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Williamstown Planning Board Candidates Discuss Issues at Forum
By Stephen Dravis, iBerkshires Staff
12:18PM / Saturday, May 05, 2018
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Four candidates are seeking two seats on the Planning Board.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The town’s four Planning Board candidates Wednesday largely agree with the current board that Williamstown needs to address its housing diversity but think the board’s process could use some work and the zoning change proposals it produced were not necessarily the right solution.
 
On Tuesday, voters will choose either Stephanie Boyd or Michael Goodwin to fill a five-year seat on the board and either Alexander Carlisle or John Spelman to serve the last two years on the unexpired term of Ann McCallum, who is stepping down from the panel.
 
On Wednesday, the local chapter of the League of Women Voters hosted a candidates forum to give the four a chance to address voters and field some questions.
 
Not surprisingly, most of the discussion kept coming back to the Planning Board’s recent efforts to rezone a large portion of the town’s General Residence district with the intent of bringing existing homes into conformity with the bylaw and, at the same time, opening more options for multi-family housing either by right or by special permit.
 
Last month, the board decided to pull those proposals from the warrant for the May 15 annual town meeting amid a wave of criticism - much from residents in the neighborhoods that would see the most potential for increased housing density under the plan.
 
All four of the candidates in Tuesday’s town election said on Wednesday that they thought the process could have gone more smoothly if the Planning Board had approached residents differently.
 
For the four candidates, it was a question of timing.
 
“It really was a huge kerfuffle,” Carlisle said. “They were having meetings, but they were conceptual meetings talking about, vaguely, where we wanted to go with housing and what we wanted to do with zoning. And I think there were enough of those meetings set up to have people aware what was going on.
 
“The trouble was, suddenly, the [article] was written, and when the warrant was read, late in the game, people had a problem with that. The problem wasn’t that the town wasn’t that the town wasn’t trying to keep people aware of the steps along the way. It was that the final step, the actual warrant, came a little late.”
 
Boyd, who spoke against the proposed zoning changes at the Planning Board’s last public hearing, on Wednesday noted that the board had put a lot of work into it and “brought, I think, a reasonable proposal to the table.”
 
“The community didn’t have the time to give their feedback and have changes before town meeting,” she said.
 
Boyd said the board needs to think more like the grassroots community group that, a couple of years ago, convinced the town to enact a plastic bag ban. And she argued that the town board needs “formal and informal” outreach.
 
Meetings that are open to the public and televised on the town’s community access television station, WilliNet, are not enough, Boyd implied.
 
“We need to figure out a way to engage the people who will ultimately be making the decisions … to be involved in the process,” Boyd said.
 
“That’s the kind of work that inspires me, that I like to do. It takes a different way of thinking where you start at the end of the process and say, ‘We want to achieve this. What do we have to do? We have to engage people early. How do we engage them?’ It’s not just turning on the TV and saying, ‘We’re televised every day.’ “
 
Spelman put the issue in terms of one of the topics he said he would like to explore if elected to the board: development on Water Street.
 
“If there was an idea for a significant or even a minor change in that area, it would be a good idea to proactively reach out to the people who live there, maybe by sticking something in their door or trying to post something in Cable Mills on their bulletin board,” Spelman said.
 
“I realize that it’s not a perfect method where you’re going to get everybody, but you’re likely to get more of the people who are immediately interested in a good outcome.
 
“We’re all interested in a good outcome, but especially abutters and nearby residents.”
 
Goodwin said that if he is elected to the board he will make himself available every Saturday morning at a Spring Street coffee shop to talk with residents about their ideas.
 
“Here’s the tradeoff: It’s not a complaint session,” Goodwin said. “I don’t want people coming in and being angry and complaining. Don’t tell us what we can’t do, tell us what we can do, and we can work together.”
 
The candidates largely steered clear of arguing the specifics of the recently abandoned warrant articles, which were the result of a multi-year Planning Board study supported by a state grant and done in cooperation with the Massachusetts Housing Partnership.
 
But in answer to a question from the floor about whether they favored dividing the current GR district into smaller zones, the candidates argued that the creation of new zones would not solve the problem the board was seeking to address.
 
Goodwin implied that instead of more zones, the town may need fewer.
 
“I’m not a big fan of zoning,” Goodwin said. “At one of the recent Planning Board meetings, it was asked, ‘Why can’t we just have one zone?’ And someone said, ‘You can’t because some things are allowed in one place but not in others.’ I understand that, but I feel like the more zoning we do, the more we restrict ourselves. And that really concerns me.
 
“My concern is when we talk about zoning, we need to have the whole town in mind. The picture needs to be a little bit broader.”
 
Boyd and Spelman agreed that the nonconformity issue the Planning Board sought to address should be remedied without creating new districts.
 
“In an attempt to make the existing homes conform with setbacks and lot sizes, [the proposal] divided the town into five sections instead of one,” she said. “I think there are other ways to do that. I also think it’s tricky to accomplish that goal through the zoning because each individual lot, as it turns out, is quite different, and you don’t accomplish the goal by doing that.”
 
Spelman said the town should look to other communities to see how they address the issue of nonconformity, specifically citing Lenox and Amherst.
 
“I think we should address nonconformity head-on by creating better grandfather clauses,” Spelman said. “Make it easier for somebody to repair a porch or do a dormer or do a bump out or whatever they want to do with their house.
 
“If we decide to make it easier to divide a single family house into a multi-family home of two or maybe three units, apply that across the entire general residence [district] rather than focus on one neighborhood. It that was an interesting idea.”
 
Carlisle said there are other things the town can do, like overlay districts, but noted that there were very real problems that the Planning Board sought to address by making the zoning map match the reality of the town’s neighborhoods.
 
“It was correcting a problem that was created in 1955 when Williamstown created the zoning laws,” Carlisle said. “Suddenly, because of the one-size-fits-all concept, three of those neighborhoods were nonconforming. … This was an effort to correct that long-standing problem that prevented people from making minor changes to their buildings and just made it harder to do anything.
 
“I think there are a few options to take those nonconforming properties and make them conforming properties without some sort of zoning changes.”
 
Not all the talk centered on housing.
 
The second question submitted online and read by moderator Jennifer Howlett asked the candidates about their thoughts on light pollution.
 
Carlisle noted that McCallum, whom he seeks to replace, was involved in writing a proposal to change the town’s lighting bylaw and he would like to continue that effort.
 
“Light pollution is a very real issue as we keep adding more lights,” Carlisle said. “Part of it is safety. There are requirements for businesses in parking lots. But I think the type of lighting … makes a difference in how it impacts passers-by and how much glare it gives to people.”
 
Boyd agreed that safety is a top priority, but, like Carlisle and Spelman, indicated she felt the town needs to reduce light pollution.
 
“There are issues that sometimes lights can be too bright and detrimental to safety because you’re blinded and may not see an aggressive person in the bushes or whatever,” Boyd said. “So, just having bright lights is not necessarily a solution to safety either.
 
“We also are in the habit of putting ‘uplighting’ on buildings where their sole purpose is to say, ‘Hey, aren’t [the buildings] beautiful?’ Where, really, we should say, ‘Hey, isn’t the sky beautiful?’ “
 
Spelman -- like the other three, a transplant to the town -- said when he was looking to relocate to Williamstown, he looked at NASA maps and was surprised the skis in this corner of Massachusetts are “not as clear as I would like them to be.”
 
“I feel blessed that I’m on a street [Moorland] that’s got the old-fashioned kind of lights that are not so bright,” Spelman said. “When I walk around other places, those LEDs that are ultra-blue or ultra-white are really problematic. As a community, we’ve raised the issue, and there are mitigating things we can do to reduce light pollution. I’m happy that we live in a town where it is an issue.”
 
Goodwin differed slightly in his answer, telling an anecdote about a conversation he had with a family visiting the college who said they did not feel safe going out at night in Williamstown because it was so dark. And he noted that on Main Street, he feels better lighting - perhaps more lighting - is needed to increase safety for pedestrians crossing Route 2 at night.
 
“We have to be cognizant of the fact that, as we try to expand and build and do these things, everything has a shared impact,” Goodwin said. “It’s the role of the Planning Board and Zoning Board to take that into consideration.”
 
When asked about each candidate’s “non-housing” priorities for the board, Goodwin returned to the notion of “expanding” and “building” the town.
 
“If we want to bring new people in and want people with creativity, it is about business growth and small businesses,” Goodwin said. “It could be someone working out of an office. It could be a shop. As we look at the changing demographics, we need to look at what we need, what we could use in town.”
 
Spelman pointed to the town’s parking standards as a potential priority item for the next Planning Board.
 
“If we do go in the direction of more multi-family housing, do we relax the requirement that acreage given over to automobiles?” Spelman asked. “I think that’s a real concern, especially as some people start moving away from automobile ownership.”
 
In a similar vein, Boyd’s answer focused on the idea of “complete streets.”
 
“If you design a town that works for an 8-year-old and an 80-year-old, you’ll have a pretty nice place to live, so we might want to start thinking like that,” Boyd said. “I think economic development is important. And it’s not just making the rules easier for people to come here but making it more desirable for them to come here.”
 
Carlisle, who got the question last, agreed with Boyd’s point about making the downtown more accessible for walkers and bicyclists, and he said the town’s historic housing protections need to be toughened.
 
He also said the town needs to work more strategically with its largest employer, landowner and taxpayer.
 
“Williamstown has had a Master Plan since [2002],” Carlisle said. “As far as I can tell, the college doesn’t have a master plan. It seems to me the town and college should really be working together for the long term.”
 
In addition to the two Planning Board races, residents Tuesday will be asked to vote on uncontested races for Select Board, Library Trustees and the town’s representative on the Northern Berkshire Vocational Regional School (McCann Tech). Three candidates are on the ballot for two seats on the Williamstown Elementary School Committee, including one incumbent. Whoever wins Tuesday’s election will serve the last six weeks of the committee’s existence before it is disbanded and completely replaced by the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee.
 
The full League of Women Voters forum for Planning Board candidates is available for viewing here.
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