Bangor weighs increase in membership of planning board

BANGOR – Residents interested in land use and zoning issues might want to dust off their resumes.

After several rounds of discussion by city councilors and planning board members, a proposal to bump up membership on the planning board is moving ahead to the approval process.

That process begins on Monday night, when the measure goes before the full council for a first reading.

At that time, the plan will be referred to the council’s transportation and infrastructure committee and the planning board for further review. The proposal is slated to return to the full council for a final decision later this month.

As it stands, the planning board consists of eight members, five of them regular members and three of them associate, or nonvoting, members. Associate members are called upon to vote only when regular members are absent. The board now has two associate members because a third moved away and has not been replaced.

When the current associate member system was put in place several years ago, the idea was that it would help ensure enough members would be on hand to constitute a quorum and that it also would help familiarize new members with board work that often is highly technical and complex.

Under the proposal being considered, planning board membership would increase to seven regular members, with no associates.

Councilor Hal Wheeler, who served several years on the planning board before his return to the council in November, proposed the increase in membership.

He said the measure would put an end to what he called the “potted plant syndrome.”

Though associate members faithfully attend meetings and do the necessary homework, he noted, they don’t often have a role when it comes to decision making.

In a memo Monday to City Manager Edward Barrett, planning board Chairman Robert Guerette said he supported the proposal because he had seen “frustration on the part of our associates in being ‘second class’ members, as they would describe it, without voting rights” on most business issues.

He feared that the board could lose, as it has in the past, “valuable members … if we do not make them full-fledged members.”