Staff Writer
Published: 7/18/2020 3:55:17 PM
AMHERST — Over the past year, the town’s Planning Board approved site plans for new mixed-use buildings on South East Street and Main Street, a municipal playground at Kendrick Park and a new marijuana microbusiness.
Even though no site plans brought before the panel were rejected, the board is recommending, by a 5-2 vote, that the Town Council reduce the threshold for granting future site plan approvals from a two-thirds majority to a simple majority.
The request to the council, which will do a first reading of the zoning change Monday, comes after the size of the Planning Board was reduced from nine members to seven members when the new town charter was adopted in March 2018.
Under the current bylaw, a two-thirds vote is needed to approve site plans, but not fewer than five must vote in favor. With the former nine-member board — and with the possibility that not all members would be present to vote on a site plan — that means that no plan could pass that didn’t have at least majority support on the board. With the current seven-member board, that requirement of at least five favorable votes makes approval of site plans more difficult than in the past.
“The voting requirement for site plan review in Amherst is perceived to be out of sync with the requirements of many other towns and cities across the state which require only a majority vote of board members participating and voting to approve a site plan review application,” planners write in a memo to the council.
But two Planning Board members, Michael Birtwistle and Janet McGowan, have filed a minority report, suggesting that the council reject the zoning change unless its language maintains a minimum of four Planning Board members voting in favor to approve site plans.
“The substitute amendment would have insured majority support of the whole Planning Board, not allowing a minority of three members to prevail under any circumstance,” they write.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com."board" - Google News
July 19, 2020 at 02:57AM
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