Opinion, Editorial, and Letters to the Editor
from www.Calais.US

Date: February 22nd 2005

New Land Use & Development Regulations:

At Town Meeting this year, on tuesday March 1st, we will be asked to vote on proposed new Calais Land Use & Development Regulations. I would like to let people know that I will be voting against the new changes, and to try to explain why:

We all received a blue flyer in the mail a few weeks ago. It explained that the main benefit of the new zoning regulations was a consolidation of 8 different documents into one. This is true, and good progress. It also stated that "The proposed zoning makes very little change to existing policy." Here I disagree, strongly. I actually feel that whoever wrote that statement and mailed it to me should be ashamed of themselves for trying to mislead the public.

If you read the document prepared by the Planning Commision, dated Oct. 25, 2004 that gives a summary of proposed changes, you will see that there is much more than a consolidation going on. Many areas of town become much more restrictive in the requirements for use and development. Just a few examples:

The Recreation Resource District becomes 25 acre lots, and requires conditional use to build more than 200 feet from a road.
Right-of Ways are limited to only one dwelling, and require application as a major subdivision.
Many of the proposed changes are asking propery owners to give up significant usage and rights to their land. There are many other changes which you can read a summary of here:

Click here to see The "Key Changes" in the new zoning vs. the present document:
http://www.calaisvermont.gov/vertical/Sites/{226D684E-C864-4AFA-B4A5-59BE32741B77}/uploads/{475489BE-CFF8-43EA-9642-939495B8076C}.DOC

My main point here is that more restrictive zoning will contribute to making most building lots more expensive and difficult to find, which has the unintended consequence of moving towards excluding lower income and traditional Vermont families from living here. When I first heard about some of the new regulations being proposed here, I got really nervous, because I had heard that there would be an upland overlay district which would mean that any land in Calais over 1500 feet in elevation would change from 3 acre lot requirement to 25 acre lots. This hits pretty close to home because my parents own about 40 acres of land, which has been in our family for over 200 years, since the original Land Grants, and while farmed for generations, the main reason it has been kept for the past 50 years or so has been as potential homesites for family members. The change to 25 acre lots would mean that a 40 acre lot could never be subdivided, and that in future, if a family member who wanted to build here couldn't afford the whole 40 acres, it would simply be sold on the open market.

Luckily, I was to discover later that the elevation of this property is only 1440 feet in elevation, and so we can continue to be able to live here on a 3 acre lot, but the point is, when rules and regualtions such as these are proposed, and people think about what they will cause to happen, they may be thinking that it will keep farmland open and prevent changes from occuring in town. But what actually may be happening is a distruction of the community, and excluding people who have been the ones to keep this town the same for generations.

The Planning Commision has stated that they have spent 10,000 hours working on the new regulations, and spent $15,000 dollars in grant money since the year 2000 to gather town input. This past work seems to have been an unfortunate waste of time and money. More recently, the public hearing held by the Selectboard that I went to on Dec. 6th, 2004, and which about 30 people attended for maybe 2 hours, resulted in many good comments, and 10 letters to the selectboard. The Selectboard then consolidated these comments and letters into a documents called the "Zoning Regulation and Town Plan Work List", which was published on Jan. 17th, 2005. This is a great worklist of the actual concerns which Calais Residents have about zoning. The really unfortunate thing is that none of these concerns are incorporated into the document which we will be voting on in March. Instead, the Calais Planning Commission will be asked to address them later:

Click here to see The Future Changes that the Calais Selectboard wants to see put into the document, based on input from public hearings(mostly on Dec. 6th) and letters to the Selectboard, but which they felt they did not have time to incorporate into the document which we will be voting on:

I believe that these above listed issues which were collected only recently by the Selectboard in a public forum are the important issues that we face, and by voting yes to the presently proposed document there will be a perceived concensus for the more restrictive rules, and less incentive to deal with the public's real concerns.

 

Here is another example from real life of what I consider to be a failure of the present zoning. My parents bought their house from my grandfather around 1950. Later they bought another 35 acres or so of agricultural land from him. Then maybe 10 years ago they bought yet another 3 adjoining acres from my uncle. Now that they are older, and want to pass along their land to the next generation, they want to keep their house on the original lot, and sell the extra 38 acres the next generation. This should be a simple thing, and theoretically a good thing for the town, as the intention is to preserve the woodlot and Curtis Pond shorefront. But present Calais Zoning is making it quite complicated. Because the original house lot with 245 feet is under 300 feet road frontage, and the other land is adjoining, we are being asked to take land out of the State Land Use Program to increase the house lot. Besides converting agricultural land into residential, it would also block off our access to our lower woodlot and boathouse. The really dumb thing is that if we wanted to develope and subdivide the land into 5 building lots, under the existing PRD, or Planned Residential Development regulations, we could subdivide the house off with only 225 feet frontage, as 25% reduction is allowed.

This is why after the Dec. 6th meeting that as part of the letter that I wrote to the Selectboard I requested some mechanism for the Development Review Board to be enabled to have more authority to grant variances if a particular request made sense in relation to the Town Plan and Philosophy, but did not fit the specifically written criteria. I believe the above described case is a good example of that, and that there will be many more cases in the future where complex regulations cannot predict all of the potential possibilities. The Selectboard did include this in their "Worklist", but again, this "Worklist" is not included in the document which will be voted on at Town Meeting.

I believe that the Proposed Zoning Regulations are not ready to be voted upon, and need more work and especially more public input to be anywhere near a document which represents fairness, unity, community stability, and the wishes of the general public, instead of being a document guaranteed to create divisions and factions. For these reasons I will be voting against the proposed changes, and hoping for a better option in the coming year.

 

- Steve Gallagher
Maple Corner, Calais, Vermont

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