The Nashville Town Council has talked about several matters at recent meetings that intersect on a common question: What we want Nashville to be in the future, and what we need to do now to get it there?
Besides town ordinances — and a stack of past “plans that sit on a shelf” — there’s been no comprehensive written document to guide the inevitable change and articulate a cohesive and accepted vision.
“I call it, ‘We haven’t found the outside pieces of the puzzle, so we’re trying to put the puzzle together without having the outside pieces first,’” said Dax Norton, the town’s strategic direction adviser.
Last week, all the leaders of Nashville’s boards and commissions were invited to a brainstorming session about whether or not they want to create a Nashville Comprehensive Plan, and if so, how to go about it. “Yes” was the answer to that first question.
Brown County has a comprehensive plan, last revised in 2011, and Nashville is part of the county. However, it makes sense for Nashville to have “a guidebook to advise elected officials,” Norton said.
Nashville is the only incorporated community in the county. The town already has its own ordinances and zoning codes, and those, along with planning documents, play into the larger question of what Nashville is and will be in the future.
“The two (county comprehensive plan and town comprehensive plan) can complement each other, obviously,” Norton said. “But, you know, the county comprehensive plan is going to be much more broad when you have different areas of the county that you want to do different things in. The town council’s making laws and regulations for their boundary, for their geopolitical subdivision, and their comprehensive plan will complement the county’s, but there will be areas where they are a little different.”
A past group of town residents attempted to write a comprehensive plan about 20 years ago, but that 1999 draft was never adopted. Roger Kelso, who was Nashville town manager at the time, said he remembered the process getting hung up on “tribalism” between town and county, and with all the bickering, the council walked away from the idea.
Both entities have to work together in executing and implementing a comprehensive plan because Nashville and Brown County are part of an area plan commission, with county employees enforcing town zoning and land use laws, and people who live out in the county helping to advise on town zoning and land use manners.
“I think we can get through it this time,” Kelso told the brainstorming group last week. “It seems like the mood … of Nashville and Brown County is definitely different than it was in the late ‘90s.”
They key this time will be to be inclusive, he said. For instance, if the town is to extend services like utilities — Kelso is president of the new Nashville Utility Service Board — it will need to work with county entities in the “buffer zones” around town to plan those moves.
“I don’t know if we can have a totally stand-alone Nashville if that makes sense,” he said.
RELATED: Town proposes changes to TIF areas
The town comprehensive plan would be collaborative and focused not so much on growth, but on “the direction of Nashville for the next 30 years, with an understanding that it is the driver of the county,” Norton said. “I would call Nashville a regional marketplace. It’s not just the county coming here.”
The initial brainstorming group includes the presidents of the Nashville Arts & Entertainment Commission (Melanie Voland), Development Review Commission (Greg Fox), Tree Board (Cathy Paradise), Parking and Public Facilities Development Corporation (Gloria Dobbs), Redevelopment Commission (Raymond Modglin), Park Commission (Alisha Gredy), Utility Service Board (Kelso), Nancy Crocker representing the town council, and town employee and resident Sandie Jones. Other people will be brought into the brainstorming process.
Among that group’s tasks will be to decide what they want the scope of the planning document to be; and to write an RFP (request for proposals) for a person to lead the document creation process.
Once a person is chosen to lead the process, it will include opportunities for citizen involvement.
The citizen involvement part actually started more than a year ago with three “strategic direction” sessions led by Norton, in the fall of 2019 and in February and March 2020. In those sessions, Nashville leaders, residents and business owners talked about what is and is not working in Nashville. But then, COVID happened.
Right now, the initial plan group members are reading over the Indiana Citizen Planner Guide section on comprehensive plans, and thinking about what the groups they represent would like to see considered when thinking about the Nashville of 20 or 30 years from now. They’ll meet again virtually in a couple weeks.
The idea is not to start over completely; the town has so many plans that were done in the past that it could make sense to reuse or incorporate them.
In addition, within the past year or so, the town council has adopted a sewer master plan and started work on a stormwater plan; its Utility Service Board has begun talking about infrastructure work needed now and in the future; a committee is working on a bicycle and pedestrian master plan; and the redevelopment commission is in the process of getting a new TIF and economic development plan approved. All those plans need to mesh, and a comprehensive plan could drive all of them, Norton said.
As a civil engineer and former town manager, “I can tell you it’s so darn complicated or hard … to plan how utilities are supposed to be laid out if we don’t have a good comprehensive plan that has basically built what the planning should be and the zoning should be for an area, so we know the potential of development in this spot,” Kelso added.
“We do need to do a plan that directs and guides — I won’t say growth … but development up to the next 30 years,” Norton said. Without one, “I guess we’re just throwing it to the wind and guessing.”
“As a town council person, it’s really hard to make decisions based on nothing,” Crocker said.
