Growth-related issues are at the top of the agenda for candidates in the Highlands town election this year.

The town board recently adopted a long-range land-use plan developed over 18 months by the town planning board.

“In a moving economy and moving environment it behooves you to have good planning on how you are going to use your land,” said Mayor Buck Trott.

The land-use plan is primarily conceptual and visionary. Creighton Zeek Sossomon, a candidate for mayor, said the biggest challenge facing the town over the next four years is implementing that vision.

“The town board has joyfully accepted and adopted the land-use plan, but the trick is how you do it? How do you translate that plan into zoning?” Sossomon said.

Don Mullen, a candidate for mayor, said the town needs to do more to check development.

“I think some of the growth is getting a little bit out of control,” Mullen said. “We have a beautiful place here and we need to preserve the concept of green space and parks and bike trails.”

Town Commissioners Hank Ross and Amy Patterson have both supported land-use planning and proactive measures to protect Highlands small-town character. The three challengers running against Ross and Patterson say the town tends to be too restrictive.

“I feel like they are trying to lock a gate,” said Popcorn Manley, town board candidate. “I feel like we can’t lock a gate and stay like we are. We are going to have to keep growing. To say ‘This is the way Highlands is going to be and it can never change,’ you can’t do that.”

Larry Rogers, another town board candidate, says there is no stopping growth. The former member of the zoning board says the town needs to be careful with its zoning ordinances.

“We’ve got some pretty good ordinances, but perhaps a few too many,” said Rogers.

Candidate Eric Pierson also said the town has gone overboard in trying to protect the town from development. He cited the town’s recent pledge of $300,000 toward a tract of land downtown for a park.

“That’s prime commercial property,” Pierson said, who also objected to the lack of public input on the purchase.

“That’s our tax money,” Pierson said. “When you are messing with that much tax dollars the public should have a say-so and be aware of it.”

Rogers agreed that the decision on whether to spend that much money for a park should have been decided by voters, not aldermen.

“They could’ve used that money better by investing in the current rec park. We’ve got property right now that’s not being kept up,” said Rogers.

Growth in Highlands has led the town to examine its identity on several fronts. Mullen, a candidate for mayor, said the growth in Highlands is driving up property prices and causing an affordable housing crisis and needs to be addressed.

“How to do that is another question, but it is important to me that the people who have lived here for years feel comfortable living in Highlands affordably,” Mullen said. Mullen said it is also becoming impossible for blue-collar workers at the country clubs and restaurants to afford housing locally.

Sossomon, also a mayor candidate, questioned Mullen’s idealism.

“With property going at $200,000 an acre, you tell me how you do that?” said Sossomon, a real estate attorney. “Rising cost of real estate is given. That’s just Highlands. It’s a fairly popular place and there’s not much land so the prices are going to go up.”

Mullen isn’t concerned just about affordable housing, but also affordable tourism. Mullen said Highlands could become like Aspen: “only for the high rollers, and the middle-income people are pretty much left out of coming.”

Sossomon said the town has never catered to mid-level tourists, but is more of a second-home community.

“Do we want tourism in the usual sense? The answer up here is ‘no,’” Sossomon said. “We don’t have ice-cream shops and T shirt shops. We never have.”

For Mayor Buck Trott, the biggest growth issue is protecting the town’s drinking water source.

The lake used as Highlands’ drinking water source is surrounded by homes on septic tanks and by gravel roads that erode during heavy rains and are filling up the lake with gravel and silt.

“What we are going for is the overall program to put in sewer lines around lakes, take people around the lakes off septic tanks, dredge the sediment from the lakes and pave the roads,” Trott said.