Meetings Ahead
Most meetings in Provincetown are held in person, typically with an online-attendance option. Go to the calendar at provincetown-ma.gov and click on the meeting you want to attend for a link to the agenda and details. All meetings are at Town Hall unless otherwise noted.
Thursday, May 2
- Council on Aging, 10 a.m., Veterans Memorial Community Center
- Zoning Board of Appeals, 6 p.m.
Tuesday, May 7
- Conservation Commission, 6 p.m.
Wednesday, May 8
- Harbor Committee, 2 p.m.
- Cemetery Commission, 3 p.m.
Thursday, May 9
- Planning Board, 6 p.m.
Conversation Starter
Provincetown Inn Licenses
The harbor committee on April 24 discussed asking the state Dept. of Environmental Protection to find out if there are any updated Chapter 91 public waterways licenses for the six-acre property at 1 Commercial St., the location of the Provincetown Inn.
The only license that the town has a record of is from 1956. It authorizes the property’s then-owner Chester Peck Jr. to fill 4.7 acres of publicly owned tidelands with stone riprap. Peck then built the one-story motel extension, a large parking lot, and the hotel’s swimming pool on the land.
Another license, dated August 1960, gave Peck the right to fill in another 3.5 acres of public tidelands that sit between the west edge of the motel and the Long Point dike, but that project was never completed, and the license eventually expired.
Neither license addresses the structures that were built on the filled land. Chapter 91 licenses typically require some form of public access to compensate for the private use of public tidelands.
“Once you put a structure on top of the filled land, you’re supposed to license every aspect of that structure, and we have no record of any of that,” said harbor committee chair Michelle Stefani. “There could be a license; that’s why we need to ask the DEP if one exists.
“We’re interested because it would be to the town’s benefit and the public’s benefit” to have public access provisions encoded by the state, Stefani added. “It’s one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle when it comes to the waterfront.” —Paul Benson
