We’ve long been proponents of planning, and commend the town of New Scotland for having a committee update its land-use plan, beginning with listening to residents at forums in various areas of town.

The timing is right for an update. New Scotland’s only village, Voorheesville, is in the midst of creating its own master plan, and residential and commercial developments are proposed or in the works in several parts of town. New Scotland’s current master plan was adopted by the town board 23 years ago, in 1994.

At a forum last week in Clarksville, our reporter Saranac Hale Spencer observed committee members listening attentively and recording citizens’ views that Clarksville’s caves should be protected. We agree.

It turns out, though, that such protection is one of the tenets of the 1994 plan. In fact, central to the vision of the new plan as development pushes in on the once-rural and very beautiful town, is to maintain New Scotland’s rural character and encourage development in the already existing hamlets.

That was the goal, too, in 1994. The problem, though, was the town board at the time lacked the backbone to put the tenets of the comprehensive plan into law. We remember the leaders of Sphere Development in 2008 telling us that New Scotland’s zoning served as a beacon, attracting them to the town to submit plans for a Target-anchored shopping mall on 179 acres of open farmland at the corner of routes 85 and 85A.

“There was kind of a hole in the zoning,” Supervisor Douglas LaGrange told our reporter last week; that hole would have allowed for Sphere’s 750,000-square-foot development.

A large grassroots citizens’ uprising led to the unseating of some town board members over two election cycles and the town board eventually passed a cap on the size of retail buildings. The town then studied the routes 85 and 85A corridor, producing a 42-page report this year that recommends changing the zoning on and around the old Bender melon farm for mixed-use development.

The report calls for a small, dense, village-like development near the intersection of these two main thoroughfares with less intense development around it and preserved open spaces. Such a proposal has been made by a developer who wants to build a combination of retail and residential space on property between Falvo’s Meat Market and Stonewell Plaza.

But an overarching plan, codified into zoning law, is needed. Open space — either fallow or farmed — is not only nice to look at; it costs taxpayers less money than residential and commercial development that require many more services.

New Scotland is lucky to currently have active farms that surround historic hamlets — that centuries-old development pattern is currently touted by planners as “smart growth.” The New Scotland update committee is using a federal Environmental Protection Agency manual that encourages this kind of clustered, mixed-use development in rural areas.

This is in sharp contrast to single-use zoning that, beginning in New York City in the early 20th Century, separated commercial, residential, and industrial areas, fostering sprawl and dependence on driving.

If New Scotland is to grow but still maintain its rural character and natural wonders, it needs a plan that is codified into law. Back in 2003, we urged the town to include as part of its comprehensive plan a catalogue of valued places, both natural and manmade.

We wrote then about the disappearance of a magical place in New Scotland: The field along the Altamont-Voorheesville Road edged by the Helderbergs — lush green in summer, vivid as flame in the fall, white and gray in the winter, vibrant with leaves come to life in the spring — was punctuated with quirky cartoonish dip near its edge, not far from the road.

For hundreds of years, farmers had worked around this ancient oddity. Kids imagined the depressions were a giant’s footprints or a fairyland. Houses had sprouted in the field in recent years but, because of the ice-age topography, the place had maintained its charm.

Those depression kettles, as geologists call them, are now just a flat field. Kids no longer flock there on school field trips to learn about geological history, to see it with their own eyes.

At the time the kettles were filled, our geology columnist, Michael Nardacci, explained how they were formed: During the Pleistoscene epoch, the north polar ice cap expanded until it reached as far south as Long Island. When the ice sheets began to melt, huge blocks of ice became buried in sediment, insulated from the sun’s heat, leaving depressions when the ice turned to water.

You didn’t have to be a geologist to appreciate such a natural wonder. In the summer of 2003, people called or came by our news office to report — some with outrage, some with horror — the kettles were being filled. The owners of the land had bulldozed them and arranged for rubble — asphalt and cement — from a nearby road project to be dumped there. They had the legal right to do so.

Why, then, were people so upset? Because sometimes ownership isn’t just a matter of who holds a mortgage with a bank, or whose name is on a property deed. A community can feel a sense of ownership for a historic site or a natural wonder in its midst.

In 2003, we urged the town to come up with a list of sites the community considers important. We asked citizens to consider what features, what places, what buildings are unique to New Scotland. We renewed that request over a year ago when the century-old Hilton barn was to be torn down by a developer, which would have removed an icon of the town’s agrarian past.

Any place can have big new homes built on leveled land, land without magical kettles, land without magnificent historic barns nearby. What makes New Scotland special? What structures and views should be preserved?

The New Scotland Residents’ Planning Advisory Committee, in its report submitted to the New Scotland town board in 2005, recommended the town take an inventory of its historic buildings. Now that the update committee is already surveying residents, we urge — again — that it come up with a list of sites considered important to preserve.

Determining what creates our sense of place would be both useful and inspiring. Owners of historic properties may be moved to apply to be listed on historical registers and other safeguards may be put in place. No municipality can afford to purchase all the places its citizens value in order to preserve those places for the future. And a property owner — whether a company or an individual — has a legal right to do as it wants with its land.

But such a list would at least let someone planning a purchase know what townsfolk value; it would be a way of giving fair warning. Further, it could inspire some property owners to donate development rights of their land. Some residents may be proud to preserve what they own and want it protected beyond their lifetime. Future owners would then maintain the legacy.

Once a natural feature or building is gone — whether it’s the old hotels that the city folk frequented or the cider mills where locals worked — a piece of history disappears with it. Real Victorian buildings will be replaced with modern pseudo-Victorians and ancient barns built on site with lumber from the land will be replaced with the ubiquitous prefabricated sheds.

New Scotland will look more like every place else and less like itself. We need to make the effort now to identify what we value or those places will be lost — forever.

Such a list, which would include the Clarksville caves, too, should be part of the updated comprehensive plan. But to preserve the heart of New Scotland, the town board, once the plan is completed, must adopt zoning that allows the plan to be enforced.

State law has required, since 1993, that zoning codes agree with a municipality’s comprehensive plan. We have hope that the current town board, which made such heroic efforts to save the Hilton barn, will have the gumption and the guts to put teeth into New Scotland’s plan.

The town can’t afford to wait another quarter of a century.