NAHANT — A Special Town Meeting will be held Dec. 1 for residents to decide whether a Wetlands Protection bylaw adopted at the end of August should be rescinded.
Selectmen voted, 2-1, in favor of the meeting, with selectman Richard Lombard opposed.
“I’m not in favor of this at all,” he said in a meeting in September. “I don’t believe we need another Special Town Meeting. Nahant has spoken.”
Nahant has an open Town Meeting, meaning any registered voter who lives in town can vote. More than 500 residents did so at a Special Town meeting in August.
In a meeting that lasted more than 3½ hours and left not a single chair — or square inch of floor space — unoccupied, a yes or no ballot was handed out, as voted by the body, and 285 returned the slip in favor while 278 were opposed to an amendment to the town’s bylaws to change the permitting process for projects within the town’s wetlands.
The bylaw, which was approved by Attorney General Maura Healey on Sept. 13, in essence prohibits the removal, filling, dredging, building upon, degrading, discharging into, or otherwise altering the listed resource areas (freshwater or coastal wetlands, marshes, etc.) except as authorized by the Conservation Commission. The bylaw establishes a permit application, notice and hearing, and determination procedure.
Registered voters passed the bylaw by seven votes.
“I’ve gotten several complaints about the Special Town Meeting, the heat, the lack of information that was out there about how many people were going to be affected by this,” said selectman Enzo Barile. “So there’s a book of them — of complaints from people who were not happy with the way it was handled.”
He called for a second Special Town Meeting to rescind the bylaw.
“I’ve gotten hundreds of emails about this,” said Barile at a Sept. 20 meeting. “The process was done wrong. We need to have another Town Meeting to correct it.”
Resident Julie Tarmy said she wasn’t happy with the result of the vote, but she didn’t think it should be retaken.
“We voted,” she said. “It’s done. Now if it comes up in the future and gets reversed, so be it. But to call a Special Town Meeting to vote again, I don’t think is the route we want to take.”
Lombard questioned whether the town could legally have the vote taken in the form of a ballot question, rather than another Special Town Meeting. He said it was owed to the residents of Nahant to explore all options and follow the best possible procedure, since rushing into it was what got them there in the first place.
Town Administrator Tony Barletta said he consulted with an attorney, who said the vote had to be taken at a town meeting where there could be deliberation. A satellite location could be used at the Johnson Elementary School as long as audio and video was available and votes could be taken at both locations.
The meeting was set for Saturday, Dec. 1 at noon with the option to use the Johnson Elementary School for overflow space.