First zoning article meeting of the year tomorrow
BY PETER B. BRACE
Remember the special Town Meeting last October in which voters adopted 10 zoning articles?

Most of those 41-81D Master Plan articles that made it out of the high school auditorium in one night were just abstract concepts with no specifically targeted areas of the island where they would apply.

The Planning Board and Planning Director Andrew Vorce are going to be working in earnest between now and the end of March drafting new 41-81D articles containing maps of island districts where they think zoning changes would help the island the most.

“We want it to be a working session and we want to go over what we’ve learned from the public process to date and what we should be advancing for the coming Town Meeting,” said Vorce.

Though Vorce does not have specific articles in mind for discussion, it is likely he and the board are going to be discussing how to they want to phase out the RC-2 and RC districts and the Residential-Commercial- Downtown and Limited- Commercial districts and replace them with Commercial-Mid-Island (CMI), Commercial Neighborhood

(CN), Commercial Trade, Entrepreneurship and Craft (CTEC) and Commercial-Industrial (CI).

“I don’t have actual articles written yet,” he conceded. “Unfortunately, part of this is influenced by losing the land use planner, so we don’t want to lose any of our momentum.”

Vorce’s prime motivation behind these zoning change concepts is grounded in the Land Use component of the nine-element 41-81D Master Plan and is the Planning Board’s goal of adapting the new zoning districts to current development patterns. But collectively, they don’t have all the answers. Which is why the Planning Board is getting a

jump on getting these articles together with a strategy meeting tomorrow night at 7 p.m. in the Planning Office at 2 Fairgrounds Road.

At this planning meet-up, Vorce said that he and the board are going to discuss the zoning articles they successfully got past the voters in 2006 and in what sort of direction the board wants to head with the next round of 41-81D zoning articles. He and the board are counting on having this discussion lead to rough ideas for zoning articles for the 2007 Annual Town Meeting.

The meeting is open to the public.

I