To the Editor:

I attended the July hearing. I read the planning board’s five conditions. I understand what each one is intended to do.

I also understand that the map still says eighteen.

If the road needs widening because of the development, if eighteen separate dock locations are too much for the bay, if the shoreline needs a new buffer requirement, if every lot needs individual water and septic review, and if the drainage plan is not ready, then perhaps the problem is not that the proposal lacked enough conditions. Perhaps the proposal was too much proposal.

A common dock is not no dock. A wider shoulder is not a different curve. Seventy-five feet of protected vegetation is not the same thing as the woods that are there now.

The board’s proper recommendation on this particular eighteen-lot plat should have been no.

That does not mean the pasture can never change. North Pine can bring back a smaller plan and we can have a different argument about a different map. We have become very good at arguments about maps.

But five conditions attached to eighteen lots is still eighteen lots.

It should have been zero.

— Elaine Norberg, Whitefish Road