In a short amount of time, the contentious debate over Peterborough’s zoning laws has shifted into the question of whether or not the town should have a planning board. What would the ramifications be of doing away with the Peterborough Planning Board? The petitioner, the planners and experts around the state all had something to say on the topic.
Christopher Maidment said his petition to abolish the Peterborough Planning Board has received “some very positive support” since he launched it at the start of the month.
Maidment said he was caught off guard with one letter to the editor that referenced Hitler and Nazis in response to his petition, and called it “unnecessary and a little over the top.” The author, Liz Thomas, has since written two additional letters to the editor clarifying her position.
“I’m sorry if I offended people,” she said on Monday. “I don’t really think we’d be like Nazi Germany. Of course not. It’s an exaggerated way of making a point.”
“What I really mean is I think a planning board is a good thing. It isn’t that I haven’t had problems with [their] decisions,” she said, but “… a planning board can hold a town together in the way that some other plans can’t, it seems to me.”
When asked about the petition, Planning Board member Ivy Vann said, “There are some people that don’t trust government in any form anymore. The government is us. The people in the planning board are your neighbors … I understand their frustration and think it’s a reflection of larger problems in our society.”
Maidment said the idea for the petition started for him in the aftermath of the vote on the proposed Zoning Amendment 15 earlier this year.
“It kind of pushed me over the top,” he said, to observe the town officials and members of the Planning Board’s response to the failed and contested measure.
A protest petition was launched against the Amendment 15 proposal, the original backers of Amendment 15 sued the town, and the town sued two individual supporters of Amendment 15.
“My foremost concern is property rights,” Maidment said, and that he objects to “sweeping zoning ordinances that are all-encompassing,” referring to the town’s restrictions on restaurant drive-thrus and accessory dwelling units, and an attempt to regulate architectural style through the form-based code that was rejected in 2018.
He said has filled a couple of petition pages with signatures as of Wednesday morning.
“They’re watching, and they think it’s exciting, and they’re supportive … I think we’ll get to 100,” he said, referring to the 100 signatures needed to get the question onto the warrant for the Town Meeting.
When asked if he had any concerns for any negative consequences of operating without a planning board, Maidment said, “There are always people who are going to be irresponsible with their freedom,” and noted that planning boards were started in the 1970s to keep people from infringing on others’ rights. “But, there are other forms of redress besides controlling what everyone can do with their property.” As examples, Maidment pointed to institutions like civil courts, civil suits and noise ordinances as recourse for undesirable property uses.
Vann acknowledged that some zoning measures can seem arbitrary or meddlesome at face value.
“People have an exaggerated notion of what the planning board can and cannot do. … It seems more complicated than it really is,” she said. “We can’t direct a developer to build a project that’s going to lose money for them. We can’t do that, we shouldn’t do that.”
“I want the zoning code to be available for people, to look at a piece of land they own and figure out what they can do with it.” She added that rules should be clear, transparent, and evenly applied, so a landowner doesn’t need an attorney to understand them. She said the Planning Board tries to run a sufficient public engagement process prior to proposing changes in the zoning code.
“If it were to pass, the Select Board has the duty for waivers for applications. It’s my understanding that all the ordinances would just go away,” Maidment said.
“If a planning board is abolished, nothing replaces it. It is simply gone and the functions that it served are no longer available to the town,” Michael Klass of the Office of Strategic Initiatives in an email to the Ledger-Transcript.
He explained RSA 673:19, the Effect of Abolishing Planning Boards:
“If a Planning Board is abolished at town meeting, the zoning ordinance remains valid but only for up to 2 more years, and it can’t be amended during that time. After the Planning Board is abolished and after the zoning ordinance is invalidated, there is no way for the municipality to regulate via traditional local land use controls. And there’s nothing that happens next – the municipality would just have no control through its land use boards over development in that town.”
He added that there could be other state and local regulatory schemes that would still apply, like wetland or building code regulations, or municipal ordinances.
“Given the central role that planning and zoning play in community development, abolishing planning and zoning would likely have unintended consequences… it is not a decision to take lightly,” he wrote.
Pittsburg and Clarksville, two of the northernmost towns in the state, are the only towns without a planning board.
“Everything comes down to a board decision,” the secretary to the Pittsburg Select Board said about how the town addresses development proposals. “There is a building notification form. They follow state law because there’s no zoning in Pittsburg.”
The town of Stratford voted to keep their planning board when a petition article to abolish it was placed on the 2019 Town Meeting warrant.
“There were actually maybe one or two people that wanted to abolish,” said a representative from the Stafford town office.
“A lot of the individuals that signed the petition didn’t really understand what they were signing. They weren’t versed in what the planning board did,” she said.
She said that in advance of the vote, the Select Board and Planning Board educated the public on how the planning board’s process involves the town, and what it does for the town.
“Quite a few people at town meeting showed up who lived in a floodplain,” she said.
If the Planning Board were abolished, “anybody who had flood insurance would lose it,” as per the National Floodplain Insurance Program policy, she said.
The measure was defeated, with 104 in favor of retaining the board and 21 against.