Calling Route 7 development "the single most important issue" facing the town in the next decade, the Economic Development Commission is creating teams that they hope will proactively shape aesthetic growth along the corridor.

"A multiple of agencies have to get together and start hammering out some town vision," EDC member Chris Fisher said at the commission's meeting Monday night, specifying that an intra-agency task force and a working group of Route 7 property owners will both be formed.

Commissioners feel that the need to assert a strong town voice in the debate over what Route 7 development will look like, long a discussion item, now has a deadline attached; a Route 7 land use study overseen by the area's two regional planning agencies is in the works.

Though Ridgefielders are involved with the study, whose foci include Branchville and the Routes 35 and 7 intersection, commissioners said they want to ensure that what's best for the town doesn't get lost in the regional shuffle.

"Our window is the next six months and probably less," Fisher said, so the EDC plans to organize both the task force and property owner working group by August. "If we do nothing, nothing's going to happen."

Two men who own land on Route 7, George Mulvaney and Mike Ryer, attended Monday night's meeting and got involved in the discussion.

Ryer said that the EDC did a comprehensive Route 7 study three decades ago but that nothing ever came of it.

The two men said that ongoing barriers to development from that older study onward include that zoning on Route 7 north of 35 does not allow most retail and that the Branchville area consists of parcels too small for substantial development.

"It's just rundown, beat up, because the current regulations do not allow you to do something with the property," said Mulvaney, who owns the former Exxon station at 626 Danbury Road.