NORWAY – An updated comprehensive plan that will go before voters at the June 14 town meeting.

A public hearing on the plan, completed after more than two years of effort by the Comprehensive Planning Committee, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Norway Town Hall.

The plan includes a new recommendation for a zone to protect future development of Norway’s existing Downtown Historic District as recognized by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

It also recommends ordinances to protect the aesthetics of the village’s “gateway areas” to the south – lower Main Street, Fair Street and Paris Street – and north – routes 118/117 – through good building design, signs and landscaping that compliments the downtown.

Other priorities in the plan are to emphasize cost-effectiveness and efficiency in government to ease a growing tax burden and broaden the town’s economic base; and to make the development of a trail network and recreation areas such as Pennesseewassee Park high priorities.

“While it is an update, I don’t think any of us think there are tremendous changes from the one the town passed in 1992,” Town Manager David Holt said Tuesday. Although voters approved the 1992 plan, that plan was not approved by the state.

The updated plan, like the earlier version, lays the groundwork for zoning by recommending passage by voters of specific ordinances, such as that which would create an overlay zone in the downtown historic district.

Other land use designations recommended in the plan are a lake district, in the area around the town’s four major lakes; a general residential district over and beyond Pike’s Hill including the back side to the Oxford town line; and a special commercial district to encompass the planned Oxford Hills Technology Park off Roberts Road.

The town has a site plan review and a shoreland zoning ordinance, but traditionally has resisted plans for formal townwide zoning, Holt said.

“We don’t have zoning, and I’m not aware of any plans to do that,” he said. “I do think, however, that the times are changing.”

Data collected as part of research for the update support Holt’s opinion.

After the decade of the 1990s, during which the town’s population actually dropped by .3 percent to its present level of about 4,600, “The past few years have brought considerable change, and it appears that the town is again poised for significant growth, mostly in the single-family housing market,” the plan states.

Lakeshore frontage will increasingly become more scarce, and development around the town’s four major lakes will continue, “with second and possibly even third tier development occurring,” the plan states.

Based on the 38 building permits taken out for new homes in 2003, the 2000 Census may well be mistaken in its projection of a very slow increase in Norway’s population through 2015.

Up to 25 percent of the new housing is expected to be either seasonal or high-income retirement homes.

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