State planners say those lot sizes, which are useless for farming and wood lots, make it impossible to create neighborhoods where people can walk anywhere or be served by public transportation. While planners call this development pattern sprawl, the people of West Freeport, where the village was proposed to be built, made it clear that they like the rules as they are. Residents mounted a fierce campaign against the plan, which had been initiated by a council-appointed growth committee, and accused the council of trying to urbanize the area against their will. Tuesday's council meeting included angry exchanges between a West Freeport resident, Barbara Sims, and Councilor David Soley, the council's strongest proponent of the growth committee's work. Soley called Sims' comments irrational and said that the status quo will only result in more development.
Sprawl is here.
We can't bury our heads in the sand and hope it doesn't come here. Councilors feared that the opposition was so intense that it threatened to drag down the other components of the plan, like new stream-corridor protection, Soley said. The town's Residential Growth Management Committee proposed the village idea this winter, arguing that focusing growth in some areas would help prevent the remaining rural land in Freeport from being consumed by sprawling development. The committee also proposed that the town rewrite its subdivision rules, allow accessory apartments, protect stream corridors, and limit the number of new housing units to 500 per decade. It also called for growth areas in other parts of town.