7-7-05

Walpole Planning Board Chair Vows Support for Additional Meetings

By Charles C. Bingaman, Contributing Writer

          Walpole Planning Board Chair Jeff Miller, despite missing the first two of the Board’s new meetings on the fourth Tuesday of the month, says that he supports the meetings and intends both to attend in the future and to make them valuable.

          In its regular second Tuesday April meeting, the Walpole Planning Board agreed to schedule an additional, less formal monthly meeting on the fourth Tuesday evening of the month beginning in May to focus on broader planning issues than current applications for sub-divisions, etc. that are the meat of regular second Tuesday meetings. 

          The trouble has been that, despite the some public interest in the new working sessions, Chairman Miller had work related conflicts with the first two new working meetings in May and June, and only one regular Board member even appeared for the second working meeting June 28.  And that member, Eric Merklein, arrived to find a number of citizens milling around a locked Town Hall that apparently had no preparation for the meeting.

          Miller, serving his fourth or fifth term on the Planning Board—he can’t remember for sure since he began serving in the late 1980s—said  Wednesday that the Board has used supplemental meetings in the past to consider “big picture type things” such as planning capital expenditures and revising regulations.  He said that all meetings of the Board are posted every Tuesday in the Town Hall but that notices to Planning Board members are not sent for regular or other meetings.  He also noted that poor attendance at the newly set second meetings have probably been caused in part by their beginning in summer vacation season.

          Nevertheless, Miller said that he thinks “the new fourth Tuesday meetings will be a good opportunity to go back and forth about ideas and issues the Town needs to work on.”

          With respect to suggestions for procedural and format steps to improve Planning Board meetings, especially for citizens that wish to sit in and understand what is happening, Miller said that the current approaches “are the ways we’ve always operated since I’ve been on the Board.”  With respect to facilitating room set-ups so that citizens can hear and understand initial planning notices to the Board—difficult without required use of a PA system and means of showing the public present initial surveys of properties—Miller noted that “new business is basically a conversation between the applicant and the Board”.  While agreeing that the Town Hall downstairs meeting room has difficult acoustics, Miller said that complaints made at the June meeting about the inability of some public observers to hear presentations were “the first time we even heard that people had a hard time hearing.” He also noted that the room’s PA system was currently under repair.

          At the June regular meeting of the Planning Board one member of the audience asked about the possibility of the Board’s publishing an advance agenda for regular and other meetings and using name plates for Board members.  Chairman Miller said this week that, although publishing an agenda was not required by statute, the board had been doing so for several months.  He also noted that the Board’s long-time secretary, Judy Trow, had resigned and that adding clerical functions would be difficult until a new secretary is found.

          The regular meeting of the Walpole Planning Board is set for 7:30 p.m. July 12 and the special “working” meeting is set for 7:30 p.m. July 26 at the Town Hall.