City of Norwich Community Development Director Erik Scrivener is working along with the city's planning commission to revamp the existing comprehensive plan for the City of Norwich. The plan will outline short- and long-term goals for the development of Norwich, and they are asking for feedback on what residents would like to see included in it. (Photo by Sarah Genter)

NORWICH — The City of Norwich released a public survey last week with hopes to glean public opinion on various aspects of living within the city.

The survey takes approximately ten minutes to complete, and is available to fill out on the city's website, NorwichNewYork.net under the "What's new in Norwich" section.

Topics covered on the survey include the most and least appealing things about living in the city; what's missing; rating municipal departments such as fire, police, and DPW; opinions on housing, and what is appealing and not appealing about an individual's neighborhood; thoughts on retail and service businesses in the city; recreation and cultural activities; and sustainable initiatives.

The feedback provided by residents will help the City of Norwich Department of Planning and Community Development revamp the city's comprehensive plan, which is an outline of how they plan to develop the city over the next five to ten years.

"It was originally done in 2003 and they updated it. I think 2014 is when that was done. So we’re due to update that, there’s been a lot of changes since then. So we want to get kind of in line with the times with our projects, mark off what’s been done in there, and identify what needs to be done," explained City of Norwich Community Development Director Erik Scrivener.

"It’s 100-plus pages right now. There’s a lot of information that’s redundant, so we’re hoping to make it a little more user friendly," he added. "Not so much text-based but more, here’s the goals and objectives, here’s some supporting documentation, cut out some of the narrative that no one reads. So hopefully it’ll make it a little more user friendly for everybody."

The comprehensive plan will have both short- and long-term goals for the City of Norwich, with the plan to complete short-term goals in about five years, and long-term goals around ten years, according to Scrivener.

The city planning commission has already been working on reviewing the comprehensive plan to update and reformat it. Now, it's time for city residents to weigh in on what they think should be a priority.

"We're just kind of gauging a general interest in the direction that people want to see the city go. So we’re going to kind of segment it around the comprehensive plan itself, the different sections. From economic development, housing, to recreation, and sustainability will be a new component with everything we’re doing with NYSERDA," said Scrivener.

"A lot of people probably don’t even know it exists. I mean, it’s just the nature of those things, no one’s really looking at them. So like I said, it’s just a good way to get people involved and figure out what’s going on, if they don’t already know, in the city," he added.

The community survey will be open until the end of September at NorwichNewYork.net. Scrivener said he hopes to have the newly revised comprehensive plan completed and adopted by the city by this time next year.

"We’re trying to attack a couple of sections a month and get it written," he said. "We’re reformatting it, obviously, to make it more friendly. Then it has to go through the proper chain to be officially adopted, so that’ll take a couple months. So hopefully by a year from now we’ll have an officially adopted document."