EASTHAM — Two abutters have appealed the planning board’s site plan approval of a new house that will overlook Boat Meadow marsh. At issue is the proposed house’s size: it is about twice as large as the one it will replace.
The town’s zoning board of appeals will consider the case at an April 6 hearing, the first step in the appeal process.
At issue is the property at 715 Bridge Road. Owners John Sheehan and Sara Zobel of New York City and Mashpee want to tear down the existing house and build a 4,355-square-foot house and 1,321-square-foot garage with an upstairs apartment. The proposal would result in more than 5,000 square feet of living space.
Other homes in the neighborhood range from 2,000 to 3,000 square feet; the existing house, at about 2,000 square feet, fits in that range.
The planning board approved the proposal for the larger house on Dec. 21, with only one member, James Kivlehan, voting in opposition.
Andrea Hanson and Christopher Szwedo, who live at 15 Bayview Road directly behind the target site, filed the appeal of the site plan approval in January. In their letter, the pair argue that the planning board made no attempt “to shape this large project to that of the neighborhood.
“The majority of the members, most notably the chairman, in his own words, view large home construction as an ‘inevitability,’ ” Hanson and Szwedo wrote.
Town Planner Paul Lagg explained the appeal process in Eastham, which allows for reconsideration of the original proposal by the zoning board.
“There is going to be a discussion that really gets into negotiations: what are the issues and can they be mitigated,” Lagg said.
The goal of site plan review, according to Lagg, is ultimately to get a project approved. “The board can shape the project with conditions,” he said. “It’s the same rules and the same process for the zoning board, so this is basically a do-over.”
Whatever the zoning board decides regarding the appeal, that decision, too, can be appealed by either side. Any further appeals of this case would have to be filed in the state court system.
During the planning board’s December deliberations, Vice Chair Davis Hobbs pointed out that the site plan met the town’s setback requirements. The owner therefore has the right to build it, he said.
Member Peter Weston commented that the price of land on Cape Cod has skyrocketed. “You can’t expect people to pay half a million dollars for land and build a $30,000 house,” Weston said.
While considerations do include how well a structure will fit into the neighborhood around it in terms of both size and character, Eastham currently does not have a house size limit to guide the board.
Voters at the May 6 annual town meeting will consider a proposal to link allowable house size to lot size as well as to the design, height, and building scale of other structures in the neighborhood. The aim is to take the subjectivity out of the decision.
Because it is already on the table now, however, the proposal for 715 Bridge Road would not be affected by any changes voters might approve at the upcoming town meeting.
One adjustment to zoning that will be on the warrant has to do with how the town calculates the percentage of lot coverage. Currently, it is calculated on the total acreage of the lot. One proposal, Lagg said, would instead base the calculation on the buildable upland of the lot.
In the case of 715 Bridge Road, the proposed coverage of the full 64,000-square-foot lot would be 8.87 percent. But the upland area on the lot is only 25,000 square feet, so lot coverage calculated using upland area only would put its lot coverage at more than 22 percent.
The proposed provisions would also eliminate basement areas from the living space calculation, Lagg said, so for that reason he was unsure how the changes might have played out in the 715 Bridge Road proposal.
