What the Cape Cod Commission is saying ...
Cape Business recently sat down with Cape Cod Commission Executive Director Margo Fenn and Chief Planner John Lipman to discuss the relationship between the commission and the business community. A transcript of that discussion is set forth below.
Thank you for joining us. There are concerns in the business community that the Cape Cod Commission may be stifling economic growth and regulating too aggressively. What is your take on the situation?
Margo Fenn: Back in 1994, there was a groundswell of complaints from a variety of different communities about the commission. We set up a task force of outside people to get feedback on how we were dealing with businesses and we received recommendations about the concerns raised. It worked very well. Now, we have decided it is time to do it again.
The way it was reported was not at all accurate. The truth is that [County Commissioner William] Doherty comes across as a critic, and actually Bill is a supporter [of the commission]. There needs to be a public process to both educate people about what we do and also listen to concerns and respond to those concerns.
Why now?
Fenn: We have always been a lightning rod when it comes to controversy around development issues on the Cape. One, regulation by its very nature is controversial, whether at the local planning board level or the state DEP or federal EPA. A lot of money is at stake, and people are pulling in different directions protecting their interests. We sit in the middle of that, protecting interests of the community and allowing for some reasonable development. And two, the stakes are higher than ever before. Land values are up and supply is dwindling. A lot of money is at stake, and that is why it is heating up again.
At the same time, we are a regional agency in a part of the world with a deep tradition of town-based home rule. We are seen as outsiders. ‘Who are they telling to us what to do?’ There is a built-in tension between local and regional government.
It’s interesting to me that we have perennial critics. A certain proportion never liked the idea of creating a commission in the first place. They oppose us pretty consistently. We go along through quiet periods of time, and then things get stirred up. It is very contagious. Hank Farnum advocates pulling Barnstable out of the commission and that sentiment begins to spread like wildflower. It activates those with similar feelings.
Are there legitimate concerns?
Fenn: Yes. Are we working to address them? Yes. Are there changes to do our job better? Yes. I am trying to approach this with an open heart. There is a lot to be learned and the community has a lot to learn about us. The mythology about us is so overblown and not based totally on fact. Stories have some basis in fact, but by the time they are circulated, they are blown out of proportion – how long it takes to get through the process; how expensive the process is; the idea you can’t get through it.
The fact is we approve almost 90 percent of the proposals before us. But the perception is it is an impossible hurdle.
John Lipman: There are other misconceptions. Take our perceived power. It would be quite a different commission if we had the power most people think we have. We are not the bogeyman or the savior. We are an organization with a fairly focused mission. We absolutely affect the growth of Cape Cod. But almost all residential and most commercial development proceeds without review by the commission because they do not trigger our thresholds.
Do we shape and direct growth? Yes, through the regulatory process and by the very presence of the process being there. We don’t know what decisions are made by private parties regarding whether they will locate here or not just to avoid our review.
One overblown story is that the commission is grinding economic development to a halt on Cape Cod. How could that be possible? Look at the trucks coming over bridge, the level of economic activity. Where I would rather the dialogue go with the business community is to figure out together what we can do to promote economic development on Cape Cod while meeting our mission. We need to be realistic about what we can and cannot do.
There is a difference between economic development to the promotion of business. We are talking about larger issues than business. Economic development speaks to our resource base and those elements of our community that we treasure; that motivate people to move here.
Our role is not promotion of business per se, but rather the creation and maintenance of economic development in the broader context – what brings wealth here and brings people here to create more wealth. That may not be everybody’s version of economic development.
Fenn: That is an important point. People ascribe more power to us than we actually have. We cast a bigger shadow than we really possess. But perception can be reality.
When we started out, the business community in the early 1990s was largely opposed to creating a commission. We had a very difficult relationship with the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.
Then, the county Economic Development Council was created to be a counter to the commission. We spent three or four years fighting with them about everything under the sun.
Things are not really like that now. We have a really good relationship with the chamber and have collaborated with them. We are very involved in the Business Roundtable, and a lot of the work out of that group is supporting the very things the commission originally was set up to do. There has been an evolution of people’s thinking as to what makes for a healthy economy. It is not just building more stuff. It is protecting resources, providing infrastructure to make this place healthy, providing the housing to have social diversity here and to allow people of different economic levels to live here.
All of that was part of the mission of the commission. I think there has been an evolution of thinking among leadership across the Cape, and it is that economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds, but in fact are inextricably connected. I think that is a huge step forward. There is a lot more commonality of interest than conflict.
There is conflict, however, around specific projects; and that is where most of the controversy around the commission arises. It is about our regulating a specific project.
The bigger picture was that we were supposed to set a regional policy plan; to set a vision and a set of performance standards through the regional plan to try to protect resources. That then must go into towns’ long-term plans, and the towns must take it to the next step through changes in zoning bylaws.
That remains a missing piece. Only a handful of towns have made significant progress, and then only in the last five years.
Which towns have made the most progress?
Fenn: Barnstable, especially. They understand something really important. You can’t look at downtown [development] in isolation. What you want to happen downtown depends on also zoning outlying parts of town to reduce the overall potential for additional residential development and nitrogen loading into embayments. The town council has yet to support it, but they also are working on a limit to traffic generation in corridors leading to downtown. How do you have a healthy downtown if no one can get there?
Barnstable has taken holistic approach. A lot of the planning is about affordable housing. They are using town land for affordable housing. They are enacting an inclusionary housing bylaw put in place through a DCPC growth cap. The building permit cap comes with a set aside for affordable units. A certain percentage of permits must go for affordable housing. They’re trying to attack on different fronts.
When the Cape Cod Commission act was drafted, our mission was incredibly broad and encompassed affordable housing, the environment, balanced economic growth and the protection of historic character. All of those things are interconnected. You cannot address one of them without the others. You fix one problem and you can make six others worse.
The underlying principal of the Regional Policy Plan is that you need to think about all of these things when you are developing a project.
Yes, we need affordable housing, so we allow for degradation of water quality. The approach we take is you need to care about both and address both. That is a fundamental principal I don’t want to lose. When you start making those tradeoffs, the fabric of both the mission and Regional Policy Plan falls apart.
Lipman: That word tradeoff is probably wrong. We need to find solutions that are synergistic and not tradeoffs. Businesses aren’t just coming here to take, but to invest – and not only in their business but also in all the resources across the Cape. Our wealth comes from those resources – clean water, roads relatively free of congestion, the quality of life. That is a very hard thing to do, but it is not impossible. The idea that progress means everything must get worse is a bum theory. We want to make Cape Cod different, a national model – that merges the environment, economy and community. Not only so they can coexist, but interact and support one another. They are the three legs of the stool. If one of them becomes too big, the stool becomes unsteady. They grow from different directions, but all come together at the top.
Despite your strong mandate to plan and regulate growth, the state Chapter 40b charter seems to take a great deal of your power away from you. And there is growing evidence developers are using 40b to construct just the kind of housing that you would prefer not to see – outside town centers and utilizing valuable open space.
Lipman: There was a conscious decision made in the Cape Cod Commission Act that like local zoning boards, we would have no regulatory authority over it. But in the last year, we have been taking a more active role in conjunction with town planning boards and boards of appeal. We are sending our staff to local meetings, helping boards with their questions. One thing we have is a great resource for the town. It’s not possible, or smart, for towns to individually build that kind of expertise in house. It’s not efficient. We have traffic engineers, hydrologists, landscape architects, historic preservationists, waste management experts that a town can call on us for help. In the case of 40b issues with water quality, traffic, they can ask us to help them with it.
Fenn: I have very mixed feelings about 40b. The affordable housing advocate in me says we need it. It is very important to have a process that allows for affordable housing to go forward in an expedited and more flexible way. But the planner in me says it is fraught with problems because there is nothing in the law that lets you take into account environmental constraints – problems with traffic congestion and community character. You have to rely on the good negotiating skills of local building and zoning boards, and frankly they are not set up to do this. They are used to doing very narrow things – looking at variances and special permits. Planning a 40b project is a huge exercise. We are trying to build some institutional support for that. I think it has been helpful. The town of Bourne has used our help. We are seeing a lot more 40b development on the Upper Cape. Some is right up against the Massachusetts Military Reservation in air crash zones for Otis and high noise zones. Just from the point of view of responsible planning, that is a lousy place. In Mashpee, areas zoned for industrial development are now 40b housing projects because demand is so great.
Our sister agency on Martha’s Vineyard actually has authority over 40b development because its legislation predated ours.
Would the Cape Cod Commission be different if it were being established now rather than a decade ago?
Fenn: I am not sure it would be different starting now. It’s very interesting, but the concerns that led to creation of the commission in the first place are stronger than ever. People are concerned with traffic congestion, water quality, affordable housing. Actually, affordable housing – based on a recent survey – has bumped up from 10 years ago. People finally are beginning to get it. Housing is an economic issue; not a social justice issue nor a moral issue. It is an issue of business conducting business and the fundamental health of our economy. That is a new awareness. That has really changed in the last five years with the huge spike in housing costs that has pushed many workers off-Cape because they can’t afford to live here.
Has anything changed?
Fenn: I think the fundamental concerns have not changed. I think some of the solutions have changed. Back in the 1980s, we believed we could stop the tidal wave of development, or at least slow it down. I think everybody has come to the realization that is not doable. The pressure is too great.
Our job instead is to make sure building is done the right way so we protect as much of the environment and place as we can and also provide the infrastructure to support new growth.
We thought we could go without wastewater treatment technology, and that has been disastrous. We cannot rely on septic systems. People believed that septic systems could be a development control because density depends on that. But in reality it created lot of sprawl.
It would have been better to have bitten the bullet in the 1970s and ’80s and developed wastewater treatment systems. The federal dollars were available then, and money was cheaper. Instead, we went for a suburban planning model instead of a downtown development model. We shouldn’t have tried to make this place a suburb. We should have focused growth instead in our dense villages.
Now it’s like turning an ocean liner around. We did such a good job in the ’80s convincing people that groundwater could be protected through large-lot zoning that this is now in everybody’s head. Now we are saying that was a mistake. In some locations large lots make sense, but across the board, it is not the solution. Instead, we must designate some areas for high density and some for low density. That is hard to sell because the very word ‘density’ is considered bad. That bias is only beginning to turn now.
For example, a recent survey asked: ‘Would you support loosening development rules in growth centers while making it more difficult to develop outside them?’ We also asked whether we should make development easier everywhere or harder everywhere. The answers were split between easier development in growth centers or harder everywhere. No one felt development should be easier everywhere.
Say someone wants to donate 35 acres of open space, but requires a subdivision. They will have to go through months of time and probably tens of thousands of dollars just to get approval for giving the land away to the town for conservation purposes. Isn’t that self-defeating?
Fenn: It’s true that we have a 30-acre threshold. If you want to give away half of the land, it will trip a review. There can be a DRI exemption, which is a shortened, simplified process. But people do feel that they are doing something magnanimous for the community and feel their hands are tied.
Time is always a complaint. Timing is incredibly dependent on getting a completed application at the beginning of the process. Projects that grind on are those where homework was not completed up front. We are happy to help. It’s a daunting process. Before you hire all your consultants and draw up plans, talk with us first, and let us give you a sense of the pitfalls so you can save money up front by designing a project that will comply with standards. We can give you a heads up in the beginning.
A DRI exemption stimulates a public hearing within 60 days, provided there are not a lot of issues. Beyond that, one of the things we are talking about now is what we want to do with our thresholds. There are a number of adjustments we will make to address concerns – the impact on small businesses, getting growth to the right places.
What are some of the most promising adjustments we might expect?
Fenn: One of the first things we did – and attorney Pat Butler raised it – was to address the 10,000-square-foot threshold that applies to any commercial or industrial project. It doesn’t differentiate among uses. Over the years, that has hurt quite a few nonprofits: IFAW, the Audubon property in Wellfleet, the Marine Life Center in Buzzards Bay. Pat has made the case for a more flexible process for organizations that have limited financial resources and cannot afford to go through the full suite of mitigation – not just the review process required. This is a process for community benefit, a hardship exemption. We need relief from some standards of the regional plan. It has been in place a little more than a year. We have reviewed the Wellfleet Harbor Actor’s Theater, the Marine Life Center, the Riverview School in Sandwich and the Cape End Manor in Provincetown. I think they all would say it went very well.
What it does is give us flexibility. If there is a hardship, you don’t get a complete free pass. But if you can demonstrate you are not creating a problem, we don’t have to hold you to all the standards.
For WHAT, they already had a developed site; they were reusing an existing building. We waved the open space requirement. But there were concerns for traffic, so we worked out some police control at the time of performances.
Secondly, there is a question of reusing existing buildings. We try to encourage that, yet it’s hard to get people to do that. Sometimes, it is easier and cheaper to strip a new site than retrofit an existing one. We set up a change-of-use or redevelopment process. You can go to a regulatory committee rather than full commission if you want to do ‘x’ with an already developed property.
Is the impact of a new use greater or different than the old use? If it is not generating more traffic or nitrogen loading, OK. We don’t have to review that. There can be a narrow scope of review to nothing at all if there is a finding of no impact. That process, I think, is working very well; it allows us to go through the usual suite of issues and determine that the only issue is nitrogen loading. Then, let’s deal with the wastewater issue and let you go on all the others.
We have heard a lot of concerns from local officials and developers about existing buildings – commercial structures that are now dysfunctional or deteriorating. Motels, for example, that currently have 200-square-foot rooms and a shower that need 400-square-foot rooms with spas to stay competitive. That would mean tearing down an obsolete motel and putting up two stories instead of one with the same number of rooms. What kind of distinction are you making to allow existing small businesses locally owned to redevelop and modernize up to current industry standards?
Lipman: Let me pool the answer into two categories. One, what you can do now? And, two, what are we trying to do in the future through the Regional Policy Plan and our regulations?
With the current redevelopment standard, you are limited to 10,000 square feet without commission review. A motel that wants to expand the size of its rooms and stay within 10,000 square feet with no increased traffic or wastewater would be OK – but not if it exceeds 10,000 square feet.
That is where we are getting to change our regulations with limited review, where the commission can unilaterally agree to look at only those issues that are relevant and not the entire suite of standards. For example, we might take a project where the only real issue is nitrogen loading. There is not much traffic generation. Maybe, if it is on a scenic road, we will look at community character, but let everything else go. That can make a review relatively easy and considerably less expensive.
Now the process is no different whether a building is a 12,000-square-foot distribution center or a large national retail store at 70,000 square feet. Should we be treating both of those projects the same? Probably not. We ought to make it easier for a small, local business to expand – and perhaps even make the process inviting enough, tolerable enough, that those businesses that now are saying, ‘Forget it, I am not going to the commission’ will choose to come to us. ‘I really always had a business plan at 14,000 square feet, but haven’t done it because I did not want a full review. Now I know I only will have to address the façade of the building and nitrogen. That, I can do.’
How can threshold changes encourage village center development and higher densities downtown?
Lipman: This could be tremendous. Instead of a 10,000-square-foot threshold, it can be 20,000 or 30,000 square feet (downtown). We also are looking at growth centers that automatically require higher thresholds, whether or not the town asks for them. A threshold also can be determined by a building’s footprint rather than square footage. We are talking about smart growth in village centers or nodes where development exists. This would allow those projects to go higher – two or even three stories for housing. Hotels can go up if they don’t plan to add more rooms, just larger ones that require a second story.
Fenn: We also may differentiate between different kinds of commercial uses. We know that the impact of a small software company is very different from a retail store, even though square footage may be the same. Thresholds may be different. That is something we often need to consider rather than paint all development with one brush.
As John said, we are thinking about where development is located. If they are located in the right place, it should be of less concern to us. The idea here is to use our regulatory thresholds to encourage the right kinds of growth and to go to the right places. A DRI-free zone downtown creates a huge incentive to have development there.
Lipman: We are having discussions with Sandwich to become a growth incentive zone, as they try to more intensely develop their so-called Golden Triangle. They have designated that area for significant expansion. But with that would come a commensurate reduction of development outside the triangle. We have to eliminate dumb growth if we want smart growth.
Fenn: In Barnstable, we are talking about a cumulative cap on the number of housing units downtown. As long as the town stays under the cap, they won’t have to go through a commission review, just local review. We can agree to that if the town has thought through the level of infrastructure – wastewater, transit, water supply, roads, surrounding open space. I anticipate that within the next few months, we will be approving the designation of that growth incentive zone and asking the County Assembly of Delegates to change the thresholds in that area.
T
hree other growth zones are in the talking phases: Dennisport, Buzzards Bay and Sandwich’s Golden Triangle. Yarmouth also is interested along Route 28.
When it comes to Hyannis, however, a growth zone can be sabotaged if there is not sufficient easy access.
Fenn: Sen. (Rob) O’Leary has funding to address this, a Hyannis access study that will consider not just the proposed Exit 6 ½, but the whole array of transportation improvements in the pipeline and beyond. We need to see where we can best invest our funds to get the best access plan – Route 132, Willow Street and Yarmouth Road, Route 28, the Airport Rotary, the connection into the airport off Hadaway Road – to make smart decisions in and around our city. We are very excited about all that. There is a consensus between us and the town that we must look at Exit 6 ½ as one option, but not necessarily the only option.
Lipman: Regulation and thresholds must prevent things you don’t want. But more importantly, they should encourage things you do want. The growth incentive zones is a perfect model to reconcile planning with regulation and to use planning to displace some of the regulatory processes so we can comprehensively build what we want rather than regulate in piecemeal fashion what we don’t want.
People’s perceptions sometimes are not correct, even with today’s regulations and thresholds. Take motels. You conceivably can have a motel that wants to come in and expand by 15,000 square feet. We could waive almost everything right now and get through the process very easily. But so often people’s perceptions of what they have to go through are simply mistaken as to the amount of time and money it will take. So they don’t even want to know.
I have heard this time and time again. An assistant town planner says to us that people don’t want to come to us. I told her that is not the way the commission works. She kept saying, however, that the minute a business hears the Cape Cod Commission, they don’t want to come. As a planner, I tell her, ‘You should be advocating for them. You should be telling them it is not that difficult.’
Some people are so hardened. As a local planner, I would push back on the business community. We tell you we can. You have to be an advocate for us. It is in your self-interest. It is not as hard as you think.
A number of businesspeople tell us they don’t know what the hurdles are when they come in. Can you tell them whether they will be successful, period?
Fenn: There always has been the ability to handicap eventual success. [Take] CanalSide Commons, which still is in the review process. Very early on, when Len [Cubellis] first proposed his big idea, I was very frank with him and said, ‘I do not think a project of this size can work in this location. There will be too much traffic in too sensitive a location.’ I usually am not so blunt, but I did so here because I really thought it would not work. But it is his right to pursue it, and over and over again, every time – traffic was always the make or break issue, although now we are approaching something that could work.
I can’t tell an applicant, ‘Don’t bother coming here because we won’t approve the project.’ I will say, ‘You have a huge hurdle to make.’
Yes, [Cubellis] invested huge dollars and came right to brink of the commission denying the project until he said, ‘Wait,’ and he reconfigured the plan. We have been reconfiguring ever since with multiple extensions. The fact of the matter is that he has changed his mind over and over again.
We hear complaints that there is a good deal of unpredictability in the process, that there is variation based on staff and interpretations in the whole review process.
Fenn: I have heard that. I am not sure I buy it. The standards are there. Staff? I hear it all the time. Part of it is a fundamental misunderstanding of their role. They are not the decision makers. The commission is. The staff’s role is to guide applicants through the process. Their job is to basically represent the interests in the Regional Policy Plan and for commission members to weigh the interpretation and benefits and detriments [of each project] to ultimately reach a conclusion.
In the early years, the commission was staff-driven. But the makeup of the commission itself has really changed over the years. People don’t know about that. One of the things I want to do through the task force project is put more of a face on the commission itself. A lot of them come out of business. Our Sandwich representative is a real estate broker and attorney; our Falmouth rep is a contract consultant; Mashpee’s is a building contractor; our Barnstable representative is a maritime attorney; Yarmouth’s is a practicing physician. There is a lot of business experience on the commission.
I don’t think it is the staff’s role to weigh benefits and detriments. I find the staff will come in and say, ‘We think this is the thing we should do,’ and the commission often modifies it. It is good for staff to take an advocacy role and for the commission to say, ‘This is important, but that is important too.’
We have also heard complaints from applicants that they are constantly surprised during the process, and that ends up costing time and money.
Fenn: Sometimes, when you get into the process, either somebody comes up with a question at a public hearing we haven’t thought of, or during research, an issue arises that we did not think about that will cause problems.
I give the staff instructions: no surprises. We have to avoid the impression of the rug being pulled out from under applicants.
Also, [we look at] how to let go of the stuff that really doesn’t matter and focus on the stuff that really matters. I don’t want to spend time and energy on what doesn’t matter. So many performance standards require us to look at everything. Conclusion: We need to build more flexibility. We need to give ourselves the ability to pick and choose a bit and let go of things that don’t make a difference. That is my personal goal. Life is too short to argue about things that don’t matter. I think we have a commission – a board – that is of that mind.
Should you wait for the towns to designate growth centers or should you move unilaterally?
Fenn: It is a political decision at both the local or regional levels to encourage and discourage growth. It requires political courage. It has not happened in most places. So if you want that predictability, you basically have to be willing to take a risk, that we will structure regulations to allow growth here and more difficult there.
The current structure is flawed as an all-or-nothing proposition. If you have to come to the commission, you have to go through a rigorous process and spend on mitigation. If don’t go to the commission, you don’t spend for either. That is fundamentally unfair.
What really has to happen? What needs to be done at the local level is address the impact of projects not coming to us. If Barnstable wants to put in a system of impact fees for traffic mitigation, maybe we would not have to do a traffic study for every project.
Here is our dilemma: We have to have a good partnership with our member towns. They have to see us as being useful and helpful; and, in turn, we must convince them that there is a benefit in cooperating on a regional basis. That is a delicate balance. We have not acted unilaterally because we think towns will resent it. Instead, we work with planners and selectmen for them to do it.
The discussion is going on: Should we designate regional growth centers? You tell us what growth you want in them and their specific boundaries and what our review thresholds should be.
How important are downtown growth zones to the overall economic future of Cape Cod?
Fenn: Certainly downtown development is the key part to the affordable housing challenge. Maybe what we need is a Chapter 40b-type charter that only applies to multifamily housing. What we really need on Cape Cod is rental housing. That is politically difficult. [The Housing Assistance Corporation’s] Rick Presbrey’s thought is a profound one – that we must concentrate on the rental and multifamily housing areas. That is what we are missing: housing diversity. Not everybody wants or can afford a single-family home. We need this housing in growth centers.
What are the greatest successes for the commission over its first 10 years?
Fenn: One success of the commission: Instead of big box stores at the exits of Route 6, we got them to use existing space – old Bradlees’ location for Wal-Mart and Home Depot; a sand pit for BJ’s.
We try to revitalize what we have. We have tried to avoid sprawl, the old model of the downtown being displaced by a mall at the edge of town so that downtown goes dead. Now we see this shopping mall gets dated, so we build another one.
Lipman: Two things are going on here. There is the constantly-changing dynamic economy and demographics to support it. And there is the village model on Cape Cod. In lots of places, they keep changing landscape to accommodate economics, which is completely backwards of the logical notion of planning.
For the Cape, we must go to infilling, second stories, downtowns, redeveloping existing buildings. You can’t develop here the way you can in Wareham or Plymouth. Sprawl is a complete failure of business ingenuity.
Can that argument hold when we may no longer be able to view the Cape in a vacuum? There is tremendous economic development occurring and planned for Wareham and Plymouth. The president of the Makepeace Corporation in Wareham acknowledges that his company’s mammoth plans for retail and affordable housing development there is a threat to the Cape’s economy.
Lipman: It goes back to who are we. Cape Cod has its own identity. It is a fragile, beautiful, natural environment surrounded by water and historic villages. It is a sense of place. That is what we have. I don’t think we want to make it into something other than that. We would be losing the heart of the place. Wareham, Plymouth and Carver have a lot of land. Some of that land is as attractive as on Cape Cod. It depends on your taste.
I think we can’t fundamentally deal with communities competing against each other economically. That is a lose-lose scenario.
What may be fine for Wareham is not necessarily what Cape Cod is about. People on Cape Cod will think differently. We have a niche here that is different from every other place. Good competition has never been about what the other person does. It is about what is most innovative and what is unique about your place. There always will be people crossing the bridge for what we don’t have. That applies to Boston or Providence, too. I don’t have them here, and frankly I don’t want them there. I enjoy going there. Every place different. All places can’t be the same.
While all of us will cross the bridge for what we need, think about what people are crossing the bridge to come here for.
When all is said and done, it comes down to wastewater treatment. Density levels can’t be supported without spending hundreds of millions on a wastewater infrastructure. How will we be able to afford this?
Fenn: We will need a new revenue source: It could be a real estate transfer tax, sales taxes, meals taxes, toilet taxes. No one likes the word tax, but the reality is that it will cost money to fix it. We may be able to still attract federal funds. There has been some success elsewhere, such as in the Chesapeake Bay area and Key West, Fla., fragile environments with a regional identity. These places are viewed as valuable beyond local concerns, and thus have the ability to leverage federal funds.
The Barnstable County Wastewater Collaborative has been formed to seek outside funds. In truth, we all have to pony up. It will be an adjustment for everybody. Again, in our recent survey, what people seemed prepared to pay higher taxes for was [wastewater treatment]. This is one thing they would support.
If the Cape Cod Commission was not here, what do you think would happen to the Cape?
Fenn: Our very existence to say ‘no’ to bad things is more important than any project we review. It is very important to have an agency in place that can make tough decisions, and we have a track record of doing that. Part of the beauty of the commission is that because it is regional and includes representatives from all 15 towns, they don’t have personal relationships with specific projects before us. They really can take an objective and reasoned look at things. They are not subject to local political pressures, and that is really valuable. They are very smart people. One of the things that has endlessly fascinated me is no matter what the background or political views of the group, they have been very respectful and collegial with one another. They are truly public-spirited people. They put in a lot of hard work and hours. They are not getting any compensation. They have a commitment to this place. I would encourage you to focus on them.
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