acting as spokesman for another group, suggested replacing or renovating the high school, improving sidewalks and infrastructure, replanting trees around public facilities, and completing the city’s waterfront development project. “Basically, get it done as a mixed use development with green space,” he said.
Lynch also encouraged city planners to work toward increasing Dover’s appeal as a year-round arts and culture destination.
“So much of the season in Dover and in the Northeast kind of begs for indoor cultural activities, and a facility to have those kinds of opportunities would be a great enhancement in the life of Dover citizens,” he said.
Planning consultant Roger Hawk urged everyone at the workshop to generate as many ideas as possible.
“Really, the whole idea is to get your ideas on paper,” he told the crowd of about 15 people. “Tell us what your dreams are. Come up with as many ideas as you can. Be as restrained or as wild as you feel you want to be.”
According to Hawk, there was a time when elected leaders rarely consulted their constituents before making decisions.
“It used to be that people thought elected officials were the ones that knew it all,” he said. “The people know it all. They’re the ones that really have the answers, and the city government needs to be listening to what the community is talking about.”
The city hired Hawk, of Hawk Planning Resources, to serve as a consultant for the Dover 2023 project. A resident of Concord, he’s been involved in similar efforts in communities throughout the state, including recent planning projects in Sandwich and Rindge. He said the most outlandish idea he’s ever heard came from Nashua, where one resident recommended enclosing the entire city in a giant dome.
“Frankly, I think doing this visioning process is the most fun part of doing master planning, getting people to brainstorm,” he said.
Assisting Hawk with the project is Christopher Parker, Dover’s director of planning and community development. There’s also a Dover 2023 steering committee that includes both residents and city leaders.
The project’s mission statement is: “To fully engage the community in a discussion about what Dover’s core values are and what community changes need to happen to achieve a new, long term vision for Dover’s future 10-20 years from now.”
Dover’s process will feed into its master plan, which coordinates the city’s built environment with its geographic qualities and the needs of the people who live there—where they live, what natural resources they use, how they move around, what services are necessary, what they value—and ties it all to a budget process.
When it comes to the built environment, Randall Arendt, an author of books on conservation planning and nationally known advocate for smart growth, says that for communities trying to envision the future, it’s hard to see beyond the physical space we’re currently living in to imagine new ways of doing things.
New England’s small cities tend to reflect our industrial and agricultural heritage, but also mid-20th century thinking, the rise of automobile culture and the emergence of the big box store. Fifty years of standard zoning has produced relatively standard landscapes. “We drive past them, and they’ve become such a part of our familiar landscape, it’s hard to get distance and look at them critically,” Arendt says.
On April 12, he will lead a planning workshop at Wells Reserve at Laudholm on “Strengthening Town Centers and Transforming Commercial Corridor Strips.” The focus is the landscape along a community’s well-traveled roads. In his workshops, Arendt leads the audience in a visual preference survey—dozens of slides flashing by at six seconds each, showing different types of landscape design, “the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Inevitably, the audiences prefer the same things, whether they live in Maine or Texas or North Carolina, Arendt says. Parking lots and sprawl are out, and walkable communities are in, as are mixed use neighborhoods, native landscaping, better transit and a vibrant business community.
“Let’s write our standards to encourage what people want, and discourage or prohibit what people don’t want. If you look at the zoning ordinances that produced what’s out there today, that people don’t like, it’s amazing that communities have institutionalized in their zoning the very things that people rate negatively,” he says.
Near at hand, the Seacoast boasts communities that are getting it right. Plan NH features Exeter on its new website of ideas and projects from around the state that contribute to vibrant, healthy communities, www.vibrantvillagesnh.org. Arendt, who once worked for Southern Maine Regional Planning Commission, points to Kittery and York.
“On a recent trip to Maine, we drove through that strip in York on Route 1. I’m thinking ‘Wow, there are trees. There are nice signs. The buildings are notable. There’s not one ugly building there. The Hannaford is in a grove of trees,’” he observed.
He contacted the town planner, whom he had not met, to get a copy of their design standards so he could learn from them. The town planner told him the planning board was still mainly applying the design standards he wrote while working at the regional planning commission in 1982. “If you wait, sometimes 10, 20 years, things gradually improve,” he says.
The built environment was very much on the minds of about 40 people who attended Dover’s initial city-wide conversation on the morning of March 10. The participants broke into groups to discuss what they like about the city and its biggest challenges. Curiously, downtown was the top result for both categories. While people like the downtown’s historic character and mix of uses, they worry about maintaining that feel while making improvements to parking and traffic patterns.
Among the city’s other strengths, according to participants, are its strong community spirit and its recreational opportunities and open space. Among the other foremost concerns are municipal issues like an aging infrastructure, community service programs and high property taxes.
Organizers recapped the results of the city-wide meeting during the neighborhood workshops before again breaking into small groups. This time citizens were asked to develop their vision for the city’s future. At the end of each workshop, Parker conducted an electronic poll in which he asked specific questions and instructed participants to rate the city in a number of categories, including its shopping options, employment opportunities, variety of housing, public education and more.
Organizers are consolidating the results in preparation for the next round of workshops in April, during which people will develop a strategy for implementation. There is also a community survey available at www.dover2023.com.
“We’re using a bunch of different techniques to try and pull ideas out of people as much as we can,” Hawk said. “Hopefully it will give us a very good sense of what the average person in the community is thinking.”
At the final meeting on May 5, participants will review and finalize the vision and implementation strategy. All the documents and ideas generated throughout the process will be available on the website, as well as on Facebook and Twitter, where members of the public can make further comments.
The final results will be used to guide the city’s new master plan, budgets and capital improvement programs for the next decade.
Separately, Dover recently offered a survey on the city’s website called “Dover Dollars,” seeking public feedback about budget priorities.
Hawk said he and Parker would also be speaking at high school civics classes to get young people involved in the planning process.
“We feel it’s important to capture the attention of young people, because even though they may not be thinking about it and may not know it, what we’re doing now is going to impact them more than these people like me that have gray hair,” he said.
Parker said the idea for the Dover 2023 initiative emerged as the city was preparing to craft its new 10-year master plan. The Planning Department wanted to engage the public and decided to use the upcoming 400th anniversary as a selling point.
“It’s not my community, it’s not the Planning Board’s community, it’s the community’s community, and the community really needs to be invested in this and really needs to come out and tell us how it wants to shape its future,” Parker said.
That sentiment is shared by other communities across the region. Portsmouth Listens formed in the late 1990s and has been holding city-wide dialogues on a number of issues ever since, including violence in schools, school redistricting, police-community relations, strategic community planning and sustainability. The group has also held a number of deliberative candidate forums.
Jim Noucas, a local attorney and co-founder of Portsmouth Listens, said city leaders have generally been receptive to the group’s feedback.
“It’s varied from time to time, but overall I think there’s been strong support from the city to obtain the information from the dialogues,” Noucas said.
When Portsmouth Listens held dialogues about the city budget process, some city councilors attended and spoke to the groups. From 2007 to 2009, Portsmouth Listens held a series of discussions on the controversial topic of whether to renovate the Portsmouth Middle School or build a new one. Most of the public preferred the idea of renovating the building, and that’s what the city ultimately did.
“The point of the process is not to replace the judgment and responsibility of the city council. The point of the process is to supplement the information process before the decisions are made,” Noucas said. “We fully and completely respect the city leaders’ autonomy and responsibility for making decisions.”
In 2010, Portsmouth Listens was a finalist for the Reinhard Mohn Prize, an international award issued by the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation in Germany. The theme of the competition was “Vitalizing Democracy through Participation.”
Portsmouth city manager John Bohenko told the Reinhard Mohn evaluation team there is now “an expectation that we’ll be consulting people” on community issues.
The first section of Portsmouth’s 2005 master plan, called “A Vision for Portsmouth,” presents a summary of residents’ aspirations for the city’s future. The summary arose out of Portsmouth Listens dialogues on the topic.
Unlike its neighbors, Rochester updates its master plan one piece at a time, updating different chapters of the document every couple of years. The last cycle of updates began in 2001. According to chief planner Michael Behrendt, the next cycle will begin within the next year or two, starting with a chapter on land use.
“Once we start, we’ll have a whole public involvement procedure as part of that, probably similar to what Dover is doing,” Behrendt said.
Rochester has also been rewriting its zoning ordinance since 2003, and Behrendt said it is finally close to completion. He said the city has held numerous public meetings and committee hearings on the rezoning process.
“After that’s done, then we’re going to start this whole master plan process all over again,” he said.
That process will likely include a couple of large, facilitated public forums and several smaller exercises to gather public feedback.
“The Planning Board then takes all that raw information, and they distill it into a refined set of issues and goals and objectives,” Behrendt said.
The Planning Board is responsible for adopting Rochester’s master plan, but they seek an endorsement from the City Council. The plan is not legally binding, but it is intended to guide public policy for the following decade.
“The key end product is a set of tasks or strategies, which you then hope to implement in the coming years,” Behrendt said.
Dover is working to ensure that its end product reflects the will of its citizens. Parker encouraged people to remain involved every step of the way.
“We don’t set the stage, the community sets the stage,” Parker said. “The community is behind this visioning process.”
For Dover residents and business owners
If you live in Dover, there’s still time to get involved in the Dover 2023 project. Here are some dates to keep in mind:
neighborhood workshops—making it happen
• Tuesday, April 10, 7-9 p.m., Woodman Park Elementary School
• Thursday, April 12, 7-9 p.m., Garrison Elementary School
• Monday, April 16, 7-9 p.m., Horne Street School
city-wide conversation—bringing it all together
• Saturday, May 5, 9 a.m.-12 p.m., Dover Middle School
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