WINDHAM – The town of Windham is soliciting opinions from residents on a wide variety of issues, ranging from land-use preferences to tax policy to the quality of town services.

The venue for the feedback is a 15-minute survey, designed to kick-start a process that will lead to a new comprehensive master plan by 2017, according to Planning Director Ben Smith.

Next week, the town will send out a mailer to roughly 8,000 household and business addresses in town. The mailer will inform town residents about the survey, which can be taken either online or over the phone.

The town’s most recent comprehensive plan was adopted in 2003. In July, the Town Council appointed a 15-member review team to establish a new planning process. According to Smith, the review team will use the survey to support its “draft visioning” work for the future comprehensive plan.

The survey has been developed by Critical Insights, a Portland polling firm. According to David Nadeau, a Windham councilor and a member of the review team, the polling firm developed the survey questions after conducting two focus groups with Windham residents.

The town of Windham made a draft version of the survey available prior to the Lakes Region Weekly’s deadline. It covers a wide variety of topics, asking residents to rate their quality of life in Windham, offer opinions on whether the town has become better or worse, and predict whether the town’s quality will improve or decline in years to come. Residents are asked to rate the top three advantages of living in Windham – there are 17 choices as well as the top three disadvantages. The 17 potential “disadvantages” include “loss of rural character,” “weak schools,” “high property taxes,” “limited job opportunities,” and “weak elected leadership.”

There are also a host of questions relating to land use, development, and natural resource issues, as well as a page asking residents about threats to Windham’s quality of life. Questions about town priorities, new residential and commercial growth, and undeveloped open space are also included.

Smith said the results of the survey, which should be available to the public by mid-November, would assist the review team in its work.

“The results are going to be one of the inputs for the comprehensive plan review team,” Smith said. “As we come up with a draft vision statement and start setting some goals and strategies within the plan itself, the feedback directly from the community is going to be very valuable in that process.”

Nadeau said the results would also help him as a town councilor.

“How do you want the town to look 10 years from now?” he said. “It’s awful hard sitting up there as a councilor trying to make decisions on things when you haven’t got that input from the people.”