Letter: Zoning Proposals in Williamstown 'Not Ready for Prim Time'

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To the Editor:

A recent letter urged Williamstown residents to vote on all 10 proposed zoning articles – some with many subsections –at the Tuesday, June 14, town meeting at the high school gym.

Is debating such a long list of complicated, highly technical articles at a town meeting really the best way to do zoning?
Is debating these articles now, with a new, complicated, confusing set of voting rules and percentages advisable – especially when town counsel issued one set of answers on the number of votes required to pass the former Planning Board’s recommendations and then later had to issue a revised set?

Wow. I don't think so.

Has the board done anything over the last year, during COVID-19, to truly inform our residents about these articles? Did it conduct surveys or community engagement meetings? No.

Do our residents truly understand how one article inter-relates to another? No, because it has never been explained, and I sure cannot figure it out. How do the drastic reductions in lot size, lot frontage, and side-, front- and rear dimensional requirements affect houses to be built next to you or in your neighborhood?

Are residents aware that none of these changes were seriously studied or researched?

Are residents aware of any community having four family houses allowed as of right, without community hearings to give residents a voice? I surely do not.

Are residents aware that there is no provision to provide for affordability and therefore no additional diversity in these articles?

What harm is there to have one more year of review and community outreach so we are all so much better informed and the Planning Board has time to research each proposal and to see how other towns have fared with similar zoning changes?

To be frank, most of these articles are simply not ready for prime time.

Sherwood Guernsey
Williamstown, Mass.

 

 


Tags: zoning,   

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Williamstown's DIRE Committee Opts for Name Change

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The town's diversity committee is ready for a rebrand.
 
At its Monday meeting, the people appointed to serve on the Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Equity Advisory Committee agreed unanimously to ask the Select Board to accept a new name for the panel.
 
Growing out of discussions at the committee's recent retreat, the volunteer body suggested that it be renamed the Race, Equity, Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
 
The new name is one part of a new charge that the committee is asking the Select Board to approve, updating the charge that DIRE received in November 2022, two years after it was formed in the summer of 2020.
 
The proposed new charge preserves the existing core mission of the committee, deletes some language related to process that does not reflect how the committee has functioned and identifies seven themes for newly named committee's work: housing affordability and equity;  initiatives to increase accessibility; Stockbridge Munsee community partnerships; Black history, inclusion in local history; inclusion and belonging in schools; Pride celebrations and support; and town meeting initiatives (including review of potential new citizens petitions and revisions to Article 37 from Town Meeting 2020).
 
"We struck the section of the [2022] charge under the heading 'recommendation process,'" Andrew Art said in presenting the proposed updated charge to his colleagues. "The reason for that is that the DIRE Committee has its own process for making recommendations that has been set forth since its inception."
 
The new charge also recommends that DIRE's membership be capped at five with the option for the Select Board continuing to appoint additional, non-voting members with expertise in specific subject areas. Currently, the board is defined as having seven members, though only four members — Andrew Art, Ursula Bare, Shana Dixon and Smalls — are appointed.
 
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