As I sat there in the Great Barrington Selectmen\u2019s meeting, I was thinking about once again falling down a rabbit hole. But instead of something from \u201cAlice in Wonderland,\u201d I heard in my head that famous line from \u201cHamlet:\u201d \u201cSomething is rotten in the State of Denmark.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pretty funny seeing as how I recently wrote a column about good government and the EPA. I haven\u2019t attended a Selectmen\u2019s meeting since the meetings about Downtown Redevelopment. But I became interested after reading about the Rogers Road dispute in the Berkshire Record.<\/p>\n
In the good old days, Rogers Trucking ran his garbage business on Rogers Road, which in the midst of the residential neighborhood of Blue Hill Road. As Rogers\u2019 son-in-law reminded the Selectmen, you could pretty much do what you wanted then and so his trucks would come and go at all hours of the day and night. And the family also loved animals, horses and donkeys, and they were all over the place. Of course, the neighbors complained about the noise but Mr. Rogers provided jobs and took care of everybody\u2019s garbage and emptied septic tanks and helped out the fire company, and business in business and garbage is garbage, and garbage just happens to be a particularly noisy business.<\/p>\n
There was a court case about all in 1996 that limited Rogers\u2019 activity but gave him the right to park his vehicles and maintain an office on the site. The court gave those rights to Mr. Rogers\u2019 successors as well. So the question comes down to exactly what kind of business is occurring on the Rogers Road property now and does it legitimately fall under the permitted uses of that court decision? Gary O\u2019Brien who bought the property claims he is operating a landscaping business and parks his vehicles and runs his business out of the office. He is expanding the property to include a tree farm, an agricultural use clearly permitted under state law.<\/p>\n
His neighbors and more recently Great Barrington\u2019s Building Inspector, Edwin May, believe Mr. O\u2019Brien is involved in a series of activities that do not fall under the 1996 ruling or state regulations for agricultural use. The neighbors allege that Mr. O\u2019Brien has been operating a gravel pit, and noisily moving large quantities of materials to and from the property.<\/p>\n
So why should you care about any of this? Well it turns out this is all about how our local government functions here in Great Barrington. The Town Building Inspector ruled that Mr. O\u2019Brien was engaged in activities that violated our Town\u2019s Zoning Bylaws. When these activities continued, he issued a formal Cease and Desist Order. And because Mr. O\u2019Brien failed to stop, he levied fines. It turns out that that is Mr. May\u2019s job. He is the legally designated governmental agent charged with enforcing our Zoning Bylaws.<\/p>\n
And as Jonathan Hankin of the Planning Board reminded us, our Zoning By-laws are passed by a two-third\u2019s vote of town residents at Town Meeting. That\u2019s the highest bar we set in our little democracy; it\u2019s the clearest, least ambiguous indication of what we the little people want for our town.<\/p>\n
And here is where Main Street meets Denmark. What should have been a clear issue for the town became ever more murky. A clear determination by the man supposed to make these determinations gets ignored by some combination of the Town Manager, and the Town Counsel. And the Selectmen who are very busy and very overworked seemed not to notice this is happening.<\/p>\n
For some reason the Town Manager, Kevin O\u2019Donnell and the Town Counsel, David J. Doneski, decided to work all this out with Mr. O\u2019Brien\u2019s attorney, Ed McCormick, either on the phone or over coffee. Unfortunately, there seem to be no official notes of any of these conversations.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m not a lawyer so I don\u2019t know whether any of this is illegal or not. But it certainly doesn\u2019t promote open, transparent, democratic government. Or effective government.<\/p>\n
While Mr. McCormick seemed to think they had worked everything out, the Selectman seem not to have been informed by Mr. O\u2019Donnell or Mr. Doneski about what they were doing. And Mr. O\u2019Brien\u2019s neighbors still aren\u2019t happy.<\/p>\n
There were those Denmark moments when I wasn\u2019t sure whether Mr. Doneski was representing our town or Mr. McCormick\u2019s client. And Town Manager O\u2019Donnell was uncharacteristically silent while the Selectmen tried to catch up with almost a year\u2019s worth of mis- or non-communication. It seemed clear to me that for doing his job Mr. May had been left all alone out on a very thin limb.<\/p>\n
Considering I voted for all of the current selectmen, I really hope they don\u2019t pull a Hamlet on this one. And I can\u2019t help but wonder whether the same dysfunction has characterized the Town\u2019s plans to completely disrupt Main Street next year.<\/p>\n
Thursday June 16, 2011, The Berkshire Record \u00a9 Mickey Friedman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I sat there in the Great Barrington Selectmen\u2019s meeting, I was thinking about once again falling down a rabbit hole. But instead of something from \u201cAlice in Wonderland,\u201d I heard in my head that famous line from \u201cHamlet:\u201d \u201cSomething is rotten in the State of Denmark.\u201d Pretty funny seeing as how I recently wrote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":5,"menu_order":943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-436","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P5pvz8-72","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":438,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/436\/revisions\/438"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mickeyfriedman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}