I disagree with your editorial applauding the MVC’s decision to deny the latest iteration of the Meeting House Place subdivision.

You may be correct that the commission came to the right conclusion, but having served for years on a planning board I know a flimsy decisional rationale when I see one. Simply put, and as you rightly point out, the decision to deny was based on subjective reasons such as “anathema to the character of the Vineyard” (over the top), not “essential” or “appropriate” (question begging) rather than on the objective standards necessary for precedential decision making. These comments by commissioners are part of the public record. Even if the commission’s written decision attempts to bootstrap its denial into a more reasoned opinion, they are indelible.

Let’s start at the beginning. The developers own an expensive piece of property. It costs them more and more as the approval process is protracted—two years and counting now. No one has suggested that building residential housing in a district zoned for it is an impermissible use. To deny development of property to its highest and best use is to appropriate it, in whole or in part, without paying for that appropriation—that is, to diminish or vitiate its economic value.

But, you may suggest, the developers don’t have to build as many (or any) houses, and certainly not 3,800 square-foot houses. The inexorability of the economics (without some kind of intervention), however, says otherwise. The owners/developers cannot be expected to build houses of, say, 2,500 square feet and in turn expect to sell them at a price which yields a profit (to which they are entitled much as we may dislike that word) over and above the costs of developing the property. An always hypothetical, if unlikely, alternative is for interested parties to combine and buy the property from its current owners and turn it into conserved land.

In reality, what has happened is that the zoning ordinance and subdivision requirements already on the books haven’t kept up with present conditions: the scarcity of prime land and its consequent cost/push development exemplified by Meeting House Place. Those are the principal tools with which to meet and, most important, shape (not deny) development.

Both the Gazette and the MVC seem to wistfully “remember” an Arcadian Vineyard, before master plans yielded zoning ordinances, where properties were large, when the Vineyard was not a vacation/second home magnet, and where, above all else, everyone was friendly and well-disposed both towards his immediate neighbors and the community at large. If that utopia existed, even part of it, it is irretrievably gone. The best we can do, as a community, is to be proactive towards the future, not reactive as the MVC decision is.

My own view is that this decision, contrary to what you say, will be highly consequential. The reasons for rejecting Meeting House Place offer no guidance, no evidence of a decision making process based on the neutral principles essential for future determinations. Whatever the MVC’s mission was in 1974, likely it is time that, with the experience of almost 50 years, it is reexamined and restated with standards for decision that can withstand legal challenge, which, alas, I doubt the Meeting House Place denial can sustain.

Nicholas W. Puner

West Tisbury