Sangerville Visioning Group assesses survey

Contributed Story

SANGERVILLE — The sec-ond meeting of the Visioning Group for Sangerville’s Future, formerly the Sangerville Steer-ing Committee, was held on June 3 in the town hall community room.

With Chris Buchanan acting as facilitator, the group re-viewed a number of issues in-cluding examining the results of the community survey that was sent to all town residents.

The survey asked resident to rank a variety of town assets as essential, important or nice to have.

The strongest responses favored air and water quality, lakes, open space, rural charac-ter and water aquifers.

Hoping for additional responses to ensure that the preliminary results were accurate, the group will be posting the survey around town and asking voters at the SAD 4 school budget referendum in Sangerville to complete the survey.

The next step after completing a review of the survey results will be to draft a white paper of the trends and implications for how to protect, preserve and strengthen the values that Sangerville residents treasure most about the town.

Recognizing that Sangerville is bordered by three service cen-ter towns, there is no need to duplicate the facilities, services and offerings of Guilford, Dover-Foxcroft and Dexter.

Sangerville can provide ex-cellent residential opportunities for families and retirees and farming land for agriculture.

Protecting these assets for future generations has implications for present actions that might be taken, such as or-dinances on noise, land use, hazardous materials handling, fireworks, off-street apartment parking and how best to provide recreational opportunities for all ages.

The next meeting of the group will be on Tuesday, June 30 in the community room at 6:30 pm.

All meetings of the group are open to everyone as there is no regular or appointed member-ship. Residents are urged to attend one, many, any or all meetings to informally discuss the future direction for the growth and development of the town to guide the Board of Selectmen over the next five years.