I attended the Jan. 31 Joint Boards of Selectmen meeting covered in your newspaper last week, and as a 15-year resident of Harvard I felt ashamed by the stance taken by my town as represented by selectmen Tim Clark and Lucy Wallace. I felt truly ashamed.
The request of the Devens residents at this meeting was straightforward. It was the same request they made back in October and which the JBOS members have had five months to ponder: Devens wants 400 additional houses for their community. But Chapter 498 has put Devens residents in the awful situation of having their fate controlled by those who don’t even live there: the towns of Ayer, Harvard, and Shirley.
What I would have hoped to see on Thursday night is the same kind of respect with which we defer to the desires of our own neighborhoods, the respect that was shown to Devens residents by the towns of Shirley and Ayer. Instead Clark and Wallace played the foot-dragging obstructionist role that has characterized our Board of Selectmen’s response to Devens since Clark, Wallace, and Bob Eubanks gained the majority, and they did so with an arrogance which in Clark’s case crossed the line into downright rudeness to Senator Pam Resor. Is this the kind of town we want to be?
As a resident of Harvard I support the request of Devens residents to balance the commercial development in their community with additional residential development. I want to see our town play an active role in moving forward solutions at Devens instead of simply obstructing every proposal that comes our way. And I would like to see us giving our neighbors in Devens the empathy and respect they deserve.
Andy Perkins
Bolton Road
