Land Plan for Ice House Pond Stirs Heated Commission Debate

By IAN FEIN

Angry exchanges and charges of bad faith erupted during a
Martha's Vineyard Land Bank meeting called this week to discuss
the draft management plan for Ice House Pond Preserve.

Land bank commissioner Michael Stutz of Aquinnah said the plan has
numerous inconsistencies and huge holes. He called for additional study
of the pond this summer, and criticized what he said was an
unprecedented effort to rush through the management process.

"We've never done this before. It's wrong.
It's a mistake," Mr. Stutz said. "It's putting
before the public a plan which to me personally is embarrassing and
unacceptable, and we should not be doing that."

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The draft plan, authored by land bank ecologist Julie Schaeffer and
released last month, proposes a 12-vehicle trailhead and allows for
swimming, fishing, hunting, mountain biking and horseback riding on the
11-acre pondfront property. The plan would also prohibit boats, alcohol
and nudity, and discourage trampling along the pond shore by creating a
single trail access to a raised fiberglass swimming perch.

Some land bank representatives said that a slower, gradual opening
of the property would be more appropriate for the ecologically fragile
area, while others suggested the plan might be too modest as is.

Commission member Pamela Goff of Chilmark defended the plan and
called attention to Mr. Stutz's relationship with other pondfront
owners.

"I think Michael's done a wonderful job in his lawyerly
way for his friends who asked him to defend their pond," Ms. Goff
said. "But I think this is an excellent plan. I think
Julie's science is good; I think her botany is good. I absolutely
understand concerns of the neighbors, but criticism of this plan is just
obstructionist."

Tensions have run high over the West Tisbury property, which the
land bank purchased two years ago through a straw agent representing a
blind trust. The land bank cloaked its identity in the real estate
transaction - as well as in a later purchase of four beach lots
off Tisbury Great Pond - under the belief that the owners would
have refused to sell the parcels to the public conservation agency.

Island residents have historically enjoyed casual use of the hidden
freshwater pond off Lambert's Cove Road, but in recent decades
access to all water and pondfront properties has diminished with
increasing private ownership.

The land bank purchase will for the first time open formal public
access to Ice House Pond, also called Old House Pond.

At the joint meeting between the land bank central commission and
the West Tisbury town advisory board on Monday, Mr. Stutz was the only
person to mention the means by which the land bank obtained the two
pondfront lots.

"First of all, we're in trouble already for having used
a straw to buy this property," Mr. Stutz said. "And now we
come in with an extraordinary procedure that we've never used
before, proposing a very significant use of this property straight out
of the box, and it's just wrong."

Mr. Stutz suggested that some West Tisbury advisory board members
were pushing for too much recreational use of the property, which he
said goes against the central tenets of the land bank as a conservation
organization.

"If you look at our legislation our job is to conserve land .
. . it's not to bring public recreation to this property,"
Mr. Stutz said. "This property should be and will be open to the
public, but all we're talking about here is recreational use. What
I'd like to talk about is conservation of this property and
protection of this fragile pond. I think that should be our focus and
our most important interest here. And no one's talking about
that."

West Tisbury advisory board member Michael Colaneri took issue with
Mr. Stutz's suggestion of undue pressure, and countered that
recreational use can coexist with conservation.

"You can't make accusations like that, Michael,"
Mr. Colaneri said to Mr. Stutz. "[West Tisbury advisory board
member] Billy [Haynes] and I grew up here on the Vineyard and went
swimming in there. It's a very special place, and that experience
should be carried forward to our children and our grandchildren,"
he said.

"What we're doing here is a lot less damage than two
private big huge trophy houses would have done down there," Mr.
Colaneri added.

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Mr. Colaneri said he thought the land bank should allow the public
to use the pond in whatever ways the surrounding riparian owners can
- including boating, which is not permitted in the draft plan. He
suggested that requests from neighbors for further studies and limited
public use were disingenuous.

"[The riparian owners] want us to diminish the use on the
public side of things, but they don't talk about diminishing the
use on their side," Mr. Colaneri said. "Their use of it
seems to be okay, but ours doesn't. And I have problems with
that."

Mr. Stutz agreed that the land bank should open the property this
summer, but said only limited use should be allowed until there is
better understanding of the current health and use of the pond.

"Ultimately it seems to me likely that people should be able
to swim in the pond," Mr. Stutz said. "But before we open
this up to mountain bikes and horses and dogs without leashes and
fishermen in waders and kids hunting bullfrogs, we should know whether
our impact will be injurious," he said.

"We all share the same dreams," Mr. Stutz added.
"It's just a matter of how we get there."

Mr. Stutz again challenged the unprecedented process by which the
land bank was adopting the plan. He said that in his 12 years on the
commission he had always been allowed to review the draft plan before it
was forwarded to the town advisory board for recommendations.

Land bank executive director James Lengyel acknowledged that
Monday's meeting was the first time that a joint session of the
commission and advisory board occurred so early in the management
process. Mr. Lengyel also said it was the first time a town advisory
board approved a draft management plan before the commission.

When Mr. Colaneri moved for the advisory board to accept the draft
plan as more than adequate, Mr. Stutz asked that he first be given a
chance to go over what he said were serious errors and mistakes in the
plan.

"Do it between now and the public hearing, Michael," Mr.
Colaneri responded. "You can read fast."

Mr. Stutz told Mr. Colaneri to stop interrupting him, and reiterated
that he would like the central commission to go through the plan page by
page before sending it to the advisory board or to a public hearing.

"And shove it down our throats," Mr. Colaneri quipped.
"He's talking about process, but you know the process that
has taken place in the past. The central commission has pretty much
dictated to the advisory boards what will go to a public hearing. I
think this joint session is much healthier, and I would like to see us
do more of it."

Although a majority of the land bank representatives on Monday said
they would rather start with a smaller parking area for the property,
both the advisory board and commission eventually voted to accept the
draft plan and schedule a public hearing for April 4.

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Mr. Stutz was the only one to vote against it.

Land bank representatives said they should schedule the public
hearing even if they did not agree with everything in the draft plan
because they felt it was more important to try to have a management plan
in place for this summer.

Commissioners said a plan is needed because the public now knows
that the property is owned by the land bank. The property sat without a
management plan last summer because the land bank had not yet revealed
its ownership.

Mr. Lengyel said the agency held off on publicizing the Ice House
Pond purchase to keep its identity hidden during the unrelated Tisbury
Great Pond negotiations. The Great Pond purchase went though in July
2004, though the land bank waited another four months, until Nov. 19, to
announce the acquisition of both properties.

Mr. Lengyel said this week that it can take months for the state
secretary of environmental affairs to approve a land bank management
plan once it has been approved at the local level. So even if the land
bank adopts a management plan in April, there remains a possibility that
the plan will not be in place for this summer.

"As much as I hate to say this - because I'd like
to see the public use it - the truth of the matter is if the
property didn't get opened this summer and we had to put a fence
up and say it was closed for the season, it wouldn't be the end of
the world," said Mr. Haynes. "Then we would have time to get
it right. And I would like to see us get it right, no matter
what."