My View: There’s more than one type of rights

By JONATHAN HYMAN

Across the Town of Bethel, town officials and residents alike are in agreement that our town is at a major crossroads. Now, more than ever, pressure from growth and development compels us collectively to consider who we are and what kind of a community we want to be in the future.

After five years of working on a comprehensive plan and recently enacting it, three things are certain. First, in formal and informal surveys, Bethel residents have stated overwhelmingly that they love their town for its natural beauty and rural character. Second, they have emphatically said they want to maintain this character. Third, and perhaps most important, the town currently has no mechanism to evaluate each development proposal’s significance to the overall growth pattern we are experiencing.

Understanding a proposed development’s relationship to the town’s existing infrastructure and population density and future growth plans is vital. The type of planning, design guidelines, procedures, and zoning law modifications needed to support the goals of our comprehensive plan and smart growth for the future still needs to be thoughtfully and methodically carried out.

Recently, the Bethel Town Board acknowledged that the town is receiving development proposals at a rate faster than our planning board can process and adequately evaluate them. Because of this, the town board voted unanimously to begin proceedings to enact a moratorium, which will, in effect, buy the town time to put in place the appropriate zoning, planning services, legal services, engineering services, and administrative procedures needed to properly handle incoming development proposals and see them through with careful enforcement to their completion.

During the last town board meeting on March 8, people spoke in favor of a moratorium and against it. However, even the folks who opposed a moratorium admitted that there are many things that the town can and should do to improve the way it deals with development. Those who spoke out against the moratorium did so in the name of landowner and developers’ rights, forgetting that these rights are only one part of a formula that provides the balance needed to maintain the social fabric of a well functioning town. The rights of citizens to be actively involved in a process which decides the future of their town, and their right to demand that as their town develops its character and natural resources be respected, are also paramount.

The Bethel Town Board has shown a willingness to listen and effect change, and they are to be respected for something that is not always easy to do. I encourage them to move forward and put into effect the proposed moratorium. This moratorium will allow the town to work thoughtfully towards a fair and well articulated process which, when completed, will provide specific short- and long-term guidelines for future and inevitable development. Furthermore, enacting a moratorium will make clear to everyone that the Town of Bethel is not a supermarket where one comes and takes what he needs and leaves. Bethel needs development and it needs willing partners as it grows. Surely, a moratorium of six months or less on commercial and large-scale residential development won’t scare away anyone sincerely interested in investing in our town’s future and making a profit at the same time.

(Jonathan Hyman is a resident of Smallwood, NY.)