Petitioners present compromise to restructure Nantucket regional planning body; committee urges facilitated talks

Hillary Hedges Rayport, the lead petitioner on a long-range planning article that will appear on the town meeting warrant, presented a compromise to reshape the island’s regional planning body and urged the finance committee to help the petitioners and the NPDC (Nantucket Planning & Economic Development Commission) find a single version for voters.

“This is an article about governance and our planning commission,” Rayport said, identifying herself as a citizen petitioner and a planning-board-appointed member of the NPDC. She traced the initiative to an article first brought to town meeting in 2022 and said 18 people have signed the current warrant petition. Rayport said a facilitated meeting on Jan. 6 produced some progress but that the group remains a short distance from agreement.

The compromise Rayport described would create an 11-member commission with two planning-board appointees, three at-large members (two appointed by the county commissioners and one elected at large), one representative appointed by the county commission, and representatives appointed by the conservation commission, the Affordable Housing Trust, the land bank, the Nantucket Historical Commission and the Council for Human Services. Rayport said the language would preserve the commission’s statutory responsibility to prepare comprehensive plans under Massachusetts regional planning law while merging some of NPDC and petition language.

Committee members pressed on several specifics. Questions focused on residency requirements (whether appointees or at-large members must be legal residents of Nantucket County), term limits (the compromise drops the stricter term-limit language in the prior petition), and whether the proposed composition would unintentionally concentrate appointments among existing board members. Rayport said the current special act is silent on a legal-residency requirement, that one petition version proposed the town clerk’s voter-based definition, and that the compromise was intentionally flexible on term limits as a concession to reach agreement.

Members also raised process concerns: several said the NPDC and petitioners should reconvene with a neutral facilitator and that the planning commission’s leadership and director should see the compromise language before it is advanced. Rayport said she welcomed further meetings and asked the committee to encourage a facilitated discussion so the groups could attempt to present a single article at town meeting.

No formal motions were taken; the chair reiterated that the committee is not taking motions before Feb. 3 and asked petitioners to route any materials through the NPDC chair. The committee said it would be notified if NPDC schedules another meeting to consider the compromise.

What’s next: petitioners said they will seek another facilitated session with the NPDC; the finance committee encouraged that process before any amendments are offered at town meeting.