BERLIN – Town officials are in the process of reviewing the resilience element intended to serve as an addition to Berlin’s comprehensive plan.
Members of the town’s planning commission received a copy of the lengthy resilience element last week and are expected to discuss it in January. Planning Director Dave Engelhart said the commission would provide input on the document and how it should be worked into the town’s comprehensive plan as the town performed its review of the extensive document in 2020.
“This is the start of it,” Engelhart said.
Last January, the town hosted several community meetings to gather public input to be incorporated into the resilience element, which was to be drafted by the University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center. Center staff spent the ensuing months drafting the plan, which was funded through a grant from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Engelhart said the town had just received the completed resilience element and was now in the process of going over it. He said the town was required to review its comprehensive plan in 2020 and wanted to work the new resilience element into it.
“We wanted to include this as another part of the comprehensive plan,” he told the commission.
He said the new element addressed the town’s assets and how to protect them in the event of environmental changes.
“Basically, it’s designed to take into account sea level rise and climate change and how it’s going to affect the town…,” Engelhart said. “It’s looking to the future.”
Commission member Pete Cosby expressed concern about incorporating the entire document into the comprehensive plan. Engelhart said the town wouldn’t have to include every page of it in the plan, and could just refer to parts of it.
Cosby said he didn’t want to incorporate the entire resilience element without sufficient review.
“It just seems to me this is an awful lot to digest in a month,” he said.
Engelhart explained that the town had all of 2020 to review the comprehensive plan as a whole.
“I don’t anticipate adopting it whole-hog,” Engelhart said. “That’s why I gave it to you guys first.”
Cosby said the commission ought to use it as a guide.
“Just glancing at it, I don’t believe I’d want to incorporate all this,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff in here.”
