Letter: Support Hogeland for Planning BoardLetters to the Editor,
12:39PM / Friday, May 06, 2016 | |
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To the Editor:
Anne Hogeland is running for the two-year slot on the Williamstown Planning Board, and there hasn't been a more opportune time than next Tuesday's town election, to vote her on it.
The Planning Board is assigned, by state law, to prepare studies on land use, housing, conservation, and business development, to review zoning bylaw amendments and propose some of its own, and to make its decisions based in community support. We need to elect board members who reason with logic and open-mindedness, who are willing and able to do research and build on their own expertise in the law and town planning, who have a clear sense of their responsibilities to the whole town, and who know how to seek compromise, not win personal battles.
Anne Hogeland fills the bill. After graduating Williams College and Harvard Law School, she clerked for a U.S. District Court judge, and practiced law in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Pittsfield, representing non-profit health-care providers. After returning to Williamstown with her husband and three daughters in the 1970s, Anne immersed herself in community service, including as founder of Adventures in Learning after-school program at the Williamstown Elementary School, co-president of the Mount Greylock High School PTO and chair of the High School Superintendent Search Committee, co-chair and manager of the Williamstown Farmers Market, and member of the local Trustees of Reservations committee and Williamstown Cultural District Partnership.
This list shows the broad range of her community interests, for which she has gained full respect throughout the town, particularly for her intelligence, her openness to listening to people's concerns, her talents in managing, and her ability to engage in thoughtful, collaborative planning.
Her outlook for the future of Williamstown is broad, and persuasively positive and optimistic. She asserted on her Facebook page: "The board should be responsible stewards, sustaining the integrity of our landscape, while fully aware of our changing social and economic realities."
On one issue that sits squarely in the lap of the board — aging and housing, she says, "I have a long standing concern about housing and the elderly in town. I've worked closely with older tenants in New York City facing serious housing challenges, which intersect with health care issues. I agree with the Economic Development Committee that we should remove unnecessary zoning obstacles to a full range of housing, including low and moderately priced, multi-family, retirement, and assisted. We have a lot of work ahead!"
Let's vote Anne Hogeland to the Planning Board and watch her go to work to make the board a positive creative force for this town.
Tela Zasloff
Williamstown, Mass.
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