Lincoln Comprehensive Plan - Community Opportunities Group, Inc.

COG worked with the Town of Lincoln for nearly two years to create a new Comprehensive Plan. Through an extensive public participation process that included the Lincoln Planning Board, a 50+-member Comprehensive Long-Range Plan Committee (CLRPC), a project steering committee and five subcommittees, COG crafted a plan that affirms Lincoln’s history of creative development techniques and calls upon the town to focus on several needs and opportunities, such as:

• Promoting mixed-use development around the commuter rail station in South Lincoln through revised zoning.
• Preserving the architectural richness of the town’s built environment and the special character of its neighborhoods by controlling tear-downs and “mansionization.”
• Continuing the town’s long-standing commitment to affordable housing by adopting new strategies for housing diversity.
• Adapting the town’s traditional, small-town government to deal with demographic, social, and political changes, and encouraging Lincoln to consider new ways to forge consensus about major policy issues.

After Town Meeting accepted the Comprehensive Plan in November 2009, the town immediately moved into the implementation phase by forming a working implementation committee and creating additional professional planning capacity. The Town also initiated work on a Healthy Communities Plan and hired COG to assist with that endeavor as well.