Gateway One: Rockland Signs on!

Well, we signed on a while ago, but, it's taken me this long to find a rainy day to make a blog and fix my site. So here's the scoop:

Curious about what Gateway 1 is? www.gateway1.org
As a result of conflict over years of road widening and land use planning decisions, a number of midcoast residents who had been part of MaineDOT's regional transportation advisory committees knew that a different method of land use and transportation planning had to be developed. Gateway 1 was launched as a result. The committee participants believed that a more collaborative approach would be effective. MaineDOT also wanted to find a better way to work with the communities in the midcoast, and needed to find a way to plan for the Corridor as a whole. As population growth and development in the midcoast accelerated, MaineDOT found that transportation decisions were becoming reactive, not proactive. A forum that would combine land use and transportation planning was essential to keeping Route 1 functional. And so, late in 2004, MaineDOT, the State Planning Office and the Federal Highway Administration launched Gateway 1.
By the end of 2005, the 21 Corridor towns had all signed a Memorandum of Understanding and elected representatives to a Steering Committee, which spent from 2005 until the summer of 2009 developing planning materials and implementation strategies. MDOT agreed to provide competitive grant funding for towns and municipalities that sign on to the Gateway 1 memorandum of understanding, and work within the sensible growth and transportation planning guidelines of the Gateway 1 planning document. Rockland has signed on, which will give us considerable assistance both in being able to use the planning documents, which are very good, and to having access to the competitive grant process and collaborative planning with the communities around us.
There is also funding for planning, which is not competitively granted, but which is granted to the twons and municipalities when they sign on to the memorandum of understanding. This funding is making it possible for us to hire a professional planner.
I am a member of the Rockland Response Panel. Each community has a panel that responded to and voted on the Steering Committee recommendations.
This kind of work is at the heart of everything I stand for and all I am about: cutting down on carbon emissions due to sensible transportation planning, working to build a transportation corridor that truly works for us, working to build bike paths and foot trails, and working to develop our economy in ways that do not hinder the natural beauty of our place, which in fact is one of the greatest economic tools we have.