YACK on: Seats

Here's my column from The Nantucket Independent this week.

I’ve been going to a number of Board of Selectman meetings lately. I find it more interesting and more fun than watching it on TV. And slightly better for my health. That’s because unlike the place I normally watch TV, there’s no refrigerator in the town building filled with cheese and beer and leftover fried chicken legs. (That I know of.) And so there is far less of a likelihood that I will end up snacking my way though Wednesday evening. Which is a good thing.

One thing I don’t like about the meetings is that those of us in the gallery have to sit on those hard, wooden benches through the whole thing, and that can get rather uncomfortable after a two or three-hour session. I end up shifting my weigh several times and scrunching up the balls of my feet and arching my back to get comfortable, but that never works. Those benches are murder on my “nether regions” (especially when I attempt to pick up the feeble wireless signal that’s available in the town building by holding my laptop up at strange angles in order to post a comment on YACKon.com during the meeting). Some nights, I can barely walk out of the place because various parts of my body are numb from poor circulation.

Coincidentally, the space where the selectmen hold their meetings is also the courtroom and I find it somewhat perverse that the jury is made to sit on those same hard benches while the accused criminal gets to sit in one of those comfortable chairs in front of the room. Is that fair? I’ll bet there would be a lot fewer “guilty” verdicts if the jury could sit in plush recliners. After a week on those rather punitive benches, I would not blame any jury for giving a jaywalker life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Interestingly, when Mike Glowacki announced his resignation from the board, the newspapers said that several people had taken out papers to run for his vacant seat. In my case that was literally true. That’s one of the reasons I considered running. The seats are much more comfortable at the front table. In fact, they are cushioned and wide and just soft enough to be relaxing but just firm enough so that the selectmen do not fall asleep during the meeting (I tried one out on a recent Wednesday night). I figure, if you’re going to take the trouble to go to the meetings, you might as well have a comfortable seat, and they’re up front at the table!

In the end, I guess perfectly valid reasons to run for selectman (like plush seating) were outweighed by the reasons not to run, so I decided, prudently, to pull out.

As an aside, there’s a little bit of trivia about the seats at the Selectman’s table that no one has noticed except me and former selectman, Matt Fee. He and I refer to one of the seats at the table as “The Ejector Seat.” As you’re facing the table, it’s the one at the far left, and it is cursed, we believe. If a selectman sits in it, they will not be back for another term. Steve Bender, Tim Soverino, Finn Murphy and several others all sat in that seat in their last term in office and were not back the next year. Even more eerie, Mike Glowacki inexplicably switched seats with Doug Bennett a few weeks before health concerns caused him to step down. Now, Doug is back in The Ejector Seat. And he’s already announced that he will not run for a second term. Coincidence? I really don’t think so. There’s a curse on that chair. If the town has any money left in the budget under the “consultants” line item, it may want to think about hiring a voodoo priest or two to give that chair some good mojo, or whatever it is those voodoo priests do. It would be money well spent, especially if we ever get five selectmen we really, really like, which, I know, is not all that likely, but one can always hope.

In order to increase citizen participation in BOS meetings, I would suggest replacing all of those hard wooden benches with used couches. There are always seven or eight out in the moors dumped there by people who are too cheap to pay the disposal fee at the landfill. The town can spring for some of those matching slip-covers from Pottery Barn so that the courtroom does not end up suffering form a visual cacophony of mis-matched sofas and loveseats.

The moors will be cleaner. More people will come to the meetings. The town will be better run thanks to a higher level of accountability. And people like me will be less likely to be critical of the Board because we will no longer associate our highest elected officials with a sharp pain in our posteriors.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the Host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com, which, this week sadly lost one of its long-time YACKers, Arch McColl (who was also a friend and a damn good mechanic). Our thoughts and prayers are with Arch’s family.

YACK on Roundabout.

Here's my column from The Nantucket Independent last week.

My head is spinning. And the reason is simple. It’s that new roundabout that they are building at the intersection of Sparks Avenue and Hooper Farm Road. We’ve been talking about it a great deal on YACKon.com and it seems as though everyone has a strong opinion about it. Some people love it. Some people hate it. And some people were taken completely by surprise by the fact that it’s actually being built. (“When did we approve that?” one YACKer posted a week or so ago.)

I recall about five years back when I was hosting the YACK TV show on TV17, and Edward Sanford, who was then the chair of the Mid-Island Area Plan committee, came on the show to talk about the mid-island plan. At the time, the intersection at Sparks, Hooper Farm and Pleasant street was slated to be a four-way stop. Land was acquired at the corner of Hooper Farm and Sparks from the Sheep to Shore parking lot to bend Hooper Farm to face Pleasant street head on, thus creating a simple T-intersection. Seemed logical at the time.

But somewhere along the way, that simple T-intersection was changed to the roundabout being built this week. I’m not sure why. I guess I should have called up Traffic Planner, Mike Burns and asked him. (He’s a pretty good guy. For an Astros fan.) But life is often busy and harried and who has time to make phone calls about roundabouts and intersections when there are websites to code and ads to write and groceries to shop for and dogs to walk?

So when the vote came up at town meeting, I was somewhat surprised to see the plans for the roundabout for the first time there. It looked, to me, like Stone Henge. And I was surprised that the voters did not listen to Mr. Alan Brown when he spoke so eloquently against the roundabout. I believe the argument went something like this: This is a big project designed to make cars move faster through an intersection where today they move through somewhat slowly. But move, they do. So why do we need to spend millions on a roundabout when all that is really required is patience and perhaps some snappy tunes on the radio? I added that last part. But you get the drift.

It’s a valid argument. But I see this roundabout as serving a purpose that goes beyond mere traffic attenuation. This thing will serve as a sort of gateway to the mid-island. Kind of like the rotary at the bottom of the Bourne Bridge on the cape with the big sign that says, “Welcome to Cape Cod!” It means that people will be coming to the mid island from all over and they’ll see this modern roundabout and the cool granite stone accouterments and the signs with the arrows and they’ll say, “wow,” the mid-island has come a long, long way, man! We don’t have a cool roundabout like this in Shimmo or Dionis!” And then, as a resident of the mid-island districts, I will benefit from rising home values in the area as more and more wealthy summer residents see this roundabout and begin to pine for stylish mid-island living. Before you know it, I’ll be able to cash in on this whole roundabout concept and sell my house for nine or ten times what I paid for it. I can’t wait.

One of the problems with the particular traffic feature is deciding upon what we should all actually call it. We can’t call it “the Rotary” for two reasons. One, It’s technically not a rotary, it’s a roundabout. There are differences between a rotary and a roundabout, but those differences are only known to traffic planning wonks and seasoned municipal engineers. Just take my word for it, they are different. Two, we already have a thing called the Rotary and it’s 23 seconds away from the thing being built now. I can just hear someone giving a tourist on a bike directions.

“Take a right at the rotary and then head up to the other rotary where you’ll want to go around and take a left, which is actually a right because you’ll be headed in the other direction. If you miss your turn Just go around again….”

We may find that some people get caught up in the dueling rotary/roundabout system and run out of gas trying to find their way out of them. Or they may get so dizzy that there will be a preponderance of upside-down SUVs in the mid island due to vertigo-induced traffic accidents. It won’t be pretty.

Which brings me to another problem I have with the new roundabout. We already have one major rotary where visitors and residents alike barely understand the basic rules of engagement. Adding this second circular traffic feature will likely result in twice the number of honked horns, angry shouts and bewildered shrugs from those of us who actually know that the people in the circle have the right of way. Just driving around the new roundabout is a challenge as it is so new and foreign that I have met three separate vehicles head-on as they try to traverse the circle in a clockwise fashion instead of counter clockwise, which is the prescribed driving pattern.

I now carry a can of bright orange spray paint around with me and the next time someone meets me in the roundabout going the other way, I will stop them and paint a giant counter-clockwise arrow on the hood of their car so they can remember which way to go.

Despite my griping and moaning about the new roundabout, I do think it will be a success. I can already see traffic moving smoothly through its dusty pre-pavement layout. Drivers only need to pay attention to who’s in the circle and not who is coming the other way (If I spray paint enough hoods). And access to both Pleasant and Sparks from Hooper Farm will be less of a step-on-the-gas-and-pray proposition.

Furthermore, my wife, Barrie has given the roundabout the big thumbs up. No longer will she need to take a right from Hooper Farm Road and then turn around in the Bank’s parking lot in order to get onto Pleasant street. She’s delighted with this new traffic feature.

And when my wife is happy, I’m happy.

YACK on.

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com and he would like to remind visitors and residents that the monument in the middle of upper Main Street is not a rotary or a roundabout. Just get around the thing as best you can without hurting yourselves, please. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Nantucket Independent.