North Adams Returns to Crystal Ball For Vision 2030 City Plan

The Berkshire Eagle  reports in 2014, the city laid out a plan for the future.

Five years later, how well has North Adams followed its Vision 2030 master plan?

The city's Community and Economic Development Advisory Board has embarked on a five-year review of that document, which in 2014 outlined approaches to issues like economic renewal and infrastructure investment.

The review process — requested by Mayor Thomas Bernard — began at a board meeting Wednesday. The panel expects to craft a supplemental document.

To guide the review, the city has tapped a Berkshire Regional Planning Commission planner, Zachary Feury, a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, who outlined the board's next steps.

The Vision 2030 project was launched in 2011, more than four decades since the city's most recent master plan. The plan was adopted by the City Council in 2014 after rounds of planning and community input.

Vision 2030 covered five central themes: economic renewal; physical reinvestment in aging infrastructure; creation of a thriving, connected community; inter-generational thinking; and fiscal efficiency.

The goal of the review, Feury noted, is not to rewrite Vision 2030.

He said the city should engage "a broad swath of the North Adams community" to look back on changes in the last five years and to identify goals and priorities.