Reminder: Select Board Hearing on Unified Zoning By-Law this coming Saturday, June 25, 2016, 10AM, Robinson School Multi-Purpose Room
The Starksboro Planning Commission has been working very hard over the past several years to draft a new Unified Zoning By-Law to replace the Town of Starksboro’s current Zoning and Subdivision Regulations. The new by-law, containing some 125 pages, lays out very detailed provisions guiding land use, growth, and development within the Town.
The Select Board is hosting the last of several hearings on this Draft By-Law this Saturday. This is really the final opportunity for residents to weigh in vocally on these new proposed regulations. This document will do much to establish growth patterns within the Town, to define how much and what kind of development occurs here, where it will occur, and what it will look like. The Planning Commission has made an honorable effort to make this new document legitimately reflect the current Town Plan, and the varied, and sometimes contradictory, interests of all Town residents. Whether this document does so successfully, however, is really up to all of us as residents and community members to decide.
I have attended a number of Planning Commission meetings, as well as several public hearings on these regulations, and I still have many nagging questions about how these regulations will maintain the quality of life we have come to expect and enjoy in Starksboro. Change is part of the continuum in which we all live in Vermont, but sometimes it can happen dramatically and unexpectedly and become overwhelming. We have seen how growth pressure has precipitated itself upon neighboring towns, and transformed some of them from small villages to busy suburban commercial centers. When this happens, a town’s Zoning By-Laws become the only legal standard guiding the nature or limit of that development, and the only recourse of neighbors or residents to address or protect their interests in the face of development pressure.
Do Starksboro’s new regulations do enough to:
- Define what type of land use is acceptable in the various zoning districts and planning areas within the town?
- Establish the rights and appropriate means by which residents can protect themselves from unwanted intrusions of noise, light, or incompatible activity?
- Protect neighbors from uses which are inappropriate, out of scale, or in conflict with their own uses and enjoyment of their property?
- Provide a sense of vision for what the town and particularly its growth centers will look like, and take active steps to restrict development that we don’t want, while encouraging development that we like?
- Reflect the diversity of interests within the town and among its residents – including the ability to develop our own property in appropriate ways when it suits us?
This is certainly a challenging undertaking!
The Select Board will decide, based upon their review of comments from Town residents at this and previous hearings, whether to accept these new by-laws as written, whether to ask the Planning Commission to make changes to them to reflect concerns received from residents, or whether to put the new document to an up or down referendum ballot by which all Town residents can weigh in.
Copies of the new draft by-law are available at the Town Office, and the entire document, along with the Draft District Map, can be found at the Town website. If you can’t make it to the hearing, you can also send comments in writing to the Select Board. Members of the Select Board have indicated that comments on specific provisions of the Draft with which you are concerned are especially appreciated.
I hope many people come to the meeting and make their voices heard!
Tom Perry
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