Dear Editor:

The proposed amendment to Alna’s Shoreland Zoning Ordinance would give the Planning Board discretion to permit new permanent structures in the river, but would not offer any guidance for exercising that discretion. This oversight is really important. It ignores how the Shoreland Zoning Ordinance is intended to work, and is bound to cause new, unintended problems.

The very first sentence of the section of the ordinance that contains the Table of Land Uses states that all land use activities that appear in the table “shall conform with all of the applicable land-use standards” in the section that follows. In fact, the single-page Table of Land Uses in the existing ordinance is followed by more than 18 pages of land-use standards describing what, specifically, the Planning Board is required to consider when reviewing each application. Yet the proposed amendment doesn’t provide any such standards for the new permanent structures below the high-water line that the amendment would allow.

This isn’t the only problem. By subtly changing the title of the line being amended, without creating a corresponding change to the existing land-use standards, the proposed amendment introduces a host of new ambiguities that will almost guarantee future conflicts and legal expenses over development proposals within the shoreland zone.

I really think these are fatal flaws for the proposed amendment. If we fail to provide standards for the Planning Board to use when considering new projects that would be allowed by the proposed change, we’ll be laying the groundwork for future disputes and legal problems.Planning Board members will inevitably apply seat-of-the-pants criteria to one project, only to apply different standards for other, similar projects. The citizens of Alna, the Sheepscot, and local waterways are sure to suffer as a result.

Above all, any changes in the ordinance should encourage consistency, certainty, and fairness in planning board decisions. The proposed amendment fails to do that by failing to provide Planning Board members with land-use standards corresponding to the proposed change to the Table of Land Uses.

I urge my fellow residents to vote no on Article 27.

Ed Pentaleri

Alna