For the first time in half a year, Warren once again has a full-time Town Planner.

Town Manager Kate Michaud tapped Herbert A. Durfee III for the position, which was approved by the Town Council on Tuesday evening. He had been acting as the interim planner since the middle of May.

A Burlington, Vt. native, Durfee has over 35 years of municipal experience, including two stints as Town Manager in the Vermont towns of Fairhaven and Norwich. Prior to finding the opening in Warren, following the departure of Bob Rulli in January, Durfee was the Town Planner in Coventry, a position that he said was precarious from the start.

“They hire town managers and then fire them quite quickly over there,” he said. I think they’ve had 10 or so managers over the last 14 years. They come and go depending on the politics there. The guy that hired me, they got rid of this past December. And since I was a key department head, I went out the door on the coat tails. There really wasn’t a reason given to me, but notwithstanding that I think Coventry’s loss was Warren’s gain.”

Durfee said he was still in the introductory phase of meeting members of various boards and getting the lay of the land in terms of what grant opportunities are ongoing, while simultaneously taking part in ongoing development projects underway; such as the Liberty Street School development, where he participated in a recent Technical Review Committee meeting last week.

“I’m trying to grab every tentacle [Rulli] has been involved with and drink from the fire hose at the same time,” he said. “I’m going as quickly as I can, as fast as I can, so I can hit the ground running on the pavement.”

Finalizing a Comprehensive Plan
Whether you celebrated or mourned Rulli’s departure from town, it can’t really be argued that a noticeable void was created in his absence. Grant awards and visits from federal delegates, which seemed to happen frequently with Rulli at the helm, pretty much stopped happening. Consultant Alison Ring, who had been helping the town update its Comprehensive Plan, stepped in on an interim basis, but that was always supposed to be temporary, and was necessarily limited in scope.

In addition to continuing to mine those grant opportunities and keep track of various federal earmarks secured by Rulli, Durfee said the aforementioned Comprehensive Plan was priority number one for him.

Included within that sprawling document is everything from how developments will be fostered in town, to how transportation should be optimized, and what role the town’s historic character should have in how it grows and evolves in the years and decades moving forward. Durfee said he was hopeful to see that be finalized — including approvals from the state and, ultimately, the Town Council — by January of the New Year.

But there’s a lot of steps between then, including the adoption of various new housing policies that were approved by the General Assembly and signed by Governor McKee in the past couple of months.

“There were some watershed housing bills signed by the Governor last week,” he said. “All municipalities will have to go through a new regulatory process. Land use regulations have to occur, and a lot of other areas of those regulations need to be updated. We will be focused on housing and trying to help with affordable housing as those bills are intended to do, including in Warren.”

Intertwined with all of that is the ambitious development and climate resiliency plan, Market to Metacom, which was started by Rulli and envisions a long-term future for the Market Street and Metacom Avenue corridors. The plan relies on form-based code to guide new, mixed-use housing and commercial developments along Metacom Avenue and wetlands reclamation to address anticipated rising sea levels on Market Street.

“We have to factor our new regulations to better accommodate the Market to Metacom vision that I’m inheriting, and I think there’s still a lot of discussion that has to occur with that,” Durfee said.

Codifying Warren’s historic district
Durfee also said that Warren’s voluntary historic district must become more officially codified in order to clarify the development process moving forward.

“In my opinion Warren needs to formalize its historic district,” he said. “If we’re going to move forward with the kind of reviews we do and the kind of input we provide, we need to more formalize the historic district and get the members more formally trained on that process…Historic stuff has a lot of subjectivity to it, and in my view we need to minimize that subjectivity as best we can.”

Durfee said that getting the town’s historic district officially certified would allow them to tap into historic preservation funds, create a more refined inventory of historic properties in town that are deserving of protection, and create a more streamlined and stable process for developing within the historic portions of town.

“It might add an additional level of bureaucratic review to the process, but it will minimize subjectivity and, most importantly, add predictability to the process,” he said.

An open door policy
Durfee said that he has an “open door policy” and strives for transparency in his work to build trust with developers and the community.

“When I sit here and send an email out, I anticipate it will be out in the public somewhere,” he said. “I try to operate in an open and transparent way. That’s what helps add to a level of predictability, helps to build trust in government, especially local government, and hopefully I can contribute to that further.”

Durfee said that he has always been drawn to municipal planning because of the impact such jobs can have on a town or city, even knowing that the job will ultimately lead to plenty of scrutiny and disagreements regarding the vision he has for that community.

“Ive always been engaged that way, even up in Vermont when I was chair of the school board for nine years,” he said. “I like to be part of the decision instead of complaining about the decision. What comes with that territory is some good, some bad, and some ugly, but it’s all part of the process. And if we can make more of the good, great, if we can minimize the bad, even better, and if we can get rid of the ugly, awesome.”