HEATH — Residents may need to vote again on zoning bylaw amendments they approved at their last Annual Town Meeting in May after being informed by the Attorney General’s Office that the town did not follow the proper procedures for posting Article 21.
Article 21 was a zoning bylaw amendment that sought to change all references to “roads,” “public ways” and “private ways” in the town’s zoning bylaws to “streets.” Voters unanimously approved the article at the Annual Town Meeting, and the bylaw was subsequently submitted to the state Attorney General’s Office for review and final approval.
“After the Town Meeting, you have to send that the town approved this bylaw change, and you send all that information to the Attorney General’s Office and they approve it. You have to document that you did all the steps: the Town Meeting was posted right, the public hearing was held for the zoning bylaw changes, and then you send in copies of the existing wording and new wording,” Town Clerk Mary Sumner said. “We just received back from the attorney general their comment saying that we hadn’t actually published it in the paper two times. We had thought we had, but we actually hadn’t.”
According to Massachusetts General Law Chapter 40A, Section 5, zoning ordinances, bylaws and amendments cannot be adopted without a public hearing being held, and those hearings must be published at least twice beforehand, with the first notice being published at least 14 days in advance.
Sumner said the town published a legal notice about the public hearing in the Greenfield Recorder once, but failed to publish it a second time. To correct the error, the Attorney General’s Office offered two potential solutions: publishing the entire bylaw in a newspaper and opening a 21-day public comment period; or starting the process over, which would require holding another public hearing and voting on the bylaw changes again at next year’s Town Meeting.
Sumner told the board it will cost $936 to publish the entire bylaw, whereas publishing two legal notices costs closer to $300.
Selectboard Chair Robyn Provost-Carlson said the Planning Board had submitted a letter to the Selectboard requesting the town move forward with publishing the entire bylaw and resubmitting it to the Attorney General’s Office. However, she raised a concern that even if the town publishes the whole bylaw, the state may not approve the amendment.
“I guess one of the concerns is that we could be taking the steps of paying almost $1,000 for the review to begin again by the attorney general, and we don’t know if the actual article has any other issues,” Provost-Carlson said.
Town Coordinator Hilma Sumner added that even if the town comes up with the money to publish the entire bylaw in the newspaper, the procedural error could lead to the bylaw being challenged again in the future.
“Even if someone doesn’t file a claim during the appeal period, after it gets published, a person can make a claim about the validity, or invalidity, at any time,” she said.
“It’s probably better to just do the whole thing clean,” Selectboard member Will Emmet commented. “I would rather it go clean and bring it up next year at the ATM.”
The Selectboard is expected to vote on how the town should proceed at its next meeting.