Oriental Zoning Controversy

There were fireworks at last Tuesday night's meeting of Oriental's Town Board even before the vote on a proposed town dock.

At the beginning of the meeting, the board considered whether to schedule public hearings on five separate amendments to the town's Growth Management Ordinance (GMO), the town's zoning ordinance. When the proposal to schedule a hearing on changes to Article VI of the ordinance failed due to lack of a motion and the motion to schedule a hearing on changes to Article XV was tabled because some commissioners wanted to read it before voting on it, one member of the planning board stormed out of the meeting and the other members present expressed displeasure in other ways.

In view of the board's actions on the two most controversial GMO amendments, the subsequent public comment period was devoted entirely to the town dock issue (previous post).


At least one member of the public, who had come to the meeting for the specific purpose of speaking out against the change to Article VI, did not speak on that subject, since the board did not act. She left, thinking that business was over.

Apparently intimidated by the planning board reaction, though, the town board reconsidered its vote to table Article XV and voted to schedule a public hearing for Article XV and Article VI as well, except for a new Section 88 exempting religious institutions from the maximum footprint limits of Section 77.

That didn't make the planning board happy either. The next day the mayor scheduled a special meeting for Friday to address Article VI again. This morning the town board scheduled a public hearing for all of the changes to Article VI, including the new Section 88.

(According to some townspeople, the new Section 88 is solely designed to alleviate a concern of the church attended by the mayor and his wife I have no idea if that is true). The truth is, it is impossible for a member of the public, by reading the five draft amendments to the GMO or by attending last Tuesday's town board meeting, to have any idea why the proposed changes were drafted, what problems they were designed to solve, or what justification exists for the solutions recommended by the planning board.

Regrettably, the emotions expressed, the misunderstanding of proper legislative procedure and the failure to have effective and transparent communication between the Town Board and the Planning Board has made a situation far worse than it needed to be. Neither did it build confidence among the public that this isn't a scheme to railroad the changes through the system.

I have some ideas about how to improve procedures that I think could go far to prevent this kind of thing in the future. I just looked at the clock, though, and decided to save my ideas for the next post.