Westport begins work to preserve its history
WESTPORT — The Historic District Commission is in its early steps of creating a town-wide historic preservation plan.
Discussed in Thursday’s Historic District Commission meeting, the members will work alongside PaleoWest — a company that guides clients through a variety of regulatory frameworks that require consideration of potential impacts to historic resources, among others. Together, the groups will come up with a plan to preserve historic structures within the town, and allow them to request funding for certain projects.
The town has lost 400 houses in two years to teardowns, according to member Marilyn Harding, which she said is not good.
“Probably at the top of the list of things we want to achieve from this is to figure out how to stem the tide of teardowns,” member Grayson Braun said. “Our August meeting was four teardowns.”
Ben DiBiase, office principal for PaleoWest’s New York office, said the next goal in the process is to create a steering committee, which is a group of about five members who represent various stakeholder groups within the town. The steering committee would also help PaleoWest become familiar with the area and its current conditions, as quickly as possible, he said.
PaleoWest is familiar with local ordinances and long-term preservation plans at the local, state and national levels. That knowledge will be integrated into Westport’s preservation plan.
The approval for this consulting agreement came during the July 27 meeting of the Board of Selectwomen and described in the Historic Preservation Enhancement Grant Application.
According to the state’s website, the application “administers federal funds to help municipal historic district commissions enhance their administrative capabilities, strengthen local preservation programs, and produce public education materials and activities.”
Bill Harris, chair of the commission, explained what is driving the project.
He said they received requests from the State Historic Preservation Office about a year ago in regards to funding. However, state requires the town to create a historic preservation plan before it can request funds for individual projects.
Harris also said they would be able to create an order of merit list from this plan, which would determine what projects need to be completed, in order of importance. They can then request money through the preservation office for particular projects.
Caleb Gasparek, preservation
planner for PaleoWest, said the committee would think of the biggest strengths and weaknesses within preservation in Westport. This includes a so-called SWOT analysis, which identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within it.
The committee would help come up with a way to spread the plan among the public, according to DiBiase.
He also said that the company will look at the best practices with how to move forward, such as with what other municipalities have done in the past.
Gasparek said that the plan would ideally be refreshed every five years, though many municipalities don’t get to it until every 10 to 15 years.
The draft plan would come out in January, with the final version sometime in February, according to DiBiase. The public work session to present the plan is expected to happen in late March.
Harris asked if any approvals need to come from any other boards after the plan in finalized.
According to Donna Douglass, Historic District Commission coordinator, it is just a Historic District Commission decision, and doesn’t require approval from the RTM nor Board of Selectwomen.
It is planned that there will be some way to allow for community input. The method in which this will be conducted has not yet been released, though members said it could be through an online survey and sending post cards to residents, among other ways.
“The quality of this product is going to depend on the input,” Harris said. “If we don’t get quality input, you’re not going to get quality output.”
Harris said his concern is that the public will feel it didn’t have enough input in the plan. He mentioned hosting a virtual or in-person town meeting about the plan to allow public input.
“The public wakes up in April and doesn’t feel like they have substantial input, that’s all I’m concerned about,” he said
Martha Eidman, an alternate, agreed, saying this is not a widely known project.
Member Scott Springer said the key is getting input from people, and it is important that the questions within whatever survey they send out are worded properly. He said he had read criticisms about a recent Longshore survey based on how it was crafted, to which member Marilyn Harding agreed.
The initial steering committee meeting should happen in September, according to Harris.