Over the last two years, Newcastle has been working toward a comprehensive code  married to its site plan code, a neighborhood-based character code. Town Administator Jon Duke said they won’t reach voters by town meeting; instead, November is likely.

The Newcastle Local Planning Committee (NLPC) was given the task of overseeing the creation of a new comprehensive plan and an accompanying code. It hired the Maine Design Workshop to combine the two documents, hear from townspeople, and create documents that would be a significant improvement over most towns’ comprehensive plans, which are often put together and gather dust, and a site plan review code that is used on a daily basis, amended as needed, and corrected when errors are found.

But no one expected that the expensive comp plan and character code would need quite so many corrections before it even got to a second draft.

The town received its first deliverable in December, two documents that comprise the comprehensive plan and the site plan review documents, about 500 pages. At this point, most of the $120,000 fee was paid, per the consultants’ contract, with only about $7,000 held back for legal work and other last-minute funding needs. The town had approved the spending at town meeting, but many citizens have been asking town officials about the high cost lately, based on the amount of work the volunteers on the committee are now facing.

Duke said that while some of the work made sense for the immediate downtown and downtown neighborhoods, “a lot of it looked like it could have been done for Boston,” he said. “Newcastle is a lot more than just Glidden Street and Main Street.”

To people from rural North Newcastle, River Road, and Sheepscot Road, he said, “The ideas in the documents looked completely foreign. That’s not what they said they wanted at the various meetings and check-ins.”

After introducing the comprehensive plan and the code at a meeting at Lincoln Academy in December, the NLPC began reviewing it in earnest in January.

“Some of the edits are minor, and what you’d expect,” Duke said. “Spelling changes, grammar edits, that sort of thing. But what is taking the most time is revisions to the code for the rural districts, and the misunderstanding of how Newcastle wanted to deal with light industry, including home-based businesses.”

Newcastle wanted to incorporate light industry and home-based industry throughout the town, including the downtown and residential districts, as well as the Route One corridor and the rural areas. Somehow, that notion was not understood by the developers, and has to be rewritten, he said. “We need more tax base in the village, and ordinances that support that.”

“There is still a lot of work to do,” Duke said. “It’s not going to be ready for a vote at town meeting.  It’ll likely be November before people can vote on it.”

Once the first rewrite is complete, it will go back to the consultants for their review. The town will expect a clean version afterward. “But at that point we’ll have something to work from,” Duke said.

For now, the NLPC is talking with residents about the draft, and getting their feedback.