The work of Warwick's Town Vision begins

WARWICK — The townwide Warwick Vision took almost a year to develop and involved more than 3,000 residents.
The finished Vision document was officially presented to Warwick’s elected officials — the Town Supervisor and the mayors of Florida, Greenwood Lake and Warwick — in a well-attended ceremony at Town Hall on Tuesday evening, May 22, and almost immediately ideas in the Vision began to move forward.
Starter projectsOf the many ideas contained in the Vision, two ideas were presented at the meeting as possible “starter projects" because they could be gotten off the ground quickly.
One was a project to clear out the debris from the Wawayanda Creek and restore it to its original state as a beautiful, navigable waterway as it starts at Wickham Lake in the former correctional facility and flows through the village behind Main Street and continues south to New Jersey.
The other idea was to start planning a series of events that would draw the Town of Warwick’s three villages closer together. This idea responded to what was probably the most widely-expressed thought that came out of the Visioning process, namely that Warwick as a community was not as connected as it could be.
The reception to both ideas from the crowd of about 70 in attendance was positive. One spontaneous discussion group formed around Supervisor Michael Sweeton and Mayor Michael Newhard and began sharing ideas about the Wawayanda, while another group did the same thing with Mayors Jesse Dwyer and Daniel Harter Jr. about the villages project.
In the space of just a few minutes, it became clear that both projects had hit responsive chords and tapped into people’s passion and imagination.
'Three Lakes Festival'The Villages group actually went so far as to choose a specific project to launch the series, a “Three Lakes Festival “ that would involve Glenmere, Greenwood and Wickham Lakes, each hosted by one of the villages. They also quickly settled on Mary Collura, the chief organizer of the Warwick Village Sesquicentennial, to lead the project.
By the end of the evening, each project had about a dozen residents who had signed up to be involved as the projects moved forward.
Want to get involved?Anyone wishing to get involved with the “Three Lakes” project should contact Collura at maryccollura@gmail.com; for the Wawayanda project, the contact is Geoff Howard at towards@warwick.net.
"It is great to see two viable projects come immediately from the visioning process," Newhard said. "This is the power of creating a community dialogue. I already sense a strong connection between the three Villages and Town and I personally look forward to participating in the ‘Three Lakes Festival” as well as kayaking a navigable Wawayanda. Thank you to all involved. Let the fun begin."