by Eli Boling
I will be voting in support of the zoning amendments on November 18 and I think you should, too. I have a number of overarching reasons for my position:
- If we don’t bring ourselves into compliance with the state law, we will lose a number of grants, current and future, in areas near and dear to our hearts, such as library grants ($150,000 in current design grant, potentially $3M+ future), harbor dredging support (anticipated $2,000,000 for the next grant), and rotunda rebuild ($1M). All told in the past 10 years, we’ve had over $9M in state grants that fall into the categories of grants we would lose access to.
- We are fortunate - we have a number of people in our town who have decades of experience and expertise in municipal planning, architecture, zoning law, and other relevant fields who have been working on the problem of compliance. Some of these people have lived in town pretty much their whole lives, and are deeply vested in its culture.
- The zoning amendments proposed by our local experts are carefully designed to avoid overburdening our resources, will allow us to maintain the culture of our downtown, and will continue to give us oversight over development. Bringing ourselves into compliance with state law will not bring about doom to our town with this plan.
- If state law changes, either through legislation, or through court action, reverting our zoning to more restrictive zoning will be easy; it’s been demonstrated time and time again that many residents resist change, and I believe it would be easy to get votes to move us back to much more restrictive zoning.
- Arguments in opposition include input from lawyers such as the one who provided misguided or even incompetent advice to the Manchester Community Center board, resulting in its utter destruction; I prefer to take my legal advice on this topic from lawyers with proven domain expertise in zoning law and municipal/state governance, not family practice lawyers.
- A simple ‘no’ vote begs the question: what’s the plan then? We’ll be out of compliance with existing state law, and subject to penalties which will certainly arrive. So what’s the plan? What do we actually do then?
Much ado has been made ascribing ulterior motives to people working on creating compliant zoning, or presenting apocalyptic outcomes culturally and/or architecturally for the town if we vote yes on the proposed zoning changes. Nothing could be further from the truth; we should vote yes, bring our Town into compliance with the law, avoid financial penalties and legal entanglements, and move on.
Eli Boling
Manchester
