Greenwich to take pulse of conservation, development

GREENWICH — The town of Greenwich will soon have a report card that grades its progress on the guiding principles of its Plan of Conservation and Development.

The POCD is developed every 10 years and acts as a guiding document for the town’s priorities and projects.

But the 2019 plan, which was approved just before the start of 2020, includes a new twist. It requires that the town conduct a study every two years to determine how well it is making progress on six guiding principles in the plan.

Those principles are: preserving community character and a sense of place; developing housing opportunities for the future; providing top quality educational facilities; sustaining and improving the town’s

natural environment and landscape; maintaining the town’s economic vitality and thriving commercial centers; and providing the best quality infrastructure, municipal facilities, cultural institutions and health services.

Work began last month with a new working group that will present that report to the Representative Town Meeting later this year.

“What we wanted to do with this plan was introduce a more thoughtful and intensive critical research and analysis of the longer term trends,” town Director of Zoning Katie DeLuca said, giving the data just received from the federal 2020 Census as an example. “We wanted to see what that tells us about the state of the town and how it would or could impact land use.”

To get that data, the new group is working to identify the key performance indicators that will align with each of the six guiding principles. That work began late last month and will continue for six weeks.

The effort is led by Selectwoman Lauren Rabin, who is working closely with DeLuca, town Senior Management Analyst Dan Carlsen and Town Administrator Ben Branyan

“We’re hoping to come up with two to three very measurable and actionable indicators that we can look at on a regular basis to check our progress,” Rabin said. “We want this to be prescriptive and let us know if there’s things we need to do differently.”