QUESTIONS DECISION

The following letter was sent to Ben Lynch of the Department of Environmental Protection’s Waterways Regulations Program and is reprinted here at the author’s request

To the editor:

Issue: Location within the Filled and Flowed Tidelands of Nantucket Harbor, aka the creek area of Nantucket County. Second procedural ruling by DEPWaterways Regulations Program raises question of closed hearing and without proper notice.

Until I read Peter Brace’s story in The Independent did I have any indication that DEP in its wisdom said that Greater Harbor Yacht Club is “water-dependent” and that the line purported to be by Save Our Waterfront had no basis. What? What about public access?

How do you make this determination without a public hearing and due notice?

How do you weight your insight and/or knowledge against an opposing view?

This decision smacks of “not a level playing field.” All of a sudden and without due process you, Ben Lynch, are quoted in the newspaper as saying the issue is moot.

I believe the issue is real and very much alive. This is a key to the public’s ownership of land and its use.

• Hopefully, you will issue a written detailed statement as to how you and associates at DEP arrived at the decision?

• Under what conditions, hearings, testimony, experts were used to reach this decision?

• What was the methodology used in the determination?

• Had any of the DEP members been to the site prior to any discussion?

• What line is now used for the high/low watermark?

Sad to say — that if a closed meeting conclusion is left standing — a bad precedent is set for future Chapter 91 deliberations.

Your division of DEP should be above reproach. Every issue demands that it be done in camera (public view).

Please e-mail or send to my address the scope of regulations that allows you to make these independent judgments outside of camera and that you and your associates do not have to follow common agreed regulations and/or law. Sincerely,

— George C. Jordan III

Lenox, Mass