Finance Committee - 07/15/2020 Page 15
ON THE QUESTION
Mayor Donchess
We have Ms. Marchant here to address this contract, could you please proceed?
Sarah Marchant, Director of Community Development
Yes, good evening. Thank you all so much. | am here before you to talk about finding a contract for the
Master Planning Consultant. This process was started quite a while ago, we put an RFQ out earlier this year.
We had eight great responses from firms from all over the country and locally. We, as a team, including the
Mayor, Chief of Staff, Economic Development Director, our Long Range Planner and myself and Scott Leclair
the Planning Board Chair, decided to interview three firms. And from there, we have selected Utile Design as
the best possible firm to support the City through its Master Plan Process.
The idea is this will take approximately 12 to 15 months and the value in this is really hearing from our
community, engaging on some of those really critical issues we’ve been talking about over and over again to
get a clear vision of what the community wants as a future and then to move on from this Master Plan into
implementing changes to the Land Use Code to make sure that we actually can follow through on this vision.
So we do want this to be kind of a compressed process. We are pushing for this 12 to 15 month context,
because the real key here is the implantation on the other side and updating our Land Use Code to reflect the
values that we understand are so important to the community through this process.
| will say that Utile has an incredible amount of experience and are a design firm out of Boston with many of
the skills that we were looking for, Economic Development, Urban Design, very specifically transportation
planning, Arts & Culture planning backgrounds. They have a huge amount of engagement and different ways
of approaching engagement. If you think back when we talked about this last fall, certainly COVID has
absolutely changed how we initially went into planning some of the engagement and what this process might
look like. | think Utile Design will be an excellent team behind us. They are young, they are adaptable they are
nimble and | think we will do our best to come up with many different ways to really engage people in this new
COVID environment the best way we can.
This contract does include several large open house type meetings, it includes several larger meetings, it
includes neighborhood level meetings. And it also includes that interaction through hopefully piggy-backing off
of things that are already in place, like the Farmer’s Market where we are practicing social distancing or other
kinds of events that may or may not be happening this fall and next spring that we can really jump on. So
that’s my quick summary. | am happy to answer any questions.
Mayor Donchess
Any questions, comments? Alderwoman Klee?
Alderman Klee
Thank you again, Mr. Mayor. Director Marchant, | just have a quick question about this as far as the Master
Plan and so on is concerned. When | ran for office the first time here as Alderman, | ran across a number of
less than happy constituents or soon-to-be constituents, discussing the bridge over the river from Nashua to
Hudson, that there had been something in the Master Plan about that. It was abandoned and it never went
anywhere. But one of the things that people kept telling me over and over again, was get that out of the
Master Plan because they have this fear and anxiety that this could bubble up. I’m not asking for that to
happen, I’m not even suggesting that to happen. But my question is, if something like that that has basically
been deemed this is not going to happen or another item, would we pull that out of the Master Plan and is this
going to re-create a Master Plan or is just going to tweak the one we already have.
