With two weeks left to go before Town Meeting on April 25, the Select Board voted on whether to recommend several articles proposed by residents in recent months.

The board has heard from petitioners on these articles before, but made several of their recommendations clear in several votes during Tuesday night’s meeting.

Proposed pause on new solar

Petitioner Annie Hayes’ Article 19 details a proposed moratorium on new solar projects for the span of one year. Board members expressed concern that the moratorium might conflict with a separate article by the Solar Bylaw Study Committee that has worked to create updates to the town’s laws regarding solar developments.

Member Jim Munise was the only vote in favor of the article. He said if for some reason the town doesn’t vote to approve the Solar Bylaw Study Committee’s article, that it’d be nice to have the moratorium in place as a stopgap.

Changes to Town Meeting

Petitioner Brenda Eckstrom has submitted several articles for the town to consider. Two have to do with how Town Meetings are handled: one asks for Town Meetings to be held on Saturdays, and one asks for the lottery system, in which articles are heard in random order, be eliminated.

The board voted 1-4 to recommend Article 20, dealing with Saturday Town Meetings, with Munise as the only yes vote. The board subsequently voted 0-3-1-1 on Article 22, which asks for the removal of the lottery system. Munise voted “present” and member Patrick Tropeano abstained from the vote.

Future of Decas school building 

Petitioner Leslie Edwards Davis also presented two articles to the town, both on the future of the former Decas school.

One article asks for the town to grant the Decas Steering Committee and the recently formed John W. Decas Community Center Foundation access to the building to help ready the building for occupancy. It further asks that the Council on Aging be moved into the school building by July 1, 2022. 

The second article asks that the Decas Steering Committee be allowed to make a report to Town Meeting regarding the committee’s progress.

The board voted 1-4 on the first article, with Munise as the one yes vote. Board members discussed possible concern that Town Meeting doesn’t have the power over town facilities to do something like require the Council on Aging to be moved in by a certain date.

On the second article, the board voted to pass over and take no action on the article, in favor of referring the question to Town Meeting.

Affordable housing bylaw amendment

Eckstrom also submitted a third proposal, this time regarding affordable housing.

Her article comes as an amendment to an affordable housing bylaw passed at Town Meeting last year. The approved bylaw tackles affordable housing in Wareham by reducing the minimum lot size for certain homes. The article was designed to let homeowners subdivide their land and create new residences more easily, adding to the town’s affordable housing stock.

The wording of the original bylaw was slightly inconsistent with state law, which Attorney General Maura Healey advised should be fixed so new residences built under the bylaw would actually count toward Wareham’s affordable housing stock.

Eckstrom’s latest article aims to do just that, updating the bylaw from last year to make it work with state code.

Following an earlier discussion about concerns that the article still didn’t meet requirements necessary to make new affordable housing count toward the town’s housing stock, the board voted against recommending its passage.