TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

Quick Links

Pittsford is a small village in Rutland County about eight miles north of Rutland City on Route 7. Though it is a small community, Pittsford has a relatively lively village center, with a variety of small businesses and services within village limits. The village extends along the highway for some distance, but has relatively few side streets that extend back from Route 7 to create neighborhoods.

With an eye towards creating opportunities for new development and more "depth" in the heart of the village, a local nonprofit organization called the Pittsford Community Corporation (PCC) is in the process of buying the Forrest Farm (at the top of Elm Street). Their goal is to develop it in ways that strengthen and revitalize the village center. They asked Smart Growth Vermont and Preservation Trust of Vermont to assess what community residents would most like to see on the site. We completed focus groups, surveys and community meetings and presented these to the community.

Currently, PCC has put this project on hold.

In 2009-2010, Smart Growth Vermont and Preservation Trust of Vermont collected information to help develop a feasibility study for the Forrest Farm and reviewed other information that has already been developed such as Pittsford's Town Plan, town bylaws, and regional plans and studies.

The heart of our work, however, was facilitating an effort to engage the community in a variety of different ways. Not everyone feels comfortable speaking in a public meeting setting. So over summer and fall of 2009, we provided a variety of ways for the community to participate and share their thoughts on ways to come together as a community to strengthen the village center.  We hosted smaller focus groups, distributed comment cards and boxes around town, and organized a community-wide meeting. We also conducted a survey, the results of which are presented in the Quick Links section above. 

At a large community meeting to share the results in the spring of 2010 and learn from other communities how they had implemented successful community projects, there was general positive feedback on developing the property for senior housing, a cafe or restaurant, small businesses, a town green with gazebo and a community center. In the summer of 2010, PCC decided that they needed to put the fund raising for the property on hold until several key issues were addressed.