Save Our Waterfront, Inc.voices: the community speaks of Nantucket and GHYC
The Canary in the Coal Mine
Dear Editor,
One of the mysteries to me about this yacht club proposal is how the Union Street/Washington Street Extension neighborhood group is being maligned for questioning several of the developer's assertions. I suggest that as we are the closest in proximity to the project, and have the most directly at risk, we probably have given the project a closer look.
As landowners abutting a property that suddenly emerges as the focus of a $40 plus million project, you had better believe that it would get your attention.
In my opinion Washington St. Extension and the Creeks area has been under appreciated and neglected in the past. Certainly there is room for improvement in this neighborhood, and I looked forward with anticipation to having everything put right, as it should be, with the massive budget of this private project. These opportunities only come along once every hundred years or so. I anticipated that this would become yet another Nantucket miracle, where private capital came in and did it right, and the whole community would benefit. But with this proposal it doesn't appear to be happening this way.
For example, in a recent advertisement the developers write "Great Harbor's design provides ample parking for its members." But I can tell you that as a neighbor the amount of parking that the developers plan to supply looks to be woefully inadequate - by any reasonable measure.
The developers assert that 104 parking spaces is adequate to service a 333 seat restaurant, bar and grill operation (with additional space for meetings and banquets), a health club, a pool, a boat maintenance facility, a dorm with more than 20 rooms, and 79 in-water boat slips and 37 valet boat slips. With 400 family memberships contemplated, this property will go from a simple boatyard to a facility servicing 1600 people on a regular basis. And 104 spaces is ample parking?
As a neighbor, and one who will be directly impacted when this "ample" parking is proven to be insufficient, I have to be concerned. If the developer's assertion turns out to be incorrect (and by any reasonable measure it is) and if the Planning Board goes along with the assertion, there will be nowhere for the cars to go. There isn't any on-street parking to take the overflow. As you know Washington Street Extension is a dead end street. There is very little on-street parking on either Orange or Union Streets in this area. Beaver, York, Dover, Back, Warren, and Spring Streets all have very little if any on-street parking. There just aren't any more on street parking spaces to be had in the existing street grid. So any overflow is going to hit the neighbors - hard. We're asking, as neighbors, for this new use, this very intense use, to be required to have enough parking. Any of these uses alone would be required to have enough parking, does the fact that they are calling it a yacht club make it exempt from parking requirements which would apply to these uses individually?
The developers assure us in their ad, which appeared on page 12C of the December 11th, 2003 Inky Mirror, that they will be good neighbors, but if that is true, how come almost all the immediate neighbors oppose their plans? If there were going to be great improvements in our property values and quality of life, no neighborhood would be more open to positive change than ours. I think it is fair to say, that the developers have met with neighbors, and have informed them of what they plan to be doing with the project. I appreciate being advised. But, it is a little bit like going to the doctor's office and being informed you have some disease, and find there is no cure.
I would like to remind everyone in the community that this development proposal has visited us, we neighbors didn't go out looking for it. It is the developer's proposal to change the property's use, and it is for the community to decide if this use is appropriate.
It might be better, instead of maligning the neighbor's efforts to try to bring the proposal into some kind of reasonable scale, to treat the neighborhood outcry as a an early warning of potential problems for the whole community and the Island.
Moncure Chatfield-Taylor