‘Norwalk Tomorrow’ update to better reflect today’s vision

NORWALK — The city’s planning website — Norwalk Tomorrow — will be updated to better reflect the city’s current needs, officials said last week.

The Planning Committee advanced a contract with the Snyder Group to spend $7,650 as a onetime fee to redo the site and then a monthly maintenance fee of about $2,550 to update it, host it and provide other online services to the city.

“When the (Plan of Conservation and Development’s) process started almost two years ago now, the Redevelopment Agency was at the beginning stages of the West Ave.Wall Street Redevelopment Plan and then the city decided to undertake a citywide parking study as well,” said Steve Kleppin, director of Planning and Zoning. “We had three planning efforts that were about to kick off at the same time.”

Because there were concerns about “meeting fatigue” and “mixed messaging,” Kleppin said his department teamed up with the Norwalk Redevelopment Agency and the Park

ing Authority to invest in creating an outside website to host all of their planning materials. Each of the groups contributed a third of the funding for the site, which has totaled to about $30,000 a year.

“It was a twoway street,” said Tami Strauss, acting director of the Norwalk Redevelopment Agency. “We were able to push out information and also receive information. We were able to do that and do that interactively and you could go onto the website and comment on maps and it was mobile friendly . ... You were able to participate in a very modern way.”

Now that all three studies have reached their final stages or have already wrapped up, Kleppin and Strauss said they needed to have the website better organized and ready to handle upcoming efforts.

“We're kind of in the next phase because we're working on the East Avenue TOD plan,” Kleppin said. “We're working on the zoning regulations rewrite, we're going to do a study of the Industrial zones this coming year as well — that's already in the budget. We're realizing that the way that site was initially set up doesn't work anymore, because we need to put things into different buckets.”

While the council members voted to advance it to the full Common Council for adoption, some had questions about the ongoing maintenance cost.

“You ever think about bringing this in house?” asked Councilman John Kydes, chairman of the Planning Committee. “I know $2,500 doesn't sound like a lot, but that's times 12 (months)... to maintain it, to update it...instead of this service fee.”

Strauss said there would need to be a “dedicated person” to do the work.

Kleppin said this can eventually be considered, once some of the planning studies are implemented.