The Martha’s Vineyard Commission’s long-running public review of the proposed Katama Meadows subdivision in Edgartown was continued again last week, to resume May 7 with further testimony from the applicants and the public.

Although the current Katama Meadows hearing began in January of this year, the project and its Utah-based developers have had a long and combative history with the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, which in 2020 denied an earlier version known as Meeting House Way.

The developers appealed the commission’s denial in Superior Court and, when a judge upheld it in 2023, appealed his decision as well.

Their litigation currently is on hold while the Martha’s Vineyard Commission reviews a revised plan for the 54-acre property, now known as Katama Meadows.

Despite the change of name, several sticking points have remained the same: Islanders have assailed both projects for their size, lack of affordable homes and environmental consequences, including nitrogen runoff into the impaired Edgartown Great Pond watershed.

Like Meeting House Way, the project still calls for 26 market-rate home lots, but Katama Meadows also includes 26 smaller lots that would be deed-restricted in perpetuity to year-round residents.

Katama Meadows plans to donate two of the smallest lots to Habitat for Humanity, to be deed-restricted permanently to households earning up to 80 per cent of the area median income (AMI), and 14 to the town of Edgartown.

Edgartown in turn would donate one of its lots to Habitat, again for a year-round deed restriction at 80 per cent of the AMI, and restrict four others to 150 per cent of the AMI.

The other nine town lots, as they’re being called, would be provided to public sector employees on terms to be determined by a housing needs assessment financed by the developers, Martha’s Vineyard Commission housing planner Laura Silber said.

The plan has won the support of Edgartown’s affordable housing committee, but commissioner Douglas Sederholm questioned the lack of any income limits on the nine employee lots.

“I have a hard time thinking that that would be the best use of the town’s inventory here, if all of them were without any type of income cap,” he said.

“I don’t think it would really sit well with the employees of the town of Edgartown if all nine of them were for high level employees, and it didn’t matter how much they were making,” Mr. Sederholm added.

Commissioner Linda Sibley took a more hands-off approach.

“I don’t think we should try to solve this problem for everybody. We should be able to trust the town to figure out their own methods and their own needs,” she said.

Commissioners also pressed the developers’ representative, attorney Robert Moriarty, for better open space connections for wildlife within the development.

“That teeny little sliver between the market rate [lots] is not adequate,” Joan Malkin said, echoed by Ben Robinson.

“You really do need to have a significant corridor … and I don’t think nibbling around the edges is going to get us there,” Mr. Robinson said.

Samantha Look, executive director of the Vineyard Conservation Society — which has opposed the development since its earliest days as Meeting House Way — also objected to Mr. Moriarty’s description of the land as undesirable for conservation.

It should be possible for both habitat and housing to coexist, but Katama Meadows does not achieve that balance, Ms. Look said.

“We do not need second home developments of this density and scope on one of the last remaining large tracts of connected habitat in Edgartown, so close to one of our great ponds,” she said.

“Some community housing, not even built by the applicant, is not a sufficient trade-off,” Ms. Look said.

Nitrogen pollution, another key concern, also remains unresolved, although Mr. Moriarty promised to present a new plan next month that would offset all of, or even more than, the nitrogen emitted from the development’s septic systems and landscaping.

Briefly, he said, with every sale of a market-rate lot in the subdivision the developer would place $25,000 in a fund to connect nearby “infill” customers — who are still using septic systems, although sewering has reached their older subdivisions — to the town wastewater system.

Mr. Robinson called this an innovative thought, but declined to consider it as a true reduction, since Katama Meadows still would be emitting excess nitrogen despite mitigating it elsewhere.

“I think it’s more of an economic benefit to the town of Edgartown, or people in the Edgartown Great Pond [area] that can’t afford to hook up, than it is a nitrogen reduction,” Mr. Robinson said.

The discussion will continue next month and Mr. Moriarty promised to provide the new details well in advance of the May 7 meeting.

In other Martha’s Vineyard Commission business last week, a hearing on new housing behind the Dairy Queen in Edgartown was continued to May 14 without testimony at the applicant’s request.

Commissioners also declined to take up a small subdivision proposal in West Tisbury, handing it back to town officials.