What is the Citywide Comprehensive Plan?
The Citywide Comprehensive Plan is a community-driven set of goals and an action plan for the next decade. Over the next year, the citywide planning process will engage the community in a range of topics including Land Use, Housing, Economic Development, Transportation & Mobility, Natural and Cultural Resources, Open Space & Recreation, Services & Facilities
As a result of this process, the Comprehensive Plan will articulate a shared vision for a stronger, more equitable, and resilient New Bedford. Moreover, the resulting document will provide an actionable implementation framework, which includes policies and practices for creating a healthier community, maintaining a clean, sustainable environment, providing housing to a range of incomes, increasing opportunities for use of open space, improving transportation access, and offering quality public facilities.
Why Now?
The development and update of the Plan is required by the State’s Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) through M.G.L. c. 41, §81D. New Bedford’s most recent master plan expired in 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic delayed its update.
A post COVID- 19 master planning process provides a unique opportunity to reassess the city’s goals and priorities and offers insight to shift how we think and plan for infrastructure, housing security, equitable transportation and how we use and value our open spaces and natural and cultural resources. Preparing sustainable plans and policies to withstand economic, natural and health related adversities is critical as we realize that community planning has local, regional, and even global impacts.
Steering Committee
Adrian Ventura
Angela Johnston
Cheryl Bartlett
Dan Goulart
Ed Washburn
Ian Abreu
Isaiah Houtman
Jeff Costa
Jon Carvalho
Joe Tavares
Kamile Khazan
Kathryn Duff
Kim Ferreira
Maria Rosario
Michael Goodman
Mike Quinn
Patricia Lareau
Paul Chasse
Paul Pawlowski
Rebecca Barnes
Renee Ledbetter
Rosemary Gill
Shayne Trimbell
Steve Silverstein
Tony Sapienza
City Leads
Jennifer Carloni
Director of City Planning
Michael McCarthy
Assistant City Planner
Design Team
Agency Landscape + Planning
Agency is the capacity of human beings to act, to make choices. Planning can remove barriers. Design is an act of optimism. Optimism and action are much needed, today more than ever. At Agency Landscape + Planning, we believe in the power of people to initiate and make purposeful, positive change.
Agency is a women-owned small business (WOSB) and certified DBE/WBE practice based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our work engages the full spectrum of design services - from strategic planning to complex public realm implementation. It is tied together by a commitment to public sector work with deep community engagement. We have a significant practice dedicated to urban planning, from the regional to district scale, and a team of twelve designers and planners.
Agency is a mission-driven practice dedicated to addressing social equity, cultural vitality and environmental resilience through design excellence, strategic planning and community engagement. Co-founders Brie Hensold and Gina Ford have worked together for over a decade.
Cambridge Econometrics
Cambridge Econometrics is a global economics consultancy with offices in Northampton, MA and Europe (Cambridge, UK; Brussels; and Budapest). The office specializes in the application of economic modeling and data analysis techniques for strategic planning, policy assessment and investment analysis. The scope of work includes:
Economy (regions, cities & local area economic development, transportation and infrastructure, innovation, sectors, trade & competitiveness);
Society (jobs & skills, inequality & poverty, population, migration & housing and health & social care); and
Environment (energy, climate, circular economy and natural resources).
Cambridge Econometrics’ US operation opened in 2021, building on the long-standing expertise of Hodge Economic Consulting with deep experience in economic strategy, urban planning, transit-oriented development, and multi-modal transportation planning and analysis. Leading the Massachusetts-based office, Dan Hodge has extensive experience working on local plans, regional economic strategies, transportation investments and a wide-range of policy issues throughout the Commonwealth. He is the former Director of Economic Policy Research at the UMass Donahue Institute and has worked with an extensive list of municipal, regional, state and non-profit clients such as MassINC, MassDevelopment, MassDOT, Metro South Chamber of Commerce, Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, and Mass Department of Housing and Community Development.
Hisel Flynn Architects
Hisel Flynn is a boutique architectural and design practice launched in 2017 by longtime friends and collaborators Katie Flynn and Dan Hisel. Hisel Flynn is based in Massachusetts, and most of their work happens locally within the Commonwealth and neighboring states. The team has grown to include ten wonderful individuals whose interests range in scale from cities to large buildings to homes to furniture and objects. Hisel Flynn’s skills and tactics range accordingly - they operate concurrently at urban and material scales, zooming out to understand context, zooming in to the built details, and willing to work with their own hands and across disciplines.
Hisel Flynn’s work expresses a clarity of form and function, employing forms and materials in an honest and unadorned way. The practice responds to site conditions by providing visual and physical connections between inside and out. These qualities result in spaces that are enduring, engaging, and open.
The team believes that architects must be optimists, as every project physically changes the world and must do so for the better. They believe their must work support and improve the lives of those that encounter it, inspire wonder, and perform to tomorrow’s standards of environmentalism, equity, and building technology.
Rivera Consulting
Since late 2015, Rivera Consulting, Inc, has focused its management consulting services on delivering transformative organizational development practices that combine social justice and equity-oriented goals and action planning, participatory data-based consensus building, change management, coaching, and training focused on members, board, program staff, mid managers, and senior leadership. Known locally for her political and policy achievements, our President Wilnelia Rivera is also a nationally recognized social change practitioner. Her team is composed of multi-disciplinary transformation consultants and problem solvers. Team members are strategists, coaches, former campaign operatives, researchers, designers and change management makers.
Rivera Consulting’s work is relational. It offers a democratized version of “traditional” consulting and gives power back to the people that can most effectively wield it at this moment in time. The cornerstone of their work - deep democracy - is both a value and a methodology. They believe that as we continue to forge a new collective vision and social contract, we can leverage policy, research, and people to transform communities. The team is comprised of strategic disruptors in the fields of electoral politics, legislation and advocacy, urban planning, and movement building that is calling for a new playbook for a national just transition.
Rivera Consulting’s staff brings with it experience at the nexus of people, policy, politics, research, and community engagement practices. Be it within the halls of municipal government, community planning, or nonprofit strategic planning, our approach balances the need for relational trust building alongside a data analytical process that creates the foundation for change in real time. This combination of grassroots design thinking facilitation techniques and data-driven assessment practices gets to the core of Rivera Consulting’s ethos and theory of change.
Innes Associates
Emily Innes has been assisting communities for over ten years. Her focus is on strategic planning for waterfront and downtown revitalization, providing tools for communities to achieve their visions for these areas. In addition to her experience as project manager for comprehensive plans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Emily has acted as project manager for redevelopment plans in Lawrence, Fall River, New Bedford, Brockton, and South Norwalk and for harbor plans in Beverly and Cohasset. All have included a complex mixture of public engagement, municipal state approval processes, working with planning committees, and managing multiple subconsultants.
Innes Associates works with people to make their places better - more activities, more housing choices, more jobs, and a higher quality of life. We are proud that in Massachusetts, we have collaborated with two critical programs: MassDevelopment’s technical services program and the Massachusetts Downtown Initiative, part of the Department of Housing and Community Development. Innes Associates has deep experience with the regulatory structures and other tools and actions required to make revitalization happen in our communities. Likewise, they understand that New England’s waterfronts are a critical part of its history. From the spectacular coasts to the many inland rivers, waterfronts have provided us with jobs, recreation, and beauty. The team understands the challenges of integrating the needs of working waterfronts with community desires for access and municipal needs for housing, economic development, and open space. They have worked with properties under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts’ Waterways Act (Chapter 91) and how municipal harbor plans can be used to implement a community’s vision for its waterfront. Those tools include land use plans, zoning changes, design guidelines, and, in Massachusetts, state-enabled programs such as urban renewal/redevelopment plans, 40R, HDIP, and UCH-TIF.