YACK on: Pavement
Grant Sanders
Ioriginally began writing this week's column on Pavement. I'm talking, of course, about the 90s indie rock band that had a hit with the song "Cut Your Hair" in 1994. Pavement was the first band to achieve fame and critical praise without the help of a major record label. And this was in the day (oh, so long ago, now, wasn't it?) before iTunes and iPods and instantly downloaded music and bands with their own MySpace pages and instant fans. They did it the hard way. By touring. And getting their music on the radio and on MTV. (Yes, back in the 90s, you may recall MTV stood for "Music Television" and - this is actually true - you could hear music and see music videos on MTV.) You really have to respect a band like Pavement who did their own thing. Went their own way. Eschewing the mainstream.

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com and you can find him in the coming weeks lying in the middle of a dirt road between North Liberty Street and Crooked Lane. (Hope there's wireless internet access there.) His views are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. Or Grant's wife.

Like I said, I was going to write the whole column on Pavement, the band. But then last Wednesday night something happened and, well, I decided to turn my attention to pavement

of another kind. The black, hot sticky mixture of bitumen and sand, gravel and crushed chardonnay bottles, also know as Hot Mix Asphalt, HMA or just "hot mix" if you're a guy with your t-shirt tied around your head, holding a shovel by the side of a newly screeded ribbon of shiny smelly blackness. Bitumen sounds like a nice, innocuous word, but it's actually the byproduct from the fractional distillation of crude oil. You might think it's the same thing as tar, but it isn't. Tar is made via the destructive distillation of coal, silly. But like tar, bitumen is heavy, black and sticky, with a boiling point of 100 degrees.

But what is it exactly? Get this: It's actually a highly concentrated viscous collection of various heavy metals (like nickel, vanadium, lead, chromium, mercury arsenic, and selenium) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons!

("Mmm, mom, you make the best polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons ever! Can I have seconds, please?")

Now none of that sounds very healthy does it? And we drive on pavement all the time! Yikes! Not to worry. Once the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metal leech (or "migrate," if you're a chemist) out of the pavement, and go into the ground or the air or are washed away by the rain, the final roadway surface is perfectly safe. You could practically eat off of it. Just ask a gull with a mussel in its mouth.

Now Last Wednesday the Board of Selectmen voted 3- 2 to accept a gift from a developer of the old Westmoor property to pave upper West Chester Street. (You remember Westmoor, the land the town could have owned but the measure was defeated by a margin of 48 votes and now it's a great big housing development in the making?) I expected it to be 3-2 against, but, much to my surprise and consternation, my friend Allen Reinhard voted in favor of paving a road that had been dirt since the first settlers around Capaum Harbor used it to move their settlement to the area we call Downtown Nantucket today. Allen, later in his explanation cited concern for the surrounding wetlands because of the sediment form the dirt road washing into nearby ponds and marshes.

(Uh…what? I'd eat a handful of dirt before I'd eat a handful of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals, how about you?)

Needless to say, I was outraged when I heard about it. And I went a little off the deep end. I called Allen a "traitor" and I also called for his resignation on yackon.com. (For that, I apologize. It was uncalled for.) But today it's nearly a week later, and I still cannot understand or comprehend why a man like Allen who was elected by a whole lot of people who are opposed to paving streets like West Chester, would vote that way. I'm still a little stunned. But the problem goes deeper than a 3-2 vote of the Board of Selectmen.

It seems our illustrious Planning Board has gone on record as being in favor of paving any street as long as the developer of that neighborhood pays for the paving. Chairman Barry Rector stated flatly in a recent meeting I attended that it is the job of the Planning Board to get developers to pay for paving so the taxpayers don't have to. Somebody ought to give Barry a bootleg copy of Microsoft Excel for his birthday so he can run the real numbers and see just how much development is actually costing the taxpayers of Nantucket. Every new house (and we build 200+ a year) creates an incremental need for more stuff that the taxpayers subsidize and from which developers benefit: More teachers, more sewers, more firemen and fire trucks, more water, more police, more parking, more bike paths. And those are just the things our taxes pay for. Development also creates a need for more gardeners and house cleaners and grocery baggers and personal chefs, and those people have to live somewhere and send their kids to school and be able to turn on the faucet or the light switch or call the firemen and police once in a while too.

Planning board, you've been duped. Of course developers are happy to pay $50,000 to pave a street. You're holding their feet to a fan not the fire. They're getting off easy! If they were actually covering the real costs for their own actions, instead of the rest of us subsidizing it, they might not be so eager to open their checkbooks.

In the meantime, we see more and more paving. A quiet lane in 'Sconset here. An ancient way in town there. Maybe Eel Point Road or Millbrook or Grove Lane will be next. It's like Nantucket wants to be more and more like the mainland every day. Personally, I think it's time we broke out of this pattern. I think we need to make decisions at the Planning Board level and the Board of Selectmen level that actually benefit the entire island and not just the brotherhood of developers, nail bangers, bricklayers and landscrapers. We need to eschew mainland methods. We need to go our own way. Do our own thing.

Like Pavement. The band. Not the mixture of sand, crushed chardonnay bottles, heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

YACK on. I