A working meeting between the Mattapoisett Board of Selectmen and the Marine Advisory Board focused on three areas of the waterfront enterprise fund: coastal zone management, fees, and wharf improvements.
MAB Chairman John Cornish presented the selectmen with a draft that was not offered for public discussion at the time. The MAB members had taken an earlier document – one that was deemed inadequate to protect the public’s use of waterways along Mattapoisett’s coast – and attempted to beef up elements they felt were important. Recreational uses from shellfishing to paddle boarding, public beaches to kayaking were included as the types of recreation that should be protected and spelled out in the updated document as the board recognized the needs of more than just the boating public.
Also new in the document were suggestions on what the lengths of private docks and piers should be. Town Administrator Michael Gagne reminded the board that South Coastal Regional Coordinator David Janik of the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Office, a branch of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, had suggested they be “very specific” on this point.
Another essential topic the selectmen wished to work out with the MAB was fees. The MAB in turn had asked Harbormaster Jill Simmons to assist in collecting comparative data from surrounding towns.
Simmons found that Wareham, Marion, Dartmouth, New Bedford, Fairhaven, Fall River, and Plymouth all had mooring fees greater than Mattapoisett.
“We are right at the bottom,” Simmons said. Her written report included mooring fees that ranged from a high of $150 per year plus $100 per foot for a slip, to Mattapoisett’s low of $25 annually plus $1 per foot for vessels 35 feet or less or $2 per foot for vessels greater than 35 feet. Simmons felt that Mattapoisett’s per-foot structure was unfair, noting that one boat would be paying more than a neighboring boat simply because it was one foot longer.
The MAB has struggled, Cornish said, with not knowing how to approach increasing user fees to get more in line with neighboring communities and bring the waterfront enterprise into greater financial stability.
Simmons said she had been frustrated at not being able to understand Mattapoisett’s municipal bookkeeping.
“I owe Suzanne Szyndlar a public apology. She’s been great,” Simmons said. But the difficulty in figuring out how the earnings flowed against expenses had been on ongoing effort on her part, one that she was finally “getting a grip on.” She expressed appreciation for the assistance she had received from Town Hall staff.
Gagne offered insights into fiscal management, including the necessity of the waterfront enterprise establishing funds for contingencies.
“There’s no money in the budget for unexpected expenses,” said Gagne. “In 2015, retained earnings were $810; that’s no buffering whatsoever.”
Gagne thought that perhaps looking at a mooring fee of $65 gradually increased over several years might work saying, “When you let a fee stay stagnant for five or ten years then have an increase, it looks huge.”
Cornish acknowledged that there was a willingness on the part of the MAB to increase fees, but also cautiousness as well. Selectmen Jordan Collyer said, “We should be in parity with other harbors.”
A third topic of conversation was a recently drafted priority list: a list of must haves, to-dos, and a couple of wishes for the harbor side that the MAB had requested from Simmons. That list had been whittled down, prioritized, and offered to the selectmen for this meeting.
Collyer expressed his frustration at a list saying, “We get kicked in the teeth in public because we don’t listen to the MAB. You know what people want to see … the reason you are an advisory board is to tell us. Don’t just say, ‘Jill needs to tell us!’” He said that the members of the advisory board were in the public sphere and were hearing from the boating community more than the selectmen were and, therefore, should offer those views.
In defense of the list, Cornish said everything on it “needed to be done.”
The Mattapoisett Marine Advisory Board will meet again on November 19 at 7:00 pm in the Mattapoisett Town Hall conference room.
By Marilou Newell
