WINDHAM – The Windham Town Council voted Tuesday night to form a seven-member task force aimed at exploring ways to improve economic development efforts in Windham and to put into action the town’s recently adopted economic development strategic plan.

The 60-page strategic plan was developed with public input starting in January 2012 by the Windham Economic Development Corp., a quasi-municipal organization of local business leaders and town staff that aims to improve Windham’s economy. The plan, which the council adopted in late June, sets goals and objectives to guide and lure economic and community growth, particularly in the town’s commercial district in North Windham.

According to Dan Hancock, the president of the economic development group who led the effort to draft the strategic plan, “the [plan’s] goal is to increase development and promote the businesses in the community. The plan is also to do that in a way that benefits everyone who lives and works here, and create a better place to live and work.

“But what’s different about this plan,” Hancock went on to say, “is it encompasses all [previous] plans and develops a map to put those plans into action so it’s not just ideas on a shelf, it’s actually a plan to get some results out of the work that we’ve done.”

The task force, which has until Oct. 8 to “investigate, study and make recommendations regarding varying structures for the delivery of economic development services,” will consist of two Town Council appointees, three WEDC appointees, the town manager, and a municipal staff member.

Since Windham is the economic center of the southern Lakes Region and recently designated a regional service center by the state, leaders in Windham are working to better guide commercial development in North Windham. In the past few years, several plans have been adopted to improve the appearance and infrastructure in North Windham but with few tangible results that motorists or shoppers can see.

According to Tom Bartell, the town’s economic development director, Windham government needs to “get going” on implementing the plans that have already been approved but that have stalled for one reason or another, but mostly due to the lack of federal or state grants to aid local taxpayers in funding the upgrades. The sound defeat at the polls of the proposed sewer project last November is a good example of how the town has developed a plan but not been able to see it through to completion.

There are several other plans that the council has recently adopted. They include the 123-acre Donnabeth Lippman Park in North Windham; the 21st Century Downtown Plan that re-envisions North Windham into a more walkable grid of streets with a mixed-use, “form-based” building code; the North Route 302 Corridor Plan, which calls for a wider roadway from Anglers Road to Mineral Spring Road; and the recently adopted strategic plan, which puts more of an emphasis on trying to increase the commercial tax base by luring businesses to town.

Bartell spoke Tuesday night about the need for town leaders to not only draft plans and recommendations, but also to start doing the more intensive and difficult work of rewriting ordinances to incorporate the new vision as well as investing money toward the projects.

“So, it’s how do we get this stuff done, in other words. We can talk about things. But we need to get the different plans implemented because we want to plan for the future,” Bartell said. “We want to support business growth and prosperity. We want to create and maintain an efficient review and approval process, and we want to develop a support system for economic development. So those are the objectives.”

The strategic plan has good timing, since the town is considering a rewrite of the Comprehensive Master Plan in the next year or two, a process required by the state that towns usually take on every 10 years. Windham’s plan, last updated in the early 2000s, usually involves several dozen residents projecting a grand vision for the town’s future growth.

The strategic plan, like the comprehensive plan, guides the drafting of ordinances. And without the implementation of the plan, which involved rewriting of the ordinances, the plans are toothless.

“You’ve got to translate that vision for the downtown into ordinances so developers can react to those, and so we have some basis to ask people to do things,” Bartell said. “The strategic plan has some things that are contrary to the ordinances. And in order to make the plan happen, we have to change the ordinances. And so we’ve got to get going on that or it’s not going to happen.”

Bartell’s speech at Tuesday night’s meeting was impassioned, as Councilor Peter Anania remarked, and got into specifics. Mentioning about 20 different needs in town, Bartell said the Windham public works garage and North Windham Fire Station buildings are “a mess;” South Windham needs redevelopment of the Keddy Mill area and former REAL School site on High Street; the Route 302 and Anglers Road realignment project has gone unresolved; and wastewater and stormwater projects need to be addressed in parking-lot-laden North Windham.

In addition, Bartell said, significant zoning changes need to be made to accommodate the new 21st Century Downtown Plan, the town needs to address senior and teen center needs and build neighborhood parks and playgrounds; and the faulty sewer system at the school complex in Windham Center needs to be fixed so pollution doesn’t continue to spill into the Pleasant River.

When referring to Lippman Park, Bartell said, “I cringe every time I hear us discuss the Donnabeth Lippman Park in a way that’s not moving that project forward. We should commit to having the Donnabeth Lippman Park completed. That land was given to us in an incredibly generous donation by a property owner in the community, and we should be moving forward on that project and not messing around with it and not talking about taking money away from it. We need to move forward in a serious manner and get that done.”

Noting that money is an issue, Bartell said Windham should nevertheless consider investing more in projects that would enhance the commercial area, as other towns such as Scarborough have done despite the recession. If Windham is to compete with businesses considering Maine, it needs to “step up” the form and function of its commercial district, he said.

“It’s not just the structure of the economic development department or the [Windham] Economic Development Corp., it’s also the commitment of the community to move things forward. And if you look at Scarborough, Scarborough has invested millions of dollars – millions of dollars – into their economic development program, not the economic development corporation per se, but in their infrastructure improvements, in their sewer, in Haigis Parkway, all of those issues. They’ve invested millions of dollars over the years. And we’re going to have to pick it up and step up and do some of this.”

Part of Bartell’s frustration, as well as that of other WEDC members who were present at the meeting, was that their work developing the strategic plan during the last 18 months would be for naught if the council-approved task force spent its efforts researching ways to improve Windham’s economy, as the order creating the task force originally intended. The council took their advice to heart and changed the language of the task force’s mission statement to include a directive ordering the task force to devise steps that need to be taken to implement the strategic plan.

While implementing the strategic plan will be important to the task force’s mission, the group will also look at how other towns of similar size and character in Maine and New Hampshire organize their economic development offices. Some towns have a citizen-led economic development committee, which helps to usher new businesses through the red tape of the planning board review process, while others have an economic development director that helps businesses through that process.

A CLOSER LOOK:

The newly adopted Windham Economic Development Strategic Plan lays out four objectives to guide economic growth in Windham:

Objective 1: Plan for the Future

Goal: Engage stakeholders in a planning process designed to identify opportunities to enhance economic and community development in Windham.

Goal: Create a Capital Improvements Plan (CIP) that supports the economic and community development needs identified in the Comprehensive Planning Process.

Goal: Define and create a true sense of place in North Windham and other villages within the town.

Goal: Implement the 302 North Corridor Plan, including the realignment of the Anglers Road and Whites Bridge Road intersection.

Goal: Advocate for increased focus on workforce development to meet industry needs in all sectors in order to provide quality employment opportunities for citizens and attract new businesses.

Objective 2: Support Business Growth and Prosperity

Goal: Identify industry sectors that will add diversity and create jobs in Windham.

Goal: Develop a marketing plan to attract desired business sectors in order to improve economic diversity.

Goal: Promote Windham as the retail and service center for the Sebago Lakes Region.

Goal: Capitalize on the strengths of Windham’s agriculture industry to encourage continued growth.

Goal: Continue to develop the manufacturing industry in Windham.

Objective 3: Create and Maintain an Efficient Review and Approval Process

Goal: Examine all town services to measure impact on economic development goals and activities and to simplify and streamline the review processes to the extent possible.

Goal: Develop communication strategies and resources to guide businesses and individuals through the approval and review process.

Objective 4: Develop a Support System for Economic Development

Goal: Establish the WEDC as the champion for economic development activities/issues in the community.

Goal: Develop strategic partnerships in order to leverage resources available for economic and community development.

Goal: Identify strategic funding mechanisms to enhance investment in economic development initiatives.

Goal: Ensure that economic development initiatives remain a consistent and ongoing focus.