As we reported in last week’s Times (Oak Bluffs selectmen appoint selectman Gail Barmakian to the MVC, Dec. 29), the appointment of a selectman to the regional board caused some surprise and confusion — especially after voters in November elected some Island-wide candidates for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, and also gave the nod to possible commissioners from their own towns. Why would a town appoint a selectman when there were other citizens willing to take the post?
The MVC was formed by the Massachusetts state legislature and endorsed by Island voters in 1974 in order to establish a credible agency responsible for regional planning efforts. The stated intent allows for cutting across town lines to enable overriding, potentially parochial, town-centered decision making when necessary. In order to satisfy its regional planning proponents, and to fend off the Vineyard’s inclusion in Senator Edward Kennedy’s Nantucket Sound Islands Trust bill (with its threat of federal intrusion on local prerogatives), the MVC’s authority is very broad, and its charter is written in a way that assures that MVC decisions are almost impossible to successfully challenge.
The MVC has very broad regulatory and review powers, but no implementation responsibilities. It can conduct research and make plans, and say yea or nay to project proposals, but it can’t build, it can’t tax, and it isn’t answerable directly to taxpayers, although when the disconnect gets to be too great, towns can withdraw altogether, as Edgartown did for a number of years.
The MVC’s governance, a 21-member board, is constituted in a way which illuminates the balance of public interests and public responsibilities it sought: Five members are appointees of the governor or governor’s cabinet, with presumably little local accountability, and one is appointed by the county commissioners — perhaps a gesture to the MVC’s origins as a county agency. Of the remaining 15 members, nine are elected at large, and six are appointed by the Island towns’ selectmen.
Skepticism regarding town capacity for self-governance in planning matters — or at the least for towns to stretch their imaginations to solve planning problems reaching beyond town borders — is real and perhaps deserved, but the problem of MVC planning and decisionmaking regarding what other people should do, at what costs, and with uncertain voter support, was too big to ignore. The inclusion of six commissioners representing each town is not a nod to their personal planning sensibilities, it is an acknowledgement of the importance of the towns’ particular responsibilities to residents and taxpayers. Originally, selectmen were thought to be ideal representatives to the board, given their knowledge of town issues. But over the years, this idea has been abandoned, and it has become a tradition to look elsewhere.
And therein lies the key to the Barmakian appointment in Oak Bluffs: For Oak Bluffs and for each Island town, complete participation in MVC business is not optional and not an afterthought — it is a necessary part of the governing responsibility for each town, and the ground rules are that town interests need to be explicitly represented and argued, and not passed along to interested but unaccountable individual town residents. And similarly, the towns need to be very stingy about passing off to the commission local planning decisions bearing the faintest hint of controversy, which further confuses the important distinction between issues of local versus regional importance.
The regional context of some (relatively few, we hope and believe) projects needs to be accounted for by thoughtful town representatives, to be sure, but the entire point of town appointees is to represent town interests in planning, so that important regional planning decisions have a shot at local constituency support. The Barmakian appointment is the right call for Oak Bluffs.
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