Great Barrington — It looked like the 2021 Great Barrington annual town meeting would be scorcher. At 3 p.m., it was 90 degrees with a relative humidity of 70 percent, prompting a call from a member of the Board of Health for a postponement of the meeting, slated to take place in the parking lot of Monument Mountain Regional High School, until Thursday, which had already been announced as a fallback date.
But clouds rolled in late Monday afternoon, allowing the asphalt to cool off and providing a measure of vindication for town moderator Michael Wise, who had stubbornly resisted calls for a postponement.
Still, the turnout was low, but the welcome relief set the stage for a marathon legislative session of nearly four hours in which both the town budget and its share of the regional school district budget passed easily. But one controversial zoning amendment concerning marijuana and another article authorizing spending on a new municipal parking lot failed.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 2021 Great Barrington annual town meeting. A link to the CTSB video recording can be found here. The warrant for the meeting can be found here.
A motion was made early in the meeting to begin with the citizen zoning amendments held over from last year. The most controversial was Article 25, which would have restored the 500-foot buffer zone of cannabis businesses from areas where children commonly congregate. It would also have prohibited any marijuana establishment that “would create a nuisance to abutters or the surrounding area,” and would have barred outdoor home cultivation within 50 feet of any property line.
Proponents of the amendment, including Trevor and Denise Forbes and Michelle Loubert, argued passionately about the need for the additional restrictions, while members of the Planning Board, and others, painted the amendment as too broad and its definitions as imprecise.
Zoning amendments require a two-thirds majority to pass at town meeting. After more than an hour of back and forth, the amendment failed, with 90 voting no and only 60 voting yes. The total number of voters attending last night’s meeting was 192, down from 257 last year, town clerk Jennifer Messina said.
An amendment proposed by the Planning Board to revise the Downtown Mixed-Use B3 zone, which was adopted in 2007 and which the board now considers to be out of date, passed with little opposition. Other zoning amendments were either passed over or, in the case of a proposal to amend the Mixed Use Transitional Zone, failed for lack of a second.
A town proposal to appropriate nearly $1.2 million to acquire land and construct a downtown municipal parking lot failed after more than an hour of discussion. The properties are on the other side of the railroad tracks, adjacent to the old train station, and would be accessible to pedestrians using the underpass behind town hall.
Downtown business leaders such as Besty Andrus, who heads the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce, argued that something had to be done to accommodate downtown businesses whose customer volume is hampered by lack of parking options, and whose employees often have no place to park.
Others, such as Planning Board member Pedro Pachano countered that the expense wasn’t worth it and that there were better things to spend taxpayer money on. Fast forward to 2:39:30 on the audio recording to hear the debate.
At one point, the owner of the property, Dale Culleton, spoke. He said he acquired the properties in 1974. Culleton, a contractor, developer, and farmer, also owns the old train station which he restored some 30 years ago.
“I recognize this is a one-shot deal for the town,” Culleton said. “If the town doesn’t buy this property, I think it’s probably the last property they can do this with.”
On a secret ballot, the article failed by a margin of 47–68.
One other article of note passed with a show of hands: a nonbinding resolution to prohibit hazardous and toxic waste storage, disposal, and dumping in Great Barrington. The article was inspired in part by a recent settlement between five South County towns, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and General Electric to locate in the town of Lee a dump for PCBs that GE will remove from the Housatonic River over the next several years.
A citizens petition article on citizen speak time at public meetings also passed. The article amends the town code to allow citizens greater latitude in making public comment: “Except for procedural and housekeeping matters, Town residents shall have the right to address a Board on any item that requires a vote at a time before a Board votes on that item. Such residents will be allowed as much time as the proponent of an item is permitted to have.”
