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It was one of the shortest — if not the shortest — meeting of the Oriental Planning Board. The meeting on July 29th lasted 25 minutes:

The first item on the agenda was the Overlay Distrct proposal for upper Broad Street. At its July 1 meeting, the Town Board had sent the plan back to the Planning Board. Among other things, the Town Board took issue with a sidewalk requirement, a proposal that new buildings have a front porch at least 8 feet deep, the lifting of a requirement that buildings not have flat roofs and language on trees and landscaping. The Planning Board did not discuss or revisit those issues at its meeting. Instead, the three members present — Ron Stevens, Bill Marlowe and Dick Creighton — voted to stick with the Planning Board’s earlier recommendations and send them back to the Town Board. (Chairman Paul Olson and Bob Miller were absent from the meeting.)

Dee Sage reported to the Planning Board on the work of the Long Range Planning Committee. A first step to developing a master plan, she said, would be having a SWAT session — perhaps by early September. (The acronym takes its name from Strengths, Weaknesses, Assets and Threats.) In time, a public survey would be done. Dee Sage said that there were two openings on the Long Range Planning Committee and that in response to advertisements in the local paper and on the town website, two people had offered to serve: Jennifer Roe and Jim Barton.

Next up was a reorganization of the Growth Management Ordinance, as proposed by Rob Hill, the planner the town has hired on a part-time basis. Bill Marlowe said that the requirements in the GMO wouldn’t change, just the order. The GMO, he said, has “always been difficult to go through” and there was a lot of redundancy. The Planning Board voted to take home the thick document and review it before the next meeting.

During the Non-Agenda Items part of the meeting, Bill Marlowe said that he thought the Planning Board should next work on creating an “Overlay District” for the harbor area of town. The harbor, he said, “is a sore point hanging out there that could become a factor in the future.” Setting up a an overlay district, Bill Marlowe said, “is where I’d like to see us moving.” An overlay district could impose either stricter or looser regulations within its boundaries.

Town Manager Wyatt Cutler announced that Ron Stevens submitted his resignation from the Planning Board on Tuesday morning, and that the town needed to “find someone fairly fast.” Ron Stevens, who joined the board in November, said he was resigning because he thought he would be absent from four meetings of the next half year in order to take care of his father. Stevens’ says he will leave the Planning Board after the next meeting, in late August. That will leave the Planning Board with four members, three of whom – Paul Olson, Bob Miller and Dick Creighton -live in the White Farm Road/Dolphin Point area and one, Bill Marlowe, who lives in the main part of town.

Posted Wednesday July 30, 2008 by Melinda Penkava

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