SWRPC Holds Second Citizen Planners Roundtable in Temple
- January 27, 2025
- Planning
December 5th, 2024 was a windy night, but the promise of warm chili and good conversation drew 20 dedicated citizen planner volunteers through the snow to Temple Town Hall for the second quarterly Citizen Planner Peer-to-Peer Roundtable, sponsored by the Southwest Region Planning Commission and the Monadnock Resource Alliance.
Following the Gilsum Roundtable in September, the Temple event served as a brainstorming session for future Roundtable topics in a location more convenient to the southeastern side of the Monadnock Region.
The group discussed current challenges that the various towns were facing, including Class VI Road development ordinances, recruitment of new planning board volunteers, and ways to discuss controversial topics. The group also brainstormed what kind of Roundtables they would like to attend in the future. Key themes included in-person events to be held quarterly, and continuing with the group discussion facilitation.
Many topics proposed for future Roundtables included code enforcement, housing conversion techniques, maintaining trust between communities and their planning boards, steep slopes ordinances, and more. In a survey distributed to attendees after the Roundtable, “recruiting and retaining planning board members” was identified as the topic that Citizen Planners are most interested in, closely followed by “Class VI roads and related challenges.” The next most popular was “housing,” and within that category, “workforce housing ordinances” and “conversion of larger homes to multi-unit housing” were the top two. Steep slopes, water quality, building trust, and code enforcement were also prominent.
The group was joined by Noah Hodgetts from the NH Office of Planning and Development and UNH Extension specialists Nate Bernitz and Rebecca Levy. NH OPD and UNH Extension provide statewide technical assistance and facilitation support for municipalities, but Noah, Nate, and Rebecca served mostly as ears in Temple to hear firsthand what Citizen Planners need for their towns.
In a direct response to the Temple Roundtable, NH OPD planned a webinar on the topic of Class VI Roads to take place on January 16th, 2025. Separately, UNH Extension will run a webinar on January 15th, 2025 called “Building Trust in Communities: The Elephant in Your Town Square.”
The next Roundtable is planned for March 20, 2025 in Harrisville at the Community Church of Harrisville & Chesham (the brick church) from 5:30-7:30 pm. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here. If you are interested in receiving updates on future Citizen Planner Roundtables, please sign up for SWRPC’s biweekly newsletter, Happenings.
