Norwich — The Selectboard may soon poll residents on their priorities for updates to the Town Plan, which have waited more than a year amid a debate over development.

Board members on Wednesday will consider a draft of a survey on residents’ vision for future land use in the town.

The potential poll comes as the Selectboard weighs updates to the Town Plan — a periodically revised document that has become mired in a wider debate about how much development is appropriate in Norwich, especially along the commercial corridor of River Road and Route 5 South.

Plus or minus a few questions, the draft survey resembles a 2005 one that town leaders distributed to residents to inform their revisions to the Town Plan.

“The specific objective of re-sending a similar survey is to compare citizen sentiment today versus more than 10 years ago on growth, development, affordable housing,” Selectboard Chairman John Pepper said in an email. “The main value to the Selectboard and our town would be if any material changes in sentiment had taken place during the past decade or so.”

The draft of this year’s survey begins by asking where respondents live in Norwich and for how long they’ve been there, and goes on to solicit their views on how much the town should grow, and where.

In 2005, nearly 1,000 townspeople, a healthy proportion of the total 3,400, answered the survey.

On affordable housing, most respondents said they’d like to see modest numbers of units added in the next five years. Twenty-nine percent supported an increase of one to 20 affordable housing units, and 31 percent favored 21 to 40 more units.

The most popular sites for affordable housing construction were the village residential area, at 54 percent, and Route 5 South, at 51 percent. (The question allowed respondents to give multiple preferred sites.)

Stuart Richards, who was a member of the Planning Commission at the time, said the high response rate was due, in part, to the town’s sending out self-addressed, prepaid mailers to every resident.

Pepper said the Selectboard has yet to decide how to distribute the 2018 version, but said he would propose using “snail mail” for those who can’t fill out an internet version that also likely will be available.

Richards and a group of residents, many of them living along the Route 5 South and River Road corridor, have fought hard for their vision of modest development and green spaces that preserve the town’s historical center.

In a phone interview on Monday, Richards said the town had changed in the 13 years since 2005, with more wealthy residents who he thought might be amenable to large-scale development. But if that was so, he said, the survey should reflect it.

“It’s not just a question of how John Pepper feels or Stuart Richards feels or Mary Jane Doe feels,” he said. “It’s a question of how a majority of the people in the town feel, based on this survey.”

The Selectboard is scheduled to discuss the Town Plan revisions during its meeting at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday at Tracy Hall.

Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.

Correction

Stuart Richards chaired the Norwich Affordable Housing Committee in the mid-2000s, around the time that town planners developed a survey on residents’ vision for future land use. An earlier version of this story misstated his role on the Norwich Planning Commission, where he also was a member.