Updates

Greetings Isle au Haut folks,

I would like to provide you all with an update on the Comprehensive Plan Review process. Where we are and what the next steps are.

First, the committee would like to thank all of you that participated, brought food,  or sent in comments on the two visioning sessions this November. We, along with our partners at the Hancock County Planning Commission (HCPC) have a great collection of dreams, goals, hopes, and visions for Isle au Haut. The HCPC is still formulating all of that information into a digestible product so that the information can be folded into the new plan. I will update you here as it becomes available. Please feel free to send me or any committee member comments or concerns at any time and we will add them to our collection.

The next steps involve breaking the plan into the required sections/chapters. The HCPC staff will take the old plans from 2011 and 2016 and update them with publicly available data and information. Those drafts will then come to the committee for review and obvious corrections/consultation with local subject matter experts. The reviewed drafts of each section will then be made available for comments and review by the rest of the community. The drafts will then be updated/edited again. 

Please remember that none of these drafts are final and at any time during this process, we will always take more comments and ideas from the Isle au Haut community. The “final” product, which is due in late 2025 will still actually be a draft until it is approved by both the town and state. Remember that the final product is a vision and general planning document, and not a work-order or mandate. It just gives us an idea of where Isle au Haut wants to go, where we’ve been, and where we are. 

We will continue to meet as a committee each 4th Tuesday to move through the process. Look forward to other public sessions and email and snail mail surveys in the coming months. All of these sessions help us produce the best product for the future.

I will continue to post updates here at the  Town website for information on our progress as well as links to the HCPC site where they will have all of our draft work available for your review as we develop them. 

Here is the link to the HCPC Isle au Haut site: https://sites.google.com/hcpcme.org/town-of-isle-au-haut/home

Thank you again,

The Comprehensive Plan Committee

The Town of Isle au Haut collaborated with the Island Institute to enroll in the Community Resilience Partnership (CRP), a program administered by the Maine Governor's Office of Policy, Innovation and the Future. Enrollment in the CRP provides communities with access to funding opportunities, including Community Action Grants, and other resources to support resilience initiatives.

In spring 2024, Isle au Haut received a Community Action Grant to develop a comprehensive plan, emergency operations plan, and vulnerability assessment. The Town contracted the Hancock County Planning Commission (HCPC) to oversee these projects in August 2024.

In early August, the Isle au Haut Selectboard invited community members to apply for the Comprehensive Plan Committee. Committee members were appointed from the applicants, and the committee held its first meeting on September 24th, where it appointed David Wallstrom as Chair and Rita MacWilliams as Secretary.