From the May 16, 1986 edition of the Vineyard Gazette:

The newest effort at regional planning for Martha’s Vineyard opened this week with a search for the delicate balance of responsibility and power among the Martha’s Vineyard land bank commission and the bank advisory boards in each of the six Island towns.

Monday was the first day on which buyers of Island real estate had to pay two per cent of the purchase price to a fund for open land preservation. Monday night at the regional high school, members of the land bank commission explained to advisory board members how the scales tip toward home rule when the regional body considers buying or protecting undeveloped land with proceeds from the two per cent tax.

The advisory board in the town containing the land must approve the plan to manage the property. By the same token, said the regional commission chairman Deborah Yennie, the regional commission must agree with a purchase of land on which an advisory board wants to spend its share of land bank taxes.

“All of our decisions are going to be joint decisions,” Mrs. Yennie told the gathering. “You have strong and significant powers.”

But suppose, said West Tisbury advisory board member Virginia Jones, that a targeted parcel lies within the boarders of one town but contains a natural resource — a stream, a beach, a corner of the Island’s sole-source aquifer — shared with a neighboring town. Shouldn’t that outlying town be consulted in any decision and management plan?

Replied Mrs. Yennie: “I’m hoping that will happen.”

“It has to happen,” Virginia Jones continued. “Otherwise, it’s ‘United we stand, divided we fall.’”

That responsibility to set aside parochial concerns for Island-wide ones will rest with as many as 50 people at a time, as money from the two per cent tax flows into the land bank. If land continues to change hands at the rate of recent years, the land bank commissions expects to split some $3 million a year with the advisory boards.

Posed against $150 million-plus per year in Vineyard property transactions, the money available will enable the commission to buy no more than a few parcels in a given year, commissioners have said.

“And it should result in no net loss to the tax-raising abilities of the towns,” said commissioner Herbert Custer. Towns rightfully can raise the valuations of private property adjoining any land bank property, thereby offsetting the loss of the open land from property tax rolls, he said. That is one of the reasons why each advisory board contains an appointee from the town board of assessors.

The task of the land bank commission and the advisory boards and the land bank’s one permanent employee will be to identify and gain control of undeveloped land deemed vital to protect natural resources and to improve public access to now off-limits beaches, woodland trails, and ponds great and small. And as property comes under protection, the focus of the land bank will shift.

“A large portion of the money, in the long run, will go toward management,” said Mrs. Yennie.

Said Mr. Custer to the gathered advisory board members, “We have lots and lots of watchdogs — potentially 42.”

A couple of dozen of them were there this night — selectmen, assessors, water commissioners, board of health members, planning board members and conservation commissioners — all to begin learning how to run a $3 million operation without plunging into the kind of town-by-town battles that have afflicted other regional bodies.

Each advisory board will contain six members (seven in towns with water commissions), on whom the land bank commission will rely heavily to identify key parcels and to plan what happens to those lands. On Nantucket — the island that originated the land bank concept and inspired the Vineyard version — planners have the advantage of one town, one commission. But the goal here is the same, Vineyard commission members say.

Mrs. Yennie said there will be cases when the commission must move quickly to buy fragile land in imminent danger of being developed, but mostly, the emphasis at the start will be to stay ahead of the game. Hence the need for one person in the land bank office — location yet to be determined — to collect the money and pull all the information together.

So the commission is offering $20,220 a year to the person willing to be the hub of the land bank.

The trick, said Tim Sweet of Oak Bluffs, will be figuring out who spends what — when and how much.

Of such concerns, Tisbury assessor Laurie Dine observed, “Maybe this is the time to regionalize.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Edgartown selectmen Fred B. Morgan Jr. concluded.

Compiled by Hilary Wallcox

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