Massachusetts Lawyer Common Andrea Campbell has weighed in on an area Zoning Board of Appeals challenge, discovering a controversial homeless shelter proposal on Cape Cod — that sparked considerations about migrants — is a protected instructional use.
Campbell’s workplace has despatched a letter to the Dennis Zoning Board of Appeals, urging a “quick and smooth” decision on the proposal which has fostered division between the city and a regional housing nonprofit for months.
That is the primary time the Lawyer Common’s Workplace has gotten concerned in an area ZBA challenge in latest reminiscence, an workplace spokesperson advised the Herald on Tuesday.
Native opposition, additionally coming from neighboring Harwich, has delayed applicant, Housing Help Corp., from merging its three household shelters in Hyannis, Bourne and Falmouth, into one central area at a former 128-bed nursing residence in South Dennis.
Residents and officers have questioned how attorneys and Dennis’ constructing commissioner have decided the venture suits the standards of the Dover Modification — a state statute that exempts agricultural, non secular, and academic makes use of from sure zoning restrictions.
The considerations triggered an enchantment from the Dennis Planning Board final month on the constructing commissioner’s issuance of a constructing allow to HAC in late July. The Cape Cod Fee, a regional board, has discovered the venture would have no regional impression, denying a discretionary referral from the cities of Dennis and Harwich.
In a letter despatched to the ZBA on Monday, assistant attorneys normal Margaret J. Hurley and Esme Caramello wrote: “The Dover Amendment creates a wide umbrella of protection for educational uses of land, and in the view of the Attorney General, HAC’s proposal falls comfortably within its spread.”
Hurley and Caramello highlighted curricular and operational supplies that HAC would offer on the 57,000-square-foot facility, housing as much as 79 homeless households or 177 people. The constructing can solely be accessed through an extension off a primary highway in neighboring Harwich.
Grownup residents could be required to finish HAC’s “Ending Homelessness Course.” This system options classes on “budgeting and financial literacy, navigating various government benefit systems, landlord-tenant law, and life skills such as self-care, cooking, and housekeeping.”
Tenants would additionally achieve one-on-one steerage on “securing new housing,” which the Lawyer Common’s Workplace says is “a form of experiential education that aims not only to solve an immediate housing problem but to serve as training for independent searches in the future.”
Households would dwell in 272-square-foot rooms that includes a half-bathroom, fridge and microwave, and so they’d share a communal kitchen and bathe. The tight areas would lack televisions and chairs.
Common stays are about 9 months to a 12 months.
Precedence, officers have mentioned, could be given to largely single moms of infants and younger kids and never migrants. Some Dennis and Harwich group members have remained skeptical through the Massachusetts migrant disaster.
Stress across the proposal boiled over earlier this summer season when HAC lawyer Robert Brennan unleashed his frustration on Dennis Planning Board for permitting, “misstatements to come in” throughout a Could listening to on the venture that linked it to migrants.
“You are floundering here,” Brennan advised the board. “I understand immigration is an issue. We have a broken immigration system. This is not it. This is not the issue here.”
Board member Wealthy Hamlin countered Brennan’s argument, saying the lawyer’s criticism didn’t precisely convey the board’s considerations.
“I don’t care who lives in this place, period,” Hamlin mentioned. “This issue for me is one simple item: Dover Amendment. It is not the primary use of this facility, period.”
The ability could be funded via the state’s emergency housing help program, which operates migrant shelters throughout Massachusetts.
That reality, nonetheless, “does not change the analysis” of the Dennis shelter assembly the Dover Modification circumstances as a protected instructional use, the Lawyer Common’s Workplace wrote in its letter.
“In the face of an affordability crisis affecting families across the state, housing can be extremely hard to find and keep,” the letter states. “Every dollar that a homeless services organization like HAC spends fighting for its right to serve these families is a dollar it does not spend helping them.”
“The people of the Commonwealth, whom the Attorney General represents, have a strong interest in seeing this and similar matters proceed to a resolution quickly and smoothly,” it concludes.
