Can the Cape Cod Commission become more business friendly?
by Joseph SantangeloFor years, developers and local government officials have grown increasingly frustrated – often angry – at the obstacles and costs placed on development by the Cape Cod Commission.
Now, more than 15 years after the agency was established, disgruntlement is intensifying to open revolt. Three towns – Bourne, Hyannis and Sandwich – are discussing secession. Business owners are organizing to plot strategies to challenge the commission. County political leaders – during an election year – are wondering where to position themselves in this debate of growth versus regulation.
A new organization called the Alliance to Educate Cape Cod Voters is launching, modeled along the lines of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. It aims to create a grassroots campaign that will advocate steps ranging from secession by towns to changes in state legislation to make the commission a planning agency only without its regulatory powers.
Stoking the discontent – especially in the Upper Cape – is the explosion of new business in Wareham and Plymouth County just across the bridge. Fears are rising that these adjacent towns will sap dollars from the Cape’s retail and commercial economy – just as new golf courses there have cut deeply into the peninsula’s recreation and tourism sector in recent years.
Businesses in Plymouth County do not encounter the kind of money- and time-consuming regulatory limits and gauntlets imposed by the Cape Cod Commission. When able to choose between the two locales, developers increasingly decide to stay away from the Cape.
Consider that it took BJ’s in Hyannis more than eight years to gain approval from the commission, and then it could only build a facility half the size of other stores as close as Wareham.
It’s not just big-box stores. Sandwich officials complain they have been unable to attract substantial bids from commercial developers – including environmentally sensitive high-tech companies – which represent critical tax revenues, as they try to develop the town’s Golden Triangle. Instead, only developers who would construct Chapter 40b housing – and thus avoid Cape Cod Commission review – have shown interest.
The commission at a crossroads
Whether you are a loud opponent or fervent supporter of the commission, it is increasingly clear that the Cape agency is at a crossroads.
Cape Business has devoted many months to speaking with scores of business leaders, developers, government officials, environmentalists and Cape Cod Commission executives in an effort to put the emerging debate over growth and regulation in perspective.
We have sought to avoid sound bites or easy answers. Ultimately, the Cape’s officials and residents must decide whether current planning and regulatory requirements succeed in promoting balanced economic growth while protecting our environment and enhancing our special way of life.
Our investigation has revealed many undesirable and often unintended consequences of the current controls, consequences that may be at cross-purposes with the original goals of the act creating the commission.
We have asked many questions. A half-dozen in particular will guide our coverage:
• Just how effectively have the Cape Cod Commission and its pioneering land-use regulations helped create good jobs, provide affordable housing and enhance economic and social improvements?
• Has the commission truly controlled sprawl, traffic congestion and water contamination?
• In regulating growth, how much money has the commission process diverted from the Cape economy into time-consuming and expensive studies, administrative procedures and litigation?
• How can Cape leaders protect this special corner of the world while stimulating vibrant economic and community development?
• Can the Cape attract and retain young families to fill the ranks of community leaders and the workforce of the future?
• Or is the region destined to become predominantly an aging second-home and retirement community in a long, slow economic decline?
A consensus unravels rapidly
Among all groups, we found a consensus to continue limiting commercial and residential expansion so it serves a year-round seaside economy and respects the fragile environment, historic villages and community character that are uniquely Cape Cod.
John Lipman, chief planner and deputy director of the Cape Cod Commission, captures the almost universal sentiment: “It goes back to who we are. Cape Cod has its own identity. It’s a fragile, beautiful, natural environment surrounded by water, historic villages, a sense of place. That’s what we’ve got. I don’t think we want to make it something other than that. We would be losing the heart of the place.”
In the details, however, the consensus evaporates.
Various individuals and organizations put forward widely divergent opinions on how to preserve Cape Cod and what types of development should be encouraged.
Some want to limit future retail expansion, although consumer spending represents about 75 percent of the Cape economy.
Some favor clean, high-tech businesses, but few such enterprises have knocked on the Cape’s door since the dot-com bust of 2000. And onerous commission regulations often stop them at the bridge – creating a competitive advantage for neighboring Plymouth County.
Others point to municipal failure to update local zoning bylaws to encourage construction in already developed areas, while protecting undeveloped open space and natural resources. Yet some of those same towns believe their planning departments and zoning boards can do the job better than the commission.
Still others call for tighter regulation on both residential and commercial development to slow the degradation of the Cape’s waterways, highways and natural beauty.
For their part, businesspeople frequently say they are frustrated by a heavy regulatory burden that falls on all types of construction, especially much-needed revitalization and reconstruction of their aging, locally owned structures.
Property owners say the Cape is overregulating and thereby discouraging legitimate expansion and improvements to obsolete commercial buildings, while expensive single-family home construction rushes headlong.
Some tourism advocates say motels need to be rebuilt with larger rooms, exercise facilities, spas and modern amenities to attract today’s discriminating tourists.
Our analysis coincides with a five-year revision now under way of the Cape’s principle planning tool, the commission’s Regional Policy Plan. Currently, the commission itself is reassessing its policies and procedures, along with a Barnstable County review of the commission’s operations.
This is a crucial time in Cape Cod history and an opportunity for all Cape residents to be heard on the kind of future that we should leave for generations to come.
Our key findings
In important ways, Cape Cod leads Massachusetts and the nation in its regional approach to controlling overdevelopment:
• The existence of the county regulatory system has discouraged, modified or defeated some major development projects.
• Big-box national retailers have been forced to occupy and reuse existing smaller structures.
• Towns and developers generally agree that smart growth involves mixed-use residential and commercial development in livable town centers, including shops, apartments, restaurants and other attractions within walking distance.
Nevertheless, many negative development trends persist:
• While the Cape has avoided the homogenization of other rapidly growing regions, suburban sprawl is evident with large-lot housing, strip-mall shopping centers and offices spreading between picturesque village centers.
• A look at the entire state reveals that Cape Cod has experienced among the greatest build-out trends anywhere over the last decade, despite the commission’s active engagement.
• The vast majority of that build-out involves single-family homes that eat up valuable open space, increase the cost of future wastewater treatment hook-ups, price young people out of the housing market and deter the commercial development that increases town tax bases.
• Roads routinely exceed capacity on weekday mornings and evenings, not to mention in peak summer tourist season.
• Reliance on individual septic systems for wastewater treatment has produced nitrogen overloading of scenic rivers, bays and marsh land.
• The loss of pristine woodlands continues unabated, except where towns and conservation groups have purchased land for preservation.
Despite its successes, major shortcomings are identified with the present system, including:
• The region still lacks incentives to create diverse housing, notably a significant rental apartment market for young adults and other workers in the predominantly service-oriented Cape economy.
• Obsolete hotel and motel buildings serving a tourist industry that comprises 21 percent of the Cape’s economy appear frozen in time, with small rooms and few amenities to attract modern travelers.
• Village center revitalization that has been discussed for a decade has been slow to materialize.
• Town officials devote less attention to land-use issues than to more pressing day- to-day management problems common to any enterprise, such as costs of energy, staffing, employee health care and other concerns.
These and other issues will be addressed in this issue, with continuing coverage in coming issues. We encourage readers to visit our Web site for an expanded report, including full transcripts of many interviews, as well as other documentation and information.
We hope this report will stimulate conversation within the business community. We encourage our readers to contact us by letter or e-mail to share your views. We intend to enrich our coverage throughout the year by sharing your insight with all our readers.
No one wants the Cape to lose its unique quality of life. We all understand how preserving our fragile environment is the cornerstone to economic vitality. The issue is how to affect the balance.
Nor can we debate our future in a vacuum.
As our profile of A.D. Makepeace in Wareham makes very clear, what happens across the bridge will play a huge role in the Cape’s future. Development attorneys and town administrators are reporting that many companies no longer even try to locate here. Why bother, when it is easier to do in the adjacent county – with or without a new flyover at the Sagamore Bridge?
Joseph Santangelo Joseph Santangelo has been a statehouse bureau chief, a corporate executive and currently works for the Connecticut Legislature. 
Cape Business Newsletters
Keep up with the latest issues affecting your business and your life! To sign up for any of the Cape Business newsletters, click here.