Recently, Select Board member Hwei-Ling Greeney suggested in a letter to the Amherst Bulletin that the town can save money and not lose anything important by merging the Conservation and Planning Departments. By now, as a member of the Select Board, she ought to know more about what town departments do.
Conservation and Planning already do share office space and resources and one Director, David Ziomek. Besides Ziomek, the Conservation duties are fulfilled by one full-time and one half-time land managers, a half-time wetlands specialist and a three-quarter time administrative assistant. Most years, there is also seasonal staff to supervise Puffers Pond and maintain trails. In Planning, there are three planners, a management assistant, a part-time assistant for the Zoning Board of Appeals, and one student intern. While in the absence of any knowledge of what these departments do this may sound like a lot of people, it’s not.
Although Ms. Greeney wrote that Amherst has less need for “planning” and less opportunity for conservation because it is largely developed, the reality is that it needs more. Most of the land that is easy to develop has been developed, but that doesn’t stop property owners from trying to develop the harder parcels. Most of the land now being proposed for development has challenges, including wetlands or ledge (or both), steep slopes, situations where septic systems are questionable, and neighbors determined to protect the open space near them. All these lead to more complicated decisions for the boards that, under the law, have to make the decisions, and usually more meetings to hear the issues and consider them. Property owners have the right, under the law, to develop their property. Neighbors similarly have the right, under the law, to point out all the difficulties the proposed development may cause, and to try to prevent development or steer it away from a particular part of the property or a different, less intensive, use. In Amherst, we can be sure that these conflicts are going to continue, and probably intensify as fewer and fewer bits of “open space” remain near settled neighborhoods.
Usually the decisions about what can finally be built (if anything) involves some combination of the Zoning Board, the Planning Board, the Conservation Commission, and/or the Board of Health. All these boards depend on the professional expertise, records, and institutional memory of the departments and staff; three of the four of them depend on the Planning and Conservation Department.
It’s also not true that land that is protected from development doesn’t need any more time and attention. First, there’s the task of making sure that “protected” actually means what it says. Think of the Kimball House and the complicated negotiations and deal that were made necessary by the conflicting desires and responsibilities of the various participants. The owners of the house sold it to some people who didn’t want to live in it, but wanted a new house on the property; the state Department of Agriculture had paid for the preservation of agricultural use on most of the surrounding land and is understandably unwilling to let anyone use the Agricultural Preservation Restriction (APR) program become a tax-free bank for the land’s owners; the town wanted to preserve one of its most important historic houses. (Which brings in yet another board advised by the Planning Department, the Historical Commission.) This situation was not initiated by the town, but the town had to respond to it. It took a lot of time, much of it from the Planning and Conservation Department.
On a more routine note, the lands we own have to be taken care of. We own more than 3,500 acres of land that is managed by the Conservation Department, including the land most of us think of as “conservation land” and our watershed lands that protect our drinking water. There are over 80 miles of hiking trails. We need people to pay attention, deter inappropriate activity, fix up after vandalism, mow fields, supervise contracts for use of some of the land, remove trees that fell across trails, etc. Just like the state parks, we are not keeping up with some of the maintenance, especially on trails. From personal experience I can point to several places where trails are starting to erode badly, and need serious work before they become worse. If it’s true that global warming will bring us more heavy rains, erosion and the cost of maintaining our land will also increase dramatically.
If we are wise, we’ll recognize that those 80 miles of trails are an asset for economic development. People come here to walk on them, and then can eat in restaurants and stay in B&Bs. In much of our area people can enjoy the scenery from the road, but not get out in it, because it’s all private.
As officials and town meeting members struggle with our budget problems, they shouldn’t act from ignorance or false claims that departments are expendable.