ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy speaks with The Item in her office at Lynn City Hall.
We support Mayor Judith Flanagan Kennedy in her decision announced on Tuesday to hire a city planner.
Hiring a planner will allow city officials to replace the blunt instrument they are now using to craft Lynn’s development policy with a laser capable of precisely defining city objectives. To his credit, Lynn Economic Development and Industrial Corporation (EDIC) Executive Director James M. Cowdell advised Kennedy on the value of hiring a planner.
Cowdell has played a major role since Kennedy took office in 2010 in propelling the city’s development goals forward. His fingerprints are on the progress made downtown and on the waterfront.
But Cowdell heads a local agency with a specific mandate just as veteran Lynn Housing Authority and Neighborhood Development Executive Director Charles Gaeta has a mandate for his agency and Community Development Director James Marsh has one for his office.
The exact parameters for the planning job are still to be defined, but we urge Kennedy to make sure the planning office is an autonomous city department. For her part, the mayor has made it clear the planner will be a different breed of cat than the city’s three directors.
Successful planners in other communities demonstrate an ability to understand the big picture when it comes to their community’s growth and development objectives. They also understand the tiny mosaic pieces that compose that picture.
A strong Lynn planner will have relationships with the agencies overseen by Gaeta, Marsh and Cowdell and he or she will also need to build deep community relationships.
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Former Planner Kevin R. Geaney, in a 1983 Item interview, discussed the relationship between planning professionals and local appointed and elected officials. The single word defining that relationship, in Geaney’s view, is “consensus.”
With that watchword in mind, a city planner can be viewed as a gatekeeper — someone who is an initial point of contact for a developer or business with a relocation or expansion plan. A skilled planner can assess how a development vision or business idea fits into the city’s overall development plan and also assess how a proposal conforms with or clashes with local zoning code and ordinances.
Lynn has benefited from the shared expertise and vision provided during Kennedy’s tenure by Gaeta, Cowdell and Marsh. But progress has been tempered by the lack of a single professional serving as a point person for someone viewing Lynn’s potential for the first time.
As Kennedy begins to define the planner’s job description, we invite her to research how communities such as Salem and Saugus, Boston and Somerville, have used planners and how they define the planner’s role.
The end result of that research is the successful hiring of a planner who can bring a laser focus to the task of enhancing Lynn’s future.
