| Caitlyn Davison |
NGXchange is a volunteer-powered, free and independent news source for the New Gloucester community. We are proud to highlight positive stories about the people and places in New Gloucester, which is why we are excited to launch our new NG at Work profile series, featuring local businesses.
For the first piece in our series, we are delighted to present North Star Planning, with founder and principal Ben Smith.
Where are you located?
49 Pineland Drive, on the Pineland Business Campus.
Tell us a bit about North Star Planning—what do you do, what do you offer?
We work with towns and cities around Maine and Northern New England to help them create and sustain places that are special to live, work, and play. We do this by providing long range planning services – like Comprehensive Planning, Open Space and Downtown Planning – as well as ordinance and policy development and direct planning board support.
How many years have you been in New Gloucester?
We’ve been in business since 2018, and in New Gloucester since 2019.
How many people are employed by North Star Planning?
North Star Planning has six employees, including five full time planners.
What brought you to New Gloucester?
A convenient location and professional office space with some good food options were definitely factors, but Pineland and New Gloucester generally also provide great access to trails and recreational activities we all like to participate in during lunches or at the end of a long week. Several of us bike to work as the weather and our schedules allow.
What are three things you wish people in New Gloucester knew about your business?
We provide planning services to a lot of towns in the region, which gives us good regional context for local planning in this area.
We’re currently working on projects from Madawaska to North Berwick, and starting to get work in New Hampshire and Vermont, including an exciting project as part of a team to develop Vermont’s Municipal Climate Planning Framework & Guide to help communities there undertake meaningful climate planning that is coordinated with state goals.
We worked with the City of Bath to complete their Comprehensive Plan last year, which won the 2024 Plan of the Year Award from the Maine Association of Planners.
What is the most rewarding aspect of your work?
Working with town volunteers and citizens to find common ground on the big issues facing their communities and then beginning to prioritize actions and policies to address them.
What is the most challenging aspect of your work?
Helping communities anticipate and understand changes that are likely to come to their community. This is especially true in Maine, where so many people in Maine have deep personal connections with the places they live. A key to working through this is helping people understand that in order to keep special places the same for future generations as they have been for past generations, you have to take proactive steps to make that protection and preservation happen. In other words, change is everywhere – housing and job markets, environmental conditions, people moving to town or people moving away – and if a community doesn’t shape and direct those forces for the benefit of the community, that change has a strong potential to detract from that community.
Tell us about your hopes/dreams for the future—what do you hope your business will look like a few years from now?
I hope that North Star Planning can continue to grow in New Gloucester on the Pineland Campus – we’re looking for a larger space now! With a growth mindset and a continued demand for planning services, we could perhaps double our headcount in the next five years.
How can the New Gloucester community support you and your business?
Attracting good talent to our company will continue to be possible with good services and experiences in town. Pineland has great trails and food, but we also visit the trails at properties around town like Intervale Preserve and the Fairgrounds, and we love getting doughnuts from Thompson’s Orchard. We really like having Brickyard Hollow in town, but miss the New Gloucester Village Store!
How can people learn more and stay connected with you?
Visit our website at www.northstar-planning.com, and sign up for our quarterly e-newsletter with highlights from our work and planning news from around the state.
— If you’d like to have your New Gloucester-based business featured as part of our NG at Work series, please complete the form at https://forms.gle/1A4mnMkpk1NeJZQZ7) or contact Debra and Joanne at editor@ngxchange.org.
