RPP Stakeholders sought, signup online

Jan 8, 2015

RPP Stakeholders sought, signup online

The Cape Cod Commission began the five-year update of its Regional Policy Plan (RPP) with three regional meetings in early December, focusing on the history of Cape Cod, its people and factors that led to where it is today.

The process will continue through the spring in a series of regional working meetings from January through May. Stakeholders from Upper-, Mid, and Lower/Outer-Cape towns are being sought to follow that process and help guide development of the update.

It’s a similar stakeholder process used for the Section 208 Water Quality Management Plan, bringing together individuals with specific interests as well as interested residents across the Cape.

The RPP is a requirement of the Commission act and is intended to provide a coherent set of goals, policies and standards to guide planning and development on Cape Cod. Updates to the plan are required every five years.

The last update in 2009 represented the first substantial reorganization of the guidance document since it was first drafted, separating the regulatory and planning sections. Those changes and others were based on recommendations of the 21st Century Task Force, a broad-based panel appointed to perform an outside review of the Commission.

For the 2015 update, the Commission will build on those earlier reforms. Among the goals for this RPP update are to:

ease the local comprehensive planning process,
provide regulatory incentives for neighboring towns to plan together,
simplify the regulatory process,
create a framework for regional capital planning.

Advances in the Commission’s geospatial mapping and GIS capabilities are expected to play a large role in development of the updated plan. New tools, such as Envision Tomorrow, are also being developed to take advantage of the numerous planning and demographic data sets housed at the Commission. Envision Tomorrow is a set of urban and regional planning tools that can be used to model development feasibility, create multiple land use scenarios and model complex regional issues.

The next round of meetings, each from 1 to 5 p.m., are scheduled for the end of January.