Is the Northeastern vs. Nahant mess a typical town vs. gown dispute? Is it a magnified case of NIMBY (Not In My Backyard)? Is it a case of intractability and/or arrogance on the part of one party or another? Or is it something else?
Most likely, it is a case of all of the above.
For those who may skip over anything in the paper that doesn’t involve their town directly: Northeastern University, which has had a marine biology center on East Point for more than 50 years, wants to renovate and expand the facility. The people in Nahant worry that the sprawl resulting from such a project will engulf a town that is hardly set up to accommodate it, as the proposed footprint for the expansion alone will be 55,000 square feet.
Nahant is a peninsula, and there is only one way in and one way out — the causeway that connects it to Lynn. That road gets plenty of traffic from about May through September, which is beach season. And, of course, one of Nahant’s best attributes is a beautiful beach that attracts sun worshippers from all over the North Shore.
So you can understand the angst over anything Northeastern might propose that’ll increase the number of people traveling into the town when it’s already bursting at the seams for five months out of the year. Not only that, but the resulting structure will dwarf any other building in the town by a wide margin.
But from a legal standpoint, this is a fight Nahant may probably lose when all is said and done. Northeastern owns the land on which it wants to expand. But some people in the town are so adamant in their objections to the project that they are hoping that Saturday’s Town Meeting approves a proposal to take the land by eminent domain and declare the area a wildlife preserve, thus stopping Northeastern from expanding.
A nonprofit group called Nahant Preservation Trust even gave the town $3 million to put toward purchasing the land.
This is excessively confrontational — as if the town can’t think of any other way to state its case so it’ll just grab the land.
When it gets to that point, then everybody really needs to sit down in the same room (with masks on and plenty of hand sanitizer) and come to Jesus.
Oddly enough, that hasn’t happened. Northeastern claims its representatives have not met with selectmen. And Board of Selectmen Chair Josh Antrim acknowledges he knows of no such meeting in the past (before he joined the board).
All right, then, how about now? Instead of brinkmanship, what’s preventing the two parties from having a transparent discussion? It seems as if there’s plenty to talk about. Is there any reason why this has to come to a boil Saturday? Is there a cooler head over there? Anywhere?
What makes this even tougher to understand is that the university is seeking a bigger place to study environmental issues; it isn’t just throwing up a building. By now, we should all be singing “Hakuna Matata.”
But of course we’re not.
Northeastern says it has offered to provide walking trails on the grounds, plus a permanent easement that would provide unfettered access all the way to Canoe Beach.
However, while Antrim doesn’t out-and-out say that’s fiction, he does say the claim is misleading and makes little sense in conjunction with the school’s overall plans.
Then again, what are those plans? Northeastern needs to be transparent and show the town those plans. The people of Nahant need some official reassurances that the new, expanded marine biology center isn’t going to overrun the town to the point of being unworkable.
And the people of Nahant need to hear the university out. If there are valid objections, then they should be identified and solved.
The expansion of the center can be a good thing in the long run. But the obvious disconnect between “town and gown” has created an issue that illustrates everything that can be unpleasant about small-town politics.
So please, everybody, calm down and resolve this like civilized people. Because from where I sit, watching this unfold is a little bit like me, a Red Sox fan, watching a New York Yankees intrasquad game.