Welcome!
The Town of Brookline is undertaking a comprehensive plan process to help shape the future of the town, including its neighborhoods, connections, and businesses. Running through 2025, the planning process will establish a community vision, goals, and recommendations for the future of Brookline.
The plan needs YOU! Check back often for news, announcements, events, and opportunities for participation.
What is a comprehensive plan?
Under Massachusetts General Laws, master planning is governed by Chapter 41, Section 81D. This section requires that the plan address nine elements, including a goals and policies statement and an implementation plan.
Within that framework is a great deal of latitude to craft a plan that fits the individual needs for the community.
APA Sustaining Places Initiative
The American Planning Association developed the Sustaining Places Initiative to help communities integrate sustainability into comprehensive plans.
This process will use the 6 guiding principles from the APA’s Sustaining Places Initiative as an underlying framework. These principles are statements of intent that underly a plan’s overall strategy, including its goals, objective, policies, maps, and other content. The principles are:
Livable Built Environment
Harmony with Nature
Resilient Economy
Interwoven Equity
Healthy Community
Responsible Regionalism
At the intersections of these guiding principles and the MA Comp Plan topics, Brookliners’ values and vision will shape the plan topics and cross cutting themes.
Plan Impact
Policies for Physical Environment
The Comprehensive Plan will develop policies that provide direction for Town departments and cooperation with local nonprofits and businesses.
Regulatory Changes
The Comprehensive Plan will provide a framework to guide future zoning changes.
Investment
The Comprehensive Plan will be a reference for the Town for prioritizing future investment, including operating and capital funds, as well as staff and volunteer time.
Ongoing Community Discussions
The Comprehensive Plan process will include many ways to share your input, with a goal to continue transparency and engagement beyond approval of the plan and into implementation.
Schedule
Over the course of 24 months, the Town of Brookline, the consultant team, and the Brookline community will engage in the comprehensive planning process.
In the Pre-Planning stage, the Town began with overall coordination and scheduling to ensure a smooth planning process.
We are kicking off the plan with the Visioning Phase (fall 2024). The community-created vision will set the stage for the plan’s topical themes, goals, and recommendations. It will look forward to future trends and adapt to the needs of the evolving community - all while protecting what is important about Brookline’s unique spirit of place.
With the Vision as a foundation, the plan will move into Topic-Based Recommendations (fall 2024 - spring 2025), which will bring together meaningful community feedback, analysis that aligns with the state’s comprehensive planning requirements, and emerging cross-cutting themes.
The final phase, Planning for Implementation, will synthesize the previous phases into a cohesive, memorable vision for the future and develop an implementation strategy to bring the vision and recommendations to life.
