On Split Vote, Select Board Denies Appeal Of Demolition Of Old Nantucket Electric Co. Building

The Nantucket Select Board voted 3-2 on Wednesday to uphold the Historic District Commission’s decision to allow the utility company National Grid to demolish the former Nantucket Electric Company building located on New Whale Street.

The historic brick building in downtown Nantucket - one of the last vestiges of an era when the island generated its own electricity along the waterfront - is now set to be torn down, over the objections of a number of preservation advocates and concerned island residents.

Select Board chair Dawn Hill and members Tom Dixon and Brooke Mohr voted to uphold the HDC's decision to allow the demolition. Vice chair Matt Fee and member Malcolm MacNab voted in the minority to remand the decision back to the HDC, despite MacNab initially suggesting he supported the majority position.

“Maybe I, or whoever, could sit here and say, well, maybe the HDC didn’t make the correct decision, or the decision that we all collectively want,” Select Board member Tom Dixon said. “That’s not what our remit is. I can’t, on our standard, I can’t supplement my own judgement for the HDC’s on that. Right, wrong, or indifferent.”

The Nantucket Preservation Trust (NPT) had appealed the Historic District Commission (HDC) decision, alleging “several procedural and substantive errors that render the HDC's decision arbitrary and capricious,” the high standard required to void the ruling.

“The Select Board should vacate the HDC's decision, [and] remand this application back to the HDC, where a fair, true and open public hearing as outlined in Appendix C of 'Building with Nantucket in Mind' should be held,” the appeal read in part, referring to the HDC's set of guidelines.

But it is rare that the Select Board remands a case back to the HDC, given the difficulty of showing that a decision was arbitrary or that the law was violated. Despite hearing testimony to the historic character of the Electric Company building, the Select Board was not ruling Wednesday on whether the building should be demolished, only whether the HDC had acted within its purview to allow the demolition.

“Our decision is whether the HDC acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, or there was a true procedural defect,” Select Board chair Dawn Hill said. “We do not substitute our personal feelings for the decision of another regulatory board.”

“To affirm the appeal and overturn the Commission’s decision, you have to find that they acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner or contrary to law,” town counsel George Pucci told the Select Board. “On the issue of arbitrary or capricious, you’re looking at whether there is no evidence in the record on which a reasonable mind could deem reasonable to support the decision at issue, so it’s a pretty tough standard.”

HDC members argued Wednesday that their decision was appropriate and justified, if unfortunate.

“We concluded de facto that this is not a significant structure, that it is not a protected structure, because we voted to have it be demolished,” HDC chair Stephen Welch said. “We think it was a good decision. We don’t think it was a good decision in that it was a decision that we wanted to make, we don’t think it was a good decision and we took joy in making it, but we think it was a valid decision based upon information and proper deliberation.”

Representatives of National Grid also spoke in favor of the HDC’s decision.

“This is an incredibly important matter to the company, and the company’s priority has been and remains to make this property safe by taking down this building, which, as the record supports, is structurally unsound,” National Grid legal counsel Marisa Pizzi said. “The record in this matter more than amply supports demolition.”

Fee worried that the decision was representative of a broader trend and qualified as arbitrary.

“I would like to remand it, and I would like to err on the side of caution,” Fee said. “I’ve been at this long enough, and been told ‘oh, this won’t happen again, we’re going to do this and this, and we’re going to put these other things in place, and don’t worry,’ and I’ve been at this long enough, and they’re so busy, I don’t blame them, we don’t ever get to that.”

The NPT claimed that the HDC did not follow the demolition policy described in “Building With Nantucket in Mind” to determine whether 10 New Whale Street qualifies as a protected, significant, or contributing structure, a tactic that has worked at least once before.

“If a building is historic and preserving it is in the public’s best interest, end of story, it should not be demolished,” Nantucket Preservation Trust executive director Mary Bergman said. “Without determining the significance of a structure, any other decision made after that is arbitrary. It is driving blindly without a roadmap.”

The HDC voted 3-2 in July to permit the demolition after a motion to block the demolition failed on a tied 2-2 vote in June. Initially, HDC members had expressed strong opposition to National Grid’s attempt to tear down the building, but by July, enough HDC members had changed their minds for the demolition to gain approval on a narrow vote, with Welch, vice chair Ray Pohl, and commissioner Val Oliver voting in favor of the application, and commissioners Angus MacLeod and Abby Camp opposed.

“At what point is a building no longer able to be rehabilitated? When it's literally lying on the ground, a pile of bricks? Is that the point when we decide, absolutely, there's no way this could be rehabilitated? Oh, but a pile of bricks could actually be reassembled to create the same building that it came from. My point is, there's no definite line,” Pohl said at the time. “The rehabilitation of this building might, in an abstract way, be possible, but…I don't see that this building is in any way able to be practically restored.”

The NPT also alleged that the HDC failed to properly consider a pair of expert reports regarding the building and did not follow “Building with Nantucket in Mind” to establish that the condition of the building “is not the result of acts of neglect by the owner or his predecessors in title,” a provision that can be used to address a process often referred to as demolition by neglect, where property owners intentionally let buildings deteriorate until they can't be restored and must be demolished.

“Based on over 40 years of experience in this field and work on similar projects, I know this building can be restored successfully,” said preservation advocate Glenn Boornazian, who was responsible for one of the expert reports that NPT claims the HDC did not properly consider. “I know the work wasn’t done to make those decisions responsibly.”

The spectre of demolition by neglect has hung over the whole hearing, and whether National Grid's alleged neglect resulted in the building's current state was a major topic of discussion during the final deliberation before the HDC's vote. The provision cited by NPT also implicates neglect by previous owners.

HDC members broadly seem to agree that the building was allowed to fall into disrepair.

“I’m still frustrated that it was left in a neglected state for so long and there are no repercussions on the table for the purposeful disregard of this structure,” Oliver said. “In this case, it was not callously decided. There were several meetings, we had information from many different players, and I feel we made the best decision we could on the information we had and for the safety of the public.”

A town bylaw adopted in 2004 requires the owners of contributing historic structures to take “at least the minimum steps necessary to prevent the deterioration” of foundations, exterior walls, roofs, chimneys, and support structures, although enforcement can be challenging.

The NPT has been involved with several past appeals of HDC decisions.

Their appeal quoted a comment Pohl made at a previous HDC meeting, in which he claimed he would never vote to allow the demolition of the old electric building.

“It's a blue-collar version of one of the Three Bricks,” Pohl said at an HDC meeting in October of 2024. “So I could never, never vote in favor of a demolition of this building. I know there are a lot of practical considerations, but I'm not wearing my practical hat right now. I'm wearing my HDC hat. As somebody who lives here and drives past that building multiple times per week and always loved to look at it, I can't in good conscience accept a demolition on this.”

Pohl ultimately came around to the application, as did Welch, who voiced strong misgivings with the demolition at the same meeting as Pohl.

“I understand it's not cheap, and I understand it's not convenient, but there are some things where cheap and convenient can't rule the day, and I think this is one of them,” he said at the time.

Built in 1927, the brick building had served as the processing plant for the coal gasification conducted at the site by the former Nantucket Electric Company. After the power plant was closed in 1996 following the completion of the first undersea cable from Nantucket to the mainland, the brick building at 10 New Whale Street was gutted of its structural steel to house equipment associated with the remediation effort for contaminated soil at the site. That included pumping and filtering groundwater in the area for 12 years. Now empty and unused by National Grid, the building has fallen into disrepair with large cracks through its bricks, holes in its roof, and broken windows.

The building at 10 New Whale Street is part of a wider area along the waterfront that the town, along with other property owners, including National Grid and Steve Karp's Nantucket Island Resorts, previously targeted for potential redevelopment, including the construction of a possible parking garage. The former Harbor Fuel tank farm located nearby was demolished and removed in 2022.

While those ambitious plans have since fizzled and gone quiet in recent years, the town and National Grid have utilized a portion of the former Nantucket Electric Company property for the valet parking program operated by Valet Park of America.