The Peterborough Planning Board voted against recommending a warrant petition seeking to repeal the Traditional Neighborhood Overlay Zone 1 section of the town’s zoning ordinance. A public hearing on the petition was part of the Planning Board meeting on March 9.
During the public hearing, petitioner and speaker Sharon Monahan requested that Planning Board members Sarah Heller and Ivy Vann recuse themselves from the discussion “due to conflict of interest and bias.” Both members refused, according to draft minutes from the meeting.
“I am on the Housing Task Force and feel ready to do work with my fellow citizens. I am in this to work and not to recuse,” Heller said. Vann said she thought the speakers believed a property she owns is affected by TNOZ 1, and that it does not. “This ordinance does not affect me and it never has,” she said.
“The primary purpose for repealing TNOZ 1 is to clean the slate, and have all Family and General Residents districts have the same zoning prior to 2014,” Monahan said. The district covers one percent of the total town land area, and Monahan expressed skepticism that the ordinance, which was adopted to encourage infill and denser development in the areas of town where there is already water or sewer access, is benefiting the town as intended. “Traffic and congestion and lack of parking is already a problem. So to increase and concentrate the housing and population on one percent of the area close to downtown through new urbanism planning is not creating housing opportunities, it is just compounding an existing congestion and affordable housing problem. This was the number one reason people signed this petition,” she said. Monahan said she and co-organizer Andrew Dunbar obtained 81 signatures for the petition article. Five other residents spoke in favor of the petition at the meeting. “Since… it will be at least two, possibly three, years before the work of the task force is presented to the electorate, … [during that time] those of us living within this overlay district are deprived of being on the same footing as everyone else in Peterborough,” resident Lorraine Bishop said. In an interview on Thursday, Monahan said she felt that the repeal was the right way to go because she didn’t want TNOZ 1 regulations to apply while longer-term zoning deliberations are taking place.
Since the ordinance went into effect, Peterborough has seen “multiple developments increasing our tax base without increasing our infrastructure costs,” absent Board member Rich Clark wrote in a statement read at the hearing. “If we were to return back to the underlying zoning of close to eight to ten years ago, none of this would have been possible. It’s unfortunate that a group of citizens are trying to turn back the clock to antiquated zoning by circumventing due process with this petition,” he wrote. TNOZ1 passed by voters at 2014 Town Meeting, 482 yes to 392 no.
Judy Wilson Ferstenberg was the lone Board member to support the petition. “I would like to see the ordinance repealed and let the people decide what they want without having something thrown at or forced on them. It seems one person is forcing an idealism on everyone else,” she said.
The petition is the latest in a now year-long battle over TNOZ ordinances. It was put forward by individuals and not by the community group Citizens for Responsible Zoning, which proposed a rewrite of TNOZ 1 in January, group member Libby Reinhart said. At a meeting in February, the Planning Board voted to not pursue the rewrite of the ordinance in advance of the 2020 Town Meeting. In May 2019, the same group advocated the petition Zoning Amendment 15, which would have repealed the TNOZ II and amended TNOZ I to require larger lot sizes, frontage and setbacks. It won the simple majority, which was all that was initially required, but failed to pass because of a last-minute protest petition filed by supporters of the TNOZs that required a two-thirds majority to pass. TNOZ I currently remains unchanged. TNOZ II was invalidated by the Superior Court at the end of December 2019.
The Community Task Force for Affordable Housing continues to meet virtually, facilitator and Select Board member Karen Hatcher said, in a process that is separate from the petition article. “One does not preclude the other,” she said. “The folks who put the petition article forward, generally speaking, are those who have not opted to participate, either at all, or have had very limited participation in the task force,” she said, and that although there may always be people who feel that a petition article is the right way to enact change, she encourages them to be “a part of the bigger process” of finding solutions to housing issues in the community through the task force.
The 25 or 30 regular participants have met online since town offices closed to the public, and are continuing to learn and share information about affordable housing issues with virtual tools, Hatcher said. Meanwhile, a smaller group of “members who have been very passionately engaged in the zoning issues” have agreed to enlist paid facilitators to virtually mediate a “more in depth conversation together to see if they could come to find a better understanding,” she said.