2015 Eastham Town Meeting - Results

The Annual Eastham Town Meeting was held last night at the Nauset Regional High School. This year's 'results' were (in some cases) very interesting. Here are the results ..... 

• Article 7 - PASSED - Rooms Tax - to impose a tax on summer rental homes. This still requires the state legislature to approve it prior to any collection of taxes. This could affect 2016 rentals, not 2015. What I find interesting is that the Town has no plan or strategy to actually collect these new taxes. Or to assure a fair implementation.  
• Article 8 - PASSED - Municipal Water - this article funded the remainder of the municipal water system. So-called Phase 1 was funded last year. The article appropriated $85M for the remainder of the system. Yay!
• Article 16 - PASSED - Private Road Plowing - approved the plowing of some private roads in Town. What roads this article authorizes will be determined this fall. There will be a set of criteria published this summer. 
• Article 17 - PASSED - Hay Rd - this article accepts a portion of Hay Rd as a Town road, the segment from Gov. Prence to Deacon Paine. This article was strongly argued by both sides. The Town Selectmen announced that there, apparently, are some road ownership issues that may block the implementation of this article.
• Article 18 - FAILED - Vehicles on Beaches - the article was needed to make progress on the crazy discussions about driving 4-wheel vehicles on the Eastham portion of Nauset Spit. This has been an on-going dispute between Eastham and Orleans concerning a section of beach north of Orleans' Nauset Beach and south of Coast Guard Beach. Since this article failed, the ongoing dispute with Orleans just gets uglier.
• Article 30 - FAILED - Marijuana - the failure of this article says that the public consumption of marijuana will go unpunished. The argument from the floor was that the Commonwealth is currently developing their set of rules and the Town shouldn't attempt to pre-guess what the Commonwealth will do.