If you’d been placing bets ahead of time on which articles would set off the longest or most heated discussions at Town Meeting, you might have picked the big-money items, like Hildreth House and the Bromfield science labs, as your odds-on favorites. Or you might have taken a long shot on some of the smaller but still pricey ones like the DPW dump truck or the school phone system. And an adult-entertainment district might have seemed tailor-made for controversy.
But with 50 articles to choose from, would you ever have picked roadside tree trimming (Article 9), municipal permitting software (13), and the definition of a building (44) as the three most controversial?
Yet there were good reasons each of these became a hot topic.
Tree lovers have long memories
Article 9 on the roadside tree-trimming called for the DPW to hire a contractor to do the work for $20,000 or less, making it one of the least expensive items before voters. But quite a few residents had been dismayed when the town’s boom-flail mower chewed through tree limbs a couple of summers ago. Selectman Ron Ricci noted that he had received complaints and photos of damage caused by the mower.
At Town Meeting, both Bill Calderwood of the Elm Commission and landscape designer Margaret Nestler urged that the tree-trimming funds go to Christian Bilodeau, the town’s tree warden, rather than to the DPW. “The trees have been mistreated along our historic roads,” Nestler said, and the DPW’s rough trimming had left trees vulnerable to disease and insect damage.
Debbie Ricci offered an amendment that the work be carried out by the DPW “in coordination with the tree warden.” Her husband had the unhappy duty of telling her that his fellow selectmen did not accept her proposal as a friendly amendment.
When the amendment came to a vote, however, it passed. And so DPW gets the money, but residents have reason to hope that the trees will be trimmed with more attention to their health and appearance. Town Meeting gave concerned residents a chance to bring up something that had simmered in their minds for a long time, and a workable compromise was the result.
Sooner or later, everyone needs a permit
Maybe Article 13 was doomed to provoke controversy by its unlucky number, though in the end it too passed. What could sound drier than “municipal permitting software”? At $15,000, it was even less expensive than the tree-trimming. Yet Town Meeting spent a full 20 minutes discussing this article, about four times longer than the time given to the $23 million omnibus budget.
The permitting software was intended to allow people to file for building and related permits online, while submitting electronic copies of their plans to be shared among all the relevant boards. But suddenly voters began to think about all the myriad permits they need in their daily connections to the town: dog licenses, burn permits, dump stickers, beach stickers. Would the new software allow them to apply for all of these from home on their computers?
Josh Iverson of Old Littleton Road asked if there was an estimate of the cost savings from using the system. Tim Clark of Bolton Road asked if permits would be archived, in case someone needed to check back on them later. Deb Barton of Stow Road was concerned about transaction fees for those paying online for the permits.
It was an issue that hit home for many people, and Town Meeting gave them a place to consider what the change might mean to them.
What is a building?
By the time Article 44 came up, well over half the people who came to Town Meeting in the morning had left. Voters were racing through articles about digital maps, culverts, and even adult entertainment. But the Planning Board was aware of opposition to Article 44, according to member Michelle Catalina.
Several years ago, in an effort to block big-box stores from locating in Harvard, voters enacted a bylaw stating “no building shall exceed 30,000 square feet of gross floor area.” But there was a loophole, as shown by the 42-unit Bowers Brook apartment building on Ayer Road, which exceeds that size. Bowers Brook has a firewall between two parts of the structure, thereby legally making it two smaller buildings rather than one large one.
The Planning Board hoped to close that loophole before a big-box store or similar development took advantage of it. Article 44 specified that interior firewalls could not be used to determine building area.
Lou Russo of Oak Hill Road, who built the Bowers Brook complex, told the Planning Board at a February meeting that the new definition would block businesses that local people want, such as an assisted living facility. Members of Harvard’s Economic Development Committee (EDC) also objected to the revision. So Planning Board representatives were not surprised when opposition appeared at Town Meeting.
Selectman Ricci opposed the change, as did former selectmen Bill Johnson and Peter Warren. Warren currently serves on the EDC, and Johnson was once a liaison to it. EDC member Duncan Chapman of Littleton Road offered an amendment to Article 44, which town counsel ruled was outside the scope of the original measure. A second amendment, proposed by Johnson, was voted down next.
When the dust settled, voters approved the Planning Board’s original article by the two-thirds majority needed for all zoning bylaw changes. So for now, a building is limited to 30,000 square feet, firewalls notwithstanding. But the debate made clear that there is still a lot of work to be done in determining what businesses residents do or don’t want in Harvard’s commercial district. “What people want is hard to quantify,” Catalina said later, “but we will be trying to find out.”
“I think there’s some middle ground that the EDC and the Planning Board can get to,” Chapman said in a phone conversation, “for the good of the town.”
