Master Plan Working Group

The Master Plan Working Group was initiated in December 2015, charged by the Select Board and Planning Board to begin the process of updating Shutesbury's 2004 Master Plan. The first step toward that update was a visioning process in which town residents weighed in on how they would like to see the Town change over the next 10 years.  To that end, a planning design firm was hired to oversee two community visioning workshops. These workshops were held on Thursday, November 3 and Monday, December 5, 2016.

The final version of the Shutesbury Community Vision Report was endorsed by the Planning Board in June 2017 and was approved by the Select Board in July 2017, when the Group was reconfigured to "further develop specific topics and strategies" for the Town's implementation.  An update of that work was presented to the All Boards Meeting in November 2017.  A final report of the Group's work is provided in its FY2018 Annual Report..

Visioning: Round 1 [November 3, 2016]

The future of Shutesbury?  …Wilderness, coffee shops, rural setting, community meeting space, scenic beauty, library, taxes, services…just some of the comments residents provided to the Harriman Group at the first Master Plan Working Group Community Visioning Workshop on November 3rd.  Forty-five residents listed anything and everything about what Shutesbury should and shouldn’t be moving toward in the next 10 to 15 years.

Data from first Workshop and corresponding On-Line Survey. The raw data from the first visioning workshop held at the Shutesbury Elementary School, in the form of photographs of the boards generated at workshop (approx. 50 people attended), is available for those of you that are interested.  If you are considering downloading this file, beware that it is a .pdf file of pictures of the boards and is about 30 megabytes.  There is also a lower resolution version available (1.0MB) but the pictures are not quite as good. The Harriman Group has provided a summary of this data as well as a summary of the data from the 182 respondents to the online survey.  Data from paper forms is not available online. 

Neatly summarized data from the first visioning round is now available: data from the workshop boards (.xls), data from the on-line survey (.pdf), and data from the paper responses (.xls).

Visioning: Round 2 - [December 5, 2016]

This second workshop, held on December 5, 2016 at the Shutesbury Elementary School, refined topics identified during the November 3rd Workshop to further focus the vision of your community.

Data from the second Workshop and corresponding On-Line survey.   Raw data from second workshop is available as pictures of the boards generated at each of the three tables : Table 1 boards, Table 2 boards, and Table 3 boards.  Each PDF is approximately 250-300KB. The colored dots signify people's vote for the corresponding item (colors are irrelevant).  Thus, a line item that has 5 colored dots near it means that five people found that line item compelling and voted for it as being important.  The raw data derived from these boards can be downloaded as an Excel file (33KB) while the summary of this data is available as a .pdf file (156KB).

The raw data from the second on-line survey is available as a .pdf file (516KB) and the summary data  can be downloaded in a somewhat smaller .pdf file (324K).  New data is also available comparing the demographic data collected at the second public workshop with overall town demographic data derived from US Census data and the 2015 American Community Survey.

Data from the visioning workshops and survey cards are contained in the Appendices of the Shutesbury Community Vision Report.


 

Relevant Documents

  • Shutesbury's RFP for the visioning process.  This RFP is closed.

  • The Center of Rural Pennsylvania has a very nice document Planning for the Future: A Handbook on Community Visioning that provides very useful information on how to create a community vision for the future, what makes a successful visioning process, suggestions on how to run a successful visioning effort, plus several appendices with reading lists, resource guides, and sample worksheets, agendas, etc.
  • Shutesbury's Master Plan (same as the one referenced above)
  • Raw data from first visioning workshop at the Shutesbury Elementary school on November 3rd, 2016 (large file: 30MB).
  • Summary of the data from the boards generated at the first Visioning Workshop on November 3, 2016
  • Summary of the data from the first on-line survey; questions are same as those asked during the first Vision Workshop at the Shutesbury Elementary School on Nov. 3rd