Updating the town's comprehensive plan, reviewing Camden's investment portfolio, and hearing about town parks will occupy the Camden Select Board this evening at its regularly scheduled meeting, beginning at 6:30 p.m. in the Washington Street meeting room.

The agenda also includes considering a number of liquor licenses, discussing in executive session the town manager's performance evaluation, approving budget line carry-overs, and designating October as Domestic Awareness Month.

The meeting will be televised over public access television Channel 22.

The town's Planning Board is just beginning the process of updating Camden's comprehensive plan. Such plans are guiding documents for municipalities, setting collective visions for communities and which are reviewed and revised, generally every 10 years. When updated by volunteer committees, the plans go before a town for voter approval, and if approved, subsequent ordinances and policies are to be developed in accordance to what those plan articulate.

Camden's Planning Board anticipates having a finished document ready for voter review by the end of 2015, and up for a vote in 2016. The entire process is to take 36 months, Chairman Lowrie Sargent proposes.

The planning board, operating as the comprehensive plan committee, consists of Chris MacClean, Richard Householder, Jan McKinnon, Sargent, Sid Lindsley and Kerry Sabanty. The Select Board liason is Don White. Jean Freedman is on the committee, as well, as an interested citizen.

Camden's endowment portfolio is managed by R.M. Davis, of Portland. The fund, consisting of several trusts, now totals more than $2.2 million, up from the $1.5 million mark in 1998. In the past, interest from the fund has benefited the Snow Bowl, cemeteries, library, firemen's association, poor and Megunticook Lake dam. A fund was once even established for the town to supply milk to babies and aged persons.

The portfolio has been built over the centuries thanks to gifts from citizens, who bequeath money to their town for various reasons. Those trust funds generate extra income for the town, and the interest earned is often dispersed to beneficiaries. Individual trust funds are combined in the portfolios with each receiving its share of the income generated. The funds are not to be used for anything but their original purposes, and cannot be used by the towns to offset taxes, unless the donor requests it.

Over the years, the gifts grew in value, especially during the 1990s during the stock market rise. R.M. Davis, based in Portland, first acquired Camden's account in 1988, with a value of $591,900.