Down-Island representatives have a simple suggestion for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission as it reviews its checklist for referring developments of regional impact: get rid of it.

Arguing that the commission had outgrown its original chartering legislation, on Monday members of the Edgartown and Oak Bluffs planning boards met with the commission and submitted a joint letter calling for the abolishment of all mandatory referrals.

“The checklist has been a reactionary process,” the letter reads. “Therefore, the two boards propose eliminating mandatory referrals for business or commercial districts and suggest discretionary referrals.”

Such referrals, the letter said, could be made through existing town boards.

“The situation is that you have [the founding legislation] that’s enabling us to protect the Island through this gift from the legislature that not many communities have. It’s very special,” said Oak Bluffs planning board member and business owner Mark Wallace. “But it takes care of itself by defining the criteria: does it have significant impact to more than one town? People shouldn’t be cherry-picking against things they don’t like. The actual purity of the law itself covers everything it needs to cover.”

Mr. Wallace said the economic climate and excessive regulation was making it harder for small business owners in Oak Bluffs to prosper. Mr. Wallace is currently before the commission to review an expansion to his Oak Bluffs restaurant the Ocean Club.

Edgartown planning board member Robert Sparks argued that the wave of development during the 1980s has passed and it is time for the commission to scale back its oversight.

“It appears to me that at the birth of the MVC we were looking across the Vineyard Sound to the Cape at massive development from Province-town to Falmouth and said ‘My God what if they ever come over here?’” he said. “It just seemed like we were so frightened looking forward that we wanted to cover everything no matter what came along. I think now we’re looking back on the mid-1980s and saying, okay, I think we can control things now. We don’t have anybody saying they’re going to put up 200 condominiums, we don’t have people putting up 20,000-square-foot buildings, we don’t have huge subdivisions going in . . . I don’t think we feel that if somebody puts a second floor on a 1,500-square-foot house on Upper Main street that it has to be something of regional impact.”

But commission member and business owner Linda Sibley of West Tisbury was puzzled by the suggestion to abandon the checklist.

“Frankly, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” she said. “[The founding legislation] orders us to create an objective checklist. It not only doesn’t order us to create discretionary referrals from the town, it’s not clear that it even fundamentally allows us . . . if you look at the basic charge it doesn’t order us to give up checklists, it orders us to make them.”

Commission member Ned Orleans agreed that the commission’s charge has not changed since the day of its founding.

“The towns are interested in themselves as they should be. But there was a sense that there was a need for a different approach, a different outlook on some of these same issues, that had an Islandwide perspective,” he said. “I’m not aware that that situation has changed one single bit since the commission was created. There is still the need for an Islandwide perspective. So the idea that all commercial stuff would be decided by the towns as to whether they would send it to the commission or not means that you’re asking the commission to abdicate its responsibility.”

Down-Island representatives were most troubled by so-called mandatory referrals to the commission, including ones for proposed businesses over 2,000 square feet or for the change in intensity or use of a business.

“Focusing too much on square footage is problematic,” said former commissioner Benjamin Hall Jr. of Edgartown. “A 3,000-square-foot storage building is not going to generate the kind of regional impact that a 3,000-square-foot call center might have.”

However, former Oak Bluffs selectman Kerry Scott argued that, if anything, her town’s business district required more robust oversight.

“The town of Oak Bluffs has had the great misfortune to have building officials that didn’t refer things to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission that had flashing lights that said this should be a referral,” she said. “We’ve been a victim of our own choices for building officials and continue to be to this day I believe. I resent the heck out of depending on somebody in that role who doesn’t believe in the commission.”

Ms. Scott warned against delegating more responsibility to the town’s zoning board of appeals as commission member Doug Sederholm had suggested earlier in the meeting, arguing that the board is not elected and was vulnerable to cronyism.

“I’m desperately worried about the future of Oak Bluffs,” she said. “I don’t feel like we’re in good hands until something comes here. Because you guys are elected Islandwide, you don’t owe anybody anything, you’re able to look at things with a completely different view. I think we would look like downtown Hyannis if it weren’t for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.”

But Mr. Wallace said that the already full buildout of the Oak Bluffs business district did not allow the sort of expansion that the commission was wary of.

“We don’t really have a place to do all the things that people are worried about,” he said. “The only thing that’s going to happen in our town is it’s going to change, and unfortunately it changes too often. People go out of business all the time on our street. Five a year and that’s unfortunate.”

If down-Islanders feared too much regulation though, commission member Linda Sibley feared the inadequacy of town boards should the commission’s influence wane.

“If more of this stuff gets passed back to the town level, the towns don’t have the staff that the Martha’s Vineyard Commission has or the level of expertise,” she said. “We can’t afford to duplicate the level of staff expertise in every single town.”

“It’s sticky,” said commission member Christina Brown. “What keeps the character of the Island but lets commercial developers and local business people flourish?”

The commission meets again on April 4 to discuss oversized houses as part of a continuing series to solicit feedback from the public and town officials that will be incorporated when the commission revises its DRI checklist in the fall.