LYNN — It’s a strange time to be starting a new job, especially one that hasn’t been in existence for more than two decades.
Aaron Clausen started his new position as the city’s principal planner April 6, but didn’t start working out of City Hall until earlier this month when the building started to reopen to employees.
“It’s one thing to start a job but running a planning department virtually is a big challenge,” said Clausen, 45. “Things are going well, given COVID-19.”
To get acclimated, the Newburyport resident said he spent the first couple of months on the job “virtually commuting” and getting to know people in Lynn, including different organizations and stakeholders that are involved in planning processes for the city.
That kind of interconnection between various planning entities is vastly different from what Clausen has seen in other municipalities that he has worked for in the past, he said.
In Lowell, where he served as first an associate planner and later a senior planner from 2007-2013, he was part of a “fairly large” planning department, which was made up of 25-30 planners.
The City of Beverly, where he served as director of planning and development from 2014 until he was hired in Lynn, had a planning department that was smaller, but still had a staff of five people.
By comparison, Lynn has not had a full-time head planner for more than two decades and lacks a planning department.
Mayor Thomas M. McGee has said his long-term vision is to create a “more robust” planning department in the city, but a funding source beyond three years has not been determined.
Clausen was hired on a contractual basis. His three-year position, at a salary of $115,000 per year, is being funded with $675,000 worth of gifts the city received to hire both a principal and associate planner.
McGee said the city still intends to hire a full-time contracted associate planner at a salary of $90,000, but that process has been pushed back in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the meantime, Clausen has been tasked with working with the various planning entities in the city, including EDIC/Lynn, the city’s Department of Community Development, Inspectional Services Department, and Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development (LHAND).
“Lynn has a lot of entities that have done great work,” said Clausen. “It’s a collaborative approach (and involves) stringing together all those efforts so we can carry out a comprehensive approach.”
Much of the work Clausen has done so far involves jumping into ongoing projects that were already underway before his tenure began, he said.
For instance, one of the major efforts that he has started to oversee is the development of the city’s five-year housing production plan, “Housing Lynn: A Plan for Inclusive Growth.”
Clausen has been working with LHAND and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council on that planning effort, which is aimed at increasing the city’s affordable housing stock.
Having to conduct meetings and solicit public input virtually has been challenging, Clausen said.
“That’s been a pretty steep learning curve,” said Clausen. “It is such an important topic now, regionally, but also for the city.”
Clausen said he’s also been focused on grant opportunities for the city that will help make certain areas more resistant to climate change and mitigate flooding.
Last week, Clausen submitted a grant application that, if approved, will help the city implement some of the recommendations from its Strawberry Brook plan, which could reduce a significant amount of flooding in that area, he said.
Another grant effort aims to develop design and engineering solutions for the Lynn Harbor shoreline, in terms of making it more resilient to climate change, he said.
He’s also focused on working with different stakeholders to move other projects forward, such as the construction of Lynn’s portion of the Northern Strand Community Trail, and implementation of the city’s Waterfront Master Plan and Waterfront Open Space Master Plan.
Citing the visions of both of those plans, Clausen said there’s significant opportunity for the waterfront to be completely transformed. It’s an area that has drawn a vast amount of economic development interest, he said.
He was drawn to Lynn for a number of reasons, the first being that there’s something about the community that is really engaging, he said.
“It looks to me to be a really collaborative community that works together to address issues,” said Clausen. “I think it’s also a community that’s in significant transition. I think the mayor has a progessive vision for the city. (There’s an) opportunity to really affect change in a positive manner.”
