In December 2009, after years of work by dozens of people, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission approved a 50-year plan to help steer the Vineyard through thorny issues such as suburban sprawl, the local economy, the cost of living and the loss of young families moving off-Island.
The Island Plan, an ambitious 198-page document, laid out many of the Vineyard’s challenges and offered more than 200 strategies to preserve the Island’s character while supporting the next generation.
Fifteen years later, several people involved in the plan said many of the recommendations continue to be useful, though the implementation and follow through have been, at times, spotty.
“It makes me realize we were ahead of our time,” said Richard Toole, a member of the Island Plan steering committee. “Some of these issues we are still facing today. Unfortunately it became one of those plans that sits on a shelf and doesn’t go further than the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.”
The commission kicked off the Island-wide planning effort at the end of 2004, after members realized that the agency’s extensive review responsibilities had eclipsed their forward-thinking planning.
“For the last 15 years the commission has not, in an organized fashion, taken a look at the Island as a whole on a comprehensive basis,” said commissioner Nathaniel Orleans in 2004.
Countless meetings and forums ensued for the next four years, and hundreds of hours of hard work went into the document.
Jim Athearn, the chair of the steering committee and patriarch of Morning Glory Farm, said the commission’s late executive director Mark London was a driving force behind the plan, which served as a bedrock for the agency’s review process.
“This was not for the next 10 years or next five years,” Mr. Athearn said. “This was for 50 years into the future, what do we want the Island to look like.”
Bill Veno, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s senior planner, said looking back, one of the issues he saw was a lack of people tasked with the implementation of the Island Plan.
Some of the recommendations were changing rules around subdivisions, giving tax abatements for open space, cutting back on the culture of high maintenance landscaping and acquiring new shoreline access.
But the plan didn’t have measurable thresholds, making it difficult to measure if progress had been made and to what degree.
“One of the things we didn’t get was an implementation committee going to keep up the steam on it,” Mr. Veno said. “People were burned out of four-plus years of the plan.”
Slowing growth on the Island was one of the main goals of the plan, but that has been hard to battle, Mr. Veno said.
“There’s no stopping the economic behemoth of people wanting to be here,” he said.
Still others pointed to Hyannis, where just across the water fast food restaurants, large department stores and big developments are commonplace.
“We are still undeveloped,” Mr. Toole said. “There isn’t a McDonald’s on every corner.”
There were also positives that have been an outgrowth from the Island Plan, though, people involved said.
John Abrams, a member of the plan’s steering committee and the founder of South Mountain Company, said it created a new awareness around some of the issues the Vineyard faced, such as cash spent on the Vineyard flowing off-Island.
“It created a new lexicon, a new awareness,” he said. “I think that alone is a big step.”
It also laid some of the groundwork for taking on the so-called big house bylaws in Chilmark and West Tisbury, and it is serving as a foundation for climate change planning, Mr. Abrams said.
It also brought in people from all walks of life, not just town officials, he said.
“I think for many of us, it resonates all the time,” Mr. Abrams said.
On the 15th anniversary, the people involved with the plan hoped the public would revisit it, and continue thinking about the Vineyard’s future.
“You don’t hear people say the Island Plan any more,” said Mr. Veno. “But a lot of it remains valid.”
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