RUMFORD — More than 100 people participated in public input sessions and workshops for the new Rumford comprehensive plan over four days in mid-March.

The Select Board hired Haley Ward of Bangor for $110,000 to guide the new, roughly eight-month planning process for the project, officially labeled “Rumford 2035,” which began in late 2025. Rumford’s comprehensive planning committee is aiding the planning stages.

Among the issues to be addressed are growth, land use, and development over the next 10 to 12 years.

Ben Meader, a geospatial analyst and environmental planner with Haley Ward, whose focus is ecological assets and recreational assets, led a two-hour session March 12 with 28 people who talked about what they wanted to see for the town.

“All we’re doing is asking you what you want. It’s very much taking input and translating that into actions,” Meader said. “But the benefit of doing it this way is that when everybody is in the same room, and you’re all talking together, if you disagree with somebody, you’re trying to figure out together.”

Despite the group effort, Meader acknowledged that not everyone is going to agree on every issue.

“There’s disagreement. And there’s a lot of problems in the town,” he said. “But I do feel like the community is invested in its own future. There have been some very good conversations.”

Meader said that, even in the final plan, if people don’t like everything at least they see their fingerprints on it.

“They can actually see a lot of their comments in the actual plan,” he said. “That helps a lot with buy-in and people supporting it.”

Town Manager George O’Keefe said what the town wants out of the planning sessions is “thorough community engagement,” securing confidence in the plan.

“We want people to know and to be able to say this is actually built with community input as opposed to being kind of a best guess of what the community wants,” O’Keefe said. “It’s direct, structured, focused and thoughtful community engagement.”

Haley Ward has held similar engagement sessions for several communities, including Brunswick last year.

“I feel lucky we get to do this … The community up here is just so strong,” Meader said. “I’ve been watching (O’Keefe) kind of handle the process they do here in the evenings, and it’s so professional and so intentional. Everybody listens and decisions are made. It’s decisive.”

O’Keefe said a complete rewrite of the town’s comprehensive plan was last done around 2009, with an update in 2013.

“It’s so important for the town to understand that the engagement on this process,” he said, “is designed to ensure that this is something that’s owned by the people of the town of Rumford.”

Talking about the current comprehensive plan, O’Keefe said many sections are either obsolete, or marketing conditions have changed, or they had whole sections of the economy they didn’t even consider.

“Our 2013 update described outdoor recreation as a means of diversifying the town’s economy,” he said. “That has actually occurred in the past 10 years and continues to occur. So now, we have an entire outdoor recreation economy that really has to be considered as part of the plan for the next 10 years.”

O’Keefe also said he doesn’t think the industrial sector got the in-depth treatment that it needed in the last plan.

“Part of that has to do with understanding, what does the mill’s future look like here,” he said, referring to ND Paper’s Rumford Division. “So, we have one approach where we presume that it will continue to be here and then we have another approach in looking at the mill where we attempt to understand what would happen if they shut down,” he said.

O’Keefe noted that the town has an understanding that the mill has “a long-term future here in Rumford” under the current ownership.

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