WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Planning Board last week gave its final direction to the consultants hired to help the panel rewrite the town's subdivision control bylaw.

 

The town's contract with Northampton's Dodson and Flinker Landscape Architecture and Planning, which is funded by a state grant, expires on June 30, and the consultant is set to deliver a draft document in early July.

 

Last Tuesday, the board reviewed the latest progress from the consultant and considered some of the points discussed at its final, lengthy, video conference with Dodson and Flinker and its team on May 26.

 

Ultimately, plans to take the final draft and make any last decisions before presenting it to the town for a public hearing and adoption by the Planning Board later this year. Its goal has been to make the subdivision bylaw easier to navigate and more contemporary in order to encourage economic development.

 

At Tuesday's regular monthly meeting, Planning Board Chair Kenneth Kuttner told his colleagues he felt a lot of the issues were resolved at the May 26 session, including the development of a regulatory regime that ties infrastructure requirements to the size of a proposed development.

 

He also said he thought Dodson and Flinker's proposed language properly distinguishes between proposed developments in the town's core and those proposed in its rural residential districts.

 

"The thing they suggested, which I thought was interesting, was the 'payment in lieu of' for things like sidewalks in the rural area," Kuttner said in a meeting telecast on the town's community access television station, WilliNet. "So we could keep the sidewalk in the subdivision areas but require in the rural areas, payment in lieu of, which, as he said, would put the urban and rural development on an equal footing in terms of development cost.