2015 Nantucket Town Meeting starts on April 6. It can be quite a bore most of the time, but when hot topics get called, it’s better than any show on TV. If you are a non-resident, you can come and watch, but you are actually roped off in a side section – amazing in itself. A few of the spicey articles this year are whether the Hospital is allowed to swap zoning ground covers between properties it owns so it can build a new hospital on the parcel where it currently is and if it can get waivers to build beyond zoning limitations (Article 70); whether a new Fire Department will get funded $15mm (Article 11); whether new school buildings will get funded $46.2mm (Article 12); and whether a developer can get several down zoning changes to increase density roughly across Old South Road from Naushop (Articles 53 and 54).
I have a feeling Articles 53 and 54 are going to be the habaneros of this Town Meeting. I’ve thought quite a bit about them. End of the day, they make sense to a degree. There is a need for housing that is quasi-affordable (which this developer says he is aiming for) and for potentially another grocery store (monopolies get lazy – it would be nice if Stop and Shop had competition) and other commercial uses. I do think the articles need to be more refined (master plan, traffic study, etc.), but, overall, I am for them.
Then, there are the smaller articles – someone wants to change their zoning from one acre to half acre or from half acre to quarter acre. These are somewhat small to most everyone, except that person. Can you imagine, you have a one acre parcel that is in one acre zoning and your zoning gets changed to half acre, so now you have two half acre parcels?! That’s probably at least a $500K windfall – not bad for a night out at Town Meeting.
There are a ton of zoning articles on the warrant like this one. The Planning Board staff looks at all of them and makes recommendations to the actual Planning Board, which typically heeds their advice. In my opinion, the Planning Board staff are doing an amazing job. So, when I see a positive Planning Board recommendation on an article, I ask “why not” instead of “why”. When a Planning Board staff member, who is a Town employee, emails me back on a Sunday afternoon within five minutes, I’m impressed and makes me know they care.
