The Long-Simmering Feud Over NP&EDC Reform Is Back For Another Round

Years into one of Nantucket’s most heated and esoteric political debates, the Nantucket Planning and Economic Development Commission (NP&EDC) and critic Hillary Hedges Rayport, who now sits on the Commission, are once again set to attempt to find a middle ground between their competing reform articles. If they can’t, voters are likely to face two separate proposals seeking to reform Nantucket’s poorly understood regional planning agency at Town Meeting this spring.

The NP&EDC voted unanimously on Monday to schedule a special meeting to negotiate with Rayport and the petitioners who have backed her proposed reform, despite significant pushback from several of the Commission’s members.

“We've made some compromises along the way, and what's left is pretty fundamental,” Brooke Mohr, the County Commission’s appointee to the NP&EDC, said before making the motion to schedule the negotiations.

For the last three years, Rayport and the NP&EDC have battled over the proposed reform, exchanging strong and often sharply personal criticisms. But to the outside observer, the two proposals to reform the NP&EDC might look surprisingly similar.

While Rayport and the NP&EDC have sparred over several details, and a table of the differences between the two articles is included below, the most significant remaining disagreements are whether to include term limits and whether any of the NP&EDC’s members should be elected. Rayport wants to limit members to serving nine consecutive years, after which they would have to take a year off before serving again, and to make two seats elected. The NP&EDC’s reform bill excludes term limits and at-large elected seats entirely.

“Really, the differences are not that great,” Commissioner John Kitchener said. “Most people would say, ‘Well, this doesn't look like they're a million miles away from each other.’”

That has done little to cool the debate.

“My head is going to blow off my shoulders,” Commissioner Dave Iverson said at the meeting on Monday. “I'm so frustrated, I feel like I'm going to explode.”

Rayport’s reform article first passed by a single vote at the 2023 Annual Town Meeting, after a lengthy and contentious debate on Town Meeting floor. Then, the following year, it passed by a much wider margin, sailing through 286-114. But for the article to become law, it must be accepted by the state, and, facing pressure from testimony by members of the NP&EDC, the state has not taken any action on the reform.

“It is absolutely a legitimate direction, and Town Meeting did ask for these changes,” Rayport said. “I don't think [the petitioners] are just going to say ‘oh well, too bad it didn't pass at the state, let's do this other thing.’”

At Monday’s meeting, Iverson, who also serves as the chair of the Planning Board, argued that the NP&EDC had given “deference” to Rayport’s article, allowing it a chance to go before the voters uncontested, and said Rayport should now do the same for the NP&EDC’s article.

“Although, admittedly, we did argue against it, the competing article, on Town Meeting floor and at the state level, we still didn't put in a competing article against it,” he said. “I just strongly encourage the author of the competing article to give this board the same deference that she received.”

While it’s true that the NP&EDC didn’t place a competing article on the warrant in 2024, they also didn’t put one on the warrant the following year, despite initially promising to do so, because their proposed reform wasn’t ready yet.

They also lobbied against Rayport’s article, urging Town Meeting voters to oppose it, pushing the state not to accept it, and at one point even petitioning the Select Board to take the highly unusual step of not sending the article to the state for approval after it passed at Town Meeting. In all of their efforts, the NP&EDC emphasized that they would eventually present their own proposal to the voters.

“I am equally frustrated with this commission for not listening to the public at Town Meeting,” NP&EDC member Kristina Jelleme said. “At the end of the day, it has to become a compromise…we owe it to the public.”

 An initial round of negotiations between the NP&EDC and Rayport to find a compromise after the 2024 Annual Town Meeting failed.

There has been little love lost between Rayport and the NP&EDC over the last few years, but last May, Rayport was elected to the Planning Board, giving her a seat on the commission she has long criticized.

A comparison of the competing articles is included below.