Several of us attended the February 21 NEMO (Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials) meeting. As explained in the last newsletter, NEMO is a program offered by UConn to provide assistance to local land use commissions and officials on how to promote development without sacrificing natural resources and community character. The Town Conservation Commission is working on mapping all of the Town’s land in order to identify areas for development, preservation, recreation, etc. The UConn NEMO team made a presentation titled “Community Resource Inventory Online (CRI)” to a group which included the Planning & Zoning Commission (P&Z), Town Planner Charles Karno, members of other Town commissions, citizens and our HLWA members. The program is an approach to inventorying, analyzing, planning and implementing the community resources identified by the mapping, augmented by many digital maps available on the internet. This information will be used by P&Z in their work on the Town’s Plan of Conservation and Development, a critical “roadmap” for Town growth, discussed in the last newsletter.

A comprehensive document titled the Highland Lake Management Plan (1991) has not been updated because the Town Lake Commission is defunct. However, HLWA has made arrangements for a lake-water-quality scientist to make recommendations for the management of Highland Lake, and we expect to have the plan in time for inclusion in the Plan of Conservation and Development.