Nine candidates running for nine open seats on the Martha’s Vineyard Commission will appear on the November ballot. They reflect a wide range of priorities for the Island’s regional planning and review agency, but only two are newcomers. All the candidates acknowledge the need for better public understanding of the commission’s role in the community. The commission was created 40 years ago through an act of state legislature, to protect the Island’s unique character and its historic and ecological resources. It represents all six Island towns, with both elected and appointed members. Nine members are elected every two years, six are appointed every year by the town selectmen and one is appointed annually by the Dukes County Commission. Five members are appointed by the governor, but only one is currently serving.

All candidates on the November ballot are running unopposed for two-year terms. The incumbents are Fred Hancock, Joshua Goldstein, Christina Brown, Douglas Sederholm, Linda Sibley, James Vercruysse and Clarence A. (Trip) Barnes 3rd. Abraham Seiman of Oak Bluffs and Robert Doyle of Chilmark are seeking their first terms.

Executive director Mark London will retire at the end of next summer, marking a new era for the commission. In interviews with the Gazette this week, some of the candidates agreed that the first priority will be selecting a new director. An eight-member search committee was appointed Oct. 16.

The executive director “is by far the most important employee on the commission,” said Doug Sederholm, who is a member of the search committee. He added that the director’s role in supervising staff and overseeing planning efforts is often overshadowed by the more public regulatory review process.

“We are in the news almost always because of our regulatory function, and yet we do important work in the planning area,” Mr. Sederholm said. As one recent example, he cited fertilizer regulations that were developed by the commission and a group of Islanders and adopted by all six towns this year. During Mr. London’s 12-year term, the commission also developed the 198-page Martha’s Vineyard Island Plan, which serves as a visionary document for both the MVC and Island towns.

For other candidates, priorities included affordable housing, garbage removal and wastewater management. Most acknowledged the need to help towns prepare for the potential effects of climate change.

Chairman Fred Hancock said his priorities include continued wastewater management and affordable housing. He said the new fertilizer regulations were an important first step for mitigating wastewater runoff into ponds and wetlands. “It was a fairly small step, but even just doing that required getting a lot of consent from different parties,” he said.

Speaking of the continued efforts to work with towns on wastewater management, he said: “Everybody agrees that this is something that has to happen. The tough part is getting everybody to agree on how to make it happen.”

The commission has been working with each town to develop a document that outlines ways to adapt zoning laws to support affordable housing. It also released a housing needs assessment last year.

“There aren’t too many affordable housing things that the commission — other than doing plans and studies — can actually achieve on its own,” Mr. Hancock said.

Abraham Seiman, who is seeking his first term, emphasized the importance of rental housing. He also said none of the commission’s approaches to wastewater management was convincing and he believed more study would be needed before the commission could address the problem. He also said addressing the affects of climate change should not be a priority, but that further study should be done. “We have limited funding to do anything more,” he said, arguing that it was the federal government’s responsibility to fund such efforts.

But several candidates felt climate change was among the most important issues facing the commission in the next two years. Christina Brown said she is especially concerned about how rising seas would affect the Island’s roads and marshes. She said the commission’s coastal planner, Jo-Ann Taylor, is keeping track of the issue so that Island towns can take appropriate measures to protect their roads, wetlands and buildings close to shore.

“The commission provides a great deal of information about what is and might be happening, and makes sure that town boards and the county have that information,” she said.

Linda Sibley, who has served on the commission since 1992, pointed out that federal regulations will require that some future developments on the Island would need to be raised higher off the ground than has been required in the past. “Our low-lying commercial areas have a sort of traditional look that isn’t going to work in the future,” Mrs. Sibley said.

She agrees that finding a new executive director will be the first priority next year, and said the search process would likely begin with a discussion about the role of the director and of the MVC itself.

All the candidates agreed that more could be done to publicize the commission’s mission. Mrs. Sibley observed that people who attend the regular meetings or watch them on MVTV “have a much clearer idea of what’s going on than they used to.” But she said public attention has focused mostly on specific development projects, and that people tend to ignore the more abstract planning efforts.

Some view the commission as an unnecessary obstacle. “Everybody is scared to death of the Martha’s Vineyard Commission and they look at it like a problem,” said incumbent commissioner Trip Barnes. “I don’t blame most of them. Things get dragged out.”

He said he is troubled over the outcome of the commission’s review of the Stop and Shop renovation in Tisbury last spring, which ended with the company withdrawing its proposal. He said the commission was widely blamed for mishandling the review, but he believed the town of Tisbury had muddied the waters by forming a separate committee to address issues related to a parking lot. “After all the work we put in — and we were very close to a decision — they screwed it all up,” he said. “And that’s going to have to get cleaned up.”

Mr. Sederholm saw things differently. “The proposal got an awful lot better during the process, and yet it still faced a lot of criticism and opposition from a certain part of the community,” he said. “I think it’s good to have a kind of process with that kind of flexibility.”

But several candidates saw a need to streamline the review process. “I think that we need to make it easier for people and make it more user-friendly while still protecting the Island from unnecessary development and all of the stuff the commission was created to do,” said Joshua Goldstein.

“We’ve struggled for years with trying to find a way to simplify the process, especially for the simpler projects,” said Mrs. Sibley. But she added that “each project is so unique and so different that it’s hard to generalize about how you could make it simpler.” If each town developed a more detailed review process, she said, “then the commission would be able to concentrate more on just the larger projects, and potentially leave the smaller projects entirely to the town, which has been sort of a goal of ours for a long time.” She said that provision was written into the MVC guidelines for developments of regional impact, or DRIs.

Mr. Goldstein invited more community involvement on all levels. “I think more people who have issue with the commission need to get involved,” he said. He added: “I’m running unopposed because no one else filed paperwork.” He said more ethnic and economic diversity on the commission would better reflect the Island as a whole.

Mr. Barnes supports every effort to increase public awareness of the commission, in part because he also hopes to see new faces. “Nobody wants to run for office anymore, and nobody is interested in being on the commission,” he said. “I think it’s time for some new people in there, but nobody is stepping up to bat.”