West Stockbridge — With numerous continuances in The Foundry’s quest to amend its special permit’s burdensome sound-monitoring requirements, the entertainment venue will return to the drawing board to draft what is hopefully an end to the saga, an easily identifiable standard that can spark a final resolution to its long-standing dispute with an abutter over excessive noise levels.
William Martin, attorney for The Foundry owner Amy Brentano, announced at the July 29 West Stockbridge Planning Board meeting that the new proposal will match or even be more stringent than the maximum sound levels noted in the July 29 report by Herbert L. Singleton Jr. That proposal is slated to be unveiled at the Planning Board’s August 12 session at 7:15 p.m.
Singleton, who is president of Cross-Spectrum Acoustics Inc., conducted a site visit at The Foundry on July 10, monitoring the difference in sound decibels produced inside the venue and detected outside the venue, or through its walls. Per his report, Singleton determined that an inside sound level of 104 decibel A-weighted (dbA), or higher frequency sounds, and 93 decibel C-weighted (dbC), or lower frequency sounds, will produce the sound levels at the perimeter property line of 60 dbA and 65 dbC. Those perimeter property line values are the upper limits of allowable sound that can be generated by the venue pursuant to its special permit.
“Given the permit conditional limits of 60 dBA and 65 dBC, the adjustments would correspond to an interior limit of 104 dBA and 93 dBC,” the Singleton report states. “Any interior limits offered by The Foundry that are at or below these values (104 dBA and 93 dBC) are consistent with my findings.”
Singleton’s report can be found here.
The special permit granted to the entertainment venue in December dictates that monitoring of the maximum levels must be at its property line, a standard that has proven to be problematic to accurately assess due to intervening highway traffic and wind noise. According to Brentano, the goal of the test and site visit was to determine “what the levels can reach inside the venue so that they don’t go over what we are allowed to go over outside.”
A June 27 email from Martin to Planning Board Chair Dana Bixby recommended a test protocol “that will allow for the monitoring of sound levels inside the venue with limits that are expected to be acceptable at the property line.”
The June 27 email can be found here.
Additionally, prior to Singleton’s site visit, the standard for the special permit monitoring requirement was to detect the sound level via a microphone placed at the venue’s property line, a measurement that Martin said his client will now propose to be placed indoors, four feet above the technical engineer’s table. However, he said he will also propose an increase over the new draft sound standards for the end of a show, or a “spike,” to allow for applause that could be louder than the program itself.
Martin proposed that the data log for each program be the standard for review, obviating the need for a zoning enforcement officer to reflect on the audio file for the performance.
Although The Foundry’s special permit provides for four outdoor performances, Brentano said the venue hasn’t even hosted one such outside event. Martin suggested the provision be eliminated from the document, leaving the venue to request an entertainment license from the Select Board for a one-day event as its remedy. “I think it’s a significant give back to take it out of the special permit and have The Foundry take its chances with the Select Board because this is a one per event and if an event goes sideways, you can be pretty sure that [the Select Board] would be less inclined to approve the next event,” he said. “We were going to take that chance because we think the sound-monitoring protocol is so hopelessly difficult to manage.”
Otherwise, by retaining that provision, Martin said the microphone would need to be relocated outside and the town’s zoning enforcement officer be required to listen to the audio should a special permit violation be alleged. “We’re almost exclusively interested in trying to find out how the indoor events can be recorded in a way that creates really simplicity and certainty in terms of whether there is a violation,” he said.
The remainder of the Planning Board agreed the matter was headed “in the right direction.”
“We’re not doing this in a Hollywood way where we’ve got the ultimate in constant monitoring,” Martin said. “We’re trying to do something that’s just really practical in a small town, and we think this is workable.”
Brentano originally filed a request to eliminate all sound-monitoring provisions cited in the venue’s special permit, with the Planning Board’s first of several continued hearings begun in May.
Attorney Mitch Greenwald, representing abutters Truc Nguyen, together with her mother Trai Thi Duong, and on behalf of her restaurant Truc Orient Express, addressed the dais.
Greenwald’s clients have long alleged noise issues emanating from a few productions at the site that have interfered with their quality of life and business. In all but one of those cases, The Foundry was determined to have not violated its special permit.
Greenwald said his client appealed the special permit originally for a multitude of reasons, “one of which was [that] the measurement methods proposed and enacted by the Planning Board were unworkable.”
“So, we’re back here looking at measurement standards in a different way,” Greenwald said.
However, he pointed out that the rest of The Foundry’s special permit isn’t before the board and declined to comment in response to the venue’s proposed language as “it’s not in writing yet.”
Along with Planning Board members and Martin, Greenwald said he didn’t receive Singleton’s report until that afternoon and hasn’t had a chance to fully vet the document, including a review by his expert. He objected to removing the special permit’s outdoor event provision in favor of The Foundry obtaining a one-day entertainment permit for an exterior program. “The idea that an entertainment permit would substitute for the protection of a special permit is ludicrous,” Greenwald said, adding that provision would abdicate the role of the Planning Board. A case filed by Nguyen and Duong, naming The Foundry, Bixby, and officers of the West Stockbridge Zoning Board of Appeals, is pending in Massachusetts Land Court.
As with other hearings involving The Foundry and abutters, the session had its heated moments. At one point, Martin and Brentano’s testimony stopped as both addressed The Berkshire Edge photographing the scene.
Resident David Anderegg attempted to comment about the entertainment venue requirement in lieu of the current special permit provision governing outdoor events at The Foundry but was shut down by Bixby, with echoes by other board members, that the topic wasn’t germane to the hearing.
