North Lancaster Hearing Cancelled again! Error with hearing date means that Tuesday's hearing for a change to the Enterprise Zone district will be rescheduled.

 

The Zoning Bylaw Public hearing for the proposed expansion of the Enterprise Zone District in northern Lancaster was scheduled for Tuesday, September 6th: it has been cancelled and will be rescheduled again.   If you've been waiting to weigh in on the proposal you'll remember that the hearing was first scheduled for August 8th and cancelled after Town Hall published the wrong hearing notice; this time it was cancelled because the the new hearing was scheduled for the day of the Primary Election.

Zoning Bylaw Public Hearings follow the requirements from Mass. General Law Chapter 40A Section 11, and "...No such hearing shall be held on any day on which a state or municipal election, caucus or primary is held in such city or town."

At their meeting on August 16th, the Select Board initially requested that the town schedule a hearing on Monday, August 29th.    That date didn't allow enough time for proper notice of a hearing.  Somewhere behind the scenes the hearing date was shifted forward to Tuesday, September 6th and the hearing was advertised in the Sentinel & Enterprise on August 19th and August 26th.   Unfortunately September 6th proved to be one of the handful of days each year when it's not permissible to hold a hearing.

There is some tangible cost involved with these hearings.  Running the two required legal notices in the Telegram cost around $250 in the past.  (We typically opted for ads in The Item, which had a longer leadtime and was only distributed on Fridays, but was less expensive.  It looks like this one was run in the Sentinel and Enterprise, and I don't know their price off-hand.)  The hearing notices also need to be mailed to the qualifying abutters of the affected property, abutting towns and the MRPC.  Even if town counsel town doesn't review the notice (and hopefully they didn't review this one...) it does consumes some staff time.   

In the past the Planning Board scheduled its hearings at meetings, and the chair reviewed everything that was going to be published from the board; these two consecutive cancelled hearings are definitely a case of "haste makes waste."

There should still be time to advertise another hearing during the week of September 18th, if the Select Board still hopes to have a Special Town Meeting at the end of the month.  That would not allow much time for the Planning Board to produce a report -- they'd probably need to approve a short statement at the same meeting as the hearing.   Both the 40R proposal and the EZ zone expansion have hurdles to meet before any meeting: it hasn't been confirmed that the proposed 40R district would qualify as an MBTA Communities district under the finalized guidelines, and the Capital Group has been pushing back on what it's willing to commit to in a Memorandum of Agreement.