HANSVILLE — Residents will have a chance April 6 to provide input on documents the Greater Hansville Area Futures Project planning committee has been developing recently, outlining how the area could grow in the next 14 years.

The committee, made up of representatives from various groups within the Greater Hansville Area (which includes all the neighborhoods between Little Boston and the northern most point of the Kitsap Peninsula), has been taking information it has gathered from residents, government agencies and other sources on what makes Hansville what it is today. Members have also been analyzing it to create an idea of what the area could look like by 2020.

Now it’s time for residents to take a look at the documents created based on all this research and tell the committee what they think, such as if something is missing or they don’t agree with some of their research. The planning committee is hosting a public workshop at 7 p.m. April 6 at the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribal Center.

People should attend because the end result of the GHA project will be one of the tools the community will use to grow and develop the way it wants, said GHA project steering committee member Steve Bauer.

“Given the nature of the process and the fact it’s been very well publicized for a couple years now, these are going to be the documents that speak for the community,” he said.

There will be three documents up for discussion Thursday night — the community profile (a 200-page document listing the stats and facts about what historically and currently exists within GHA, such as demographics, telecommunications services, housing and cultural issues); the community values (a document created based on a survey taken in 2004 of what the residents value in the community) and the preferred future (what the residents want the GHA to look like in 2020).

“I think the planning committee really wants to hear from folks to make sure they did it right,” Bauer said.

Those attending will be put into small discussion groups where residents will be given the opportunity to comment on the documents, such as if there are elements they feel are missing or if there are ideas they don’t agree with. Notes from the workshop will be taken back to the planning committee, which will then evaluate what the public said and look at what changes are necessary within the documents.

The final step of the Futures Project is to look at the preferred future document, the likely future document (what the area would look like by 2020 if the current trends remain the same, based on the information from the community profile) and where there are big differences.

For instance, if the current trend is for an Olympic Resource Management parcel to be subdivided into two-acre lots but the preferred future is that the same property is preserved as open space, the group will look at that difference and determine how to make the latter happen.

Residents should be familiar with the information prior to the meeting, as the documents are the result of more than a year’s worth of work, Bauer said, who expects that people have been reading up on the project on the www.hansville.com Web site and through the updates in the Hansville Log. Questions can be emailed to futures@hansville.org. Comments can also be mailed to Futures, P.O. Box 325, Hansville, WA 98340.

“We’re counting on people to have sort of followed this and paid a little attention to it before they come to the meeting,” Bauer said.