PROVINCETOWN — Reading the warrant for the April 7 annual town meeting feels a bit like perusing a buffet in Las Vegas: there’s a huge variety, and you must try it all. There are two fire dept. votes, two housing projects, a hotel ownership bylaw, seven zoning changes, and four petitioned articles: one on gender-inclusive bathrooms, two on building materials, and one that would cap short-term rental licenses at 1,000.

One of the zoning measures, the new form-based code for Shank Painter Road, is more than 30 pages long, giving the town meeting booklet this year nearly the heft of an actual book.

The line at the microphones could form early, as Article 2, the budget, includes a $1.4-million operating override to fund new leadership roles in the fire dept. and more overtime in the police dept. The measure would permanently expand the town’s property tax levy, thus requiring a two-thirds majority at town meeting and more than half the voters at the town election on May 13.

The leadership positions are needed because the town hired 20 paramedics and EMTs after the collapse of the nonprofit Lower Cape Ambulance Association in 2023, Deputy Fire Chief Othaine Rance told the Independent in February. Sixteen of those people are now trained as firefighters but most do not have years of experience, Rance said.

Many of the town’s most experienced volunteer firefighters turned in their gear last summer after a conflict between Town Manager Alex Morse and Fire Chief Mike Trovato ended with Trovato’s retirement on July 2. Eighteen firefighters led by Firemen’s Association president George Felton said that Trovato had been treated with “extreme disrespect.”

Article 2 would fund four full-time fire captains, Rance said, and also pay for a full-time chief after current Chief Jimmy Roderick, who is paid as a part-timer, retires next spring.

The fire dept. also appears in Article 19, which would add the chief to a list of positions that are directly hired by the town manager, with the select board having 15 days to confirm or object. The board of fire engineers, which used to appoint the fire chief from among its members, would become an advisory board.

Article 8 would authorize the town to contribute $4 million to a 40-unit condo building on the site of the town’s old police station at 26 Shank Painter Road, with 30 of the units to be sold at below-market prices ranging from $200,000 to $675,000. The deed-restricted units would be sold through town-organized lotteries, and their future resale prices would be tied to incomes in Barnstable County rather than appreciating at market rates.

Article 9 would authorize a $1.3-million contribution from the town to the “Barracks” dormitory that Patrick Patrick is seeking to build on his family’s land at 207 Route 6, although the town’s money would support the 13 year-round rental apartments in the new building rather than the 28 dormitory rooms for seasonal workers.

The town would borrow money for Article 8 and Article 9 but would pay the five-year bonds with revenue from short-term rental taxes rather than by raising property taxes.

Article 17 would accept the state’s new “seasonal community designation,” which was created in the Affordable Housing Act that Gov. Maura Healey signed last August. The designation offers the town a group of tools to pursue middle-income housing, including the right to build housing specifically for town employees or artists and the right to raise the residential tax exemption as high as 50 percent rather than 35 percent of the value of the average residential property.

 

Petitioned Articles

Article 20 is a nonbinding citizens’ petition that asks the select board to “convert all publicly accessible municipal restroom facilities in Provincetown to meet fully gender inclusive standards” in line with the newest edition of the state building code.

According to proponent Jamie Elizabeth Grasso, those standards call for individual stalls to be made more private, with walls that reach the floor and sufficient space for family members to assist children or elders. Most multi-stall restrooms would have doors to adjoining hallways removed so that calls for help could be easily heard outside the restroom. Rather than specifying which gender could use a facility, signage would indicate whether a given stall includes a toilet, a urinal, or both.

“As a trans person, I want to reinforce that there are a lot of assaults on trans people in bathrooms,” Grasso said at the March 26 town meeting forum. Safety in restrooms is “a human right and a civil right,” he said.

Article 21, sponsored by Jon Sinaiko, would require plastic exterior siding to be cut indoors to minimize the spread of plastic dust into the environment, while Article 22, also by Sinaiko, would direct the historic district commission to allow fire retardant materials such as fiber cement siding and artificial slate shingles in the town’s historic district.

Article 23, sponsored by Doug Cliggott, would cap the number of short-term rental certificates issued by the town at 1,000, which Cliggott said was slightly above the current 950 rental certificates in town.

“The purpose of this article is also to improve diversity in Provincetown — diversity based on age and income — because the way Provincetown is now, and I’m part of it, we’re old,” Cliggott said at the March 26 forum.

The number of year-round rentals in town has decreased from 1,009 in 1990 to 558 in 2023, according to U.S. Census figures — and even with new housing projects on the way, it would be hard to increase that number much when existing year-round rentals can still be converted to short-term rentals, Cliggott said.

“In my opinion, the critical thing is year-round rentals, or we’re just going to become less and less diverse in terms of age,” Cliggott said. “I think that’s a real crisis.”

One more article on the warrant came from a nonbinding citizens petition last spring: Article 27, which would cap the number of hotel licenses that any one person or company could hold at three.

 

Zoning Articles

The seven zoning articles include updates to the town’s accessory-dwelling-unit, inclusionary-zoning, and growth-management bylaws, along with an expansion of the town’s most permissive Town Commercial Center district to include more of Provincetown’s East End.

Article 35 would add a new section to the zoning code: a mixed-use overlay district that would protect existing commercial spaces along the main stretch of Commercial Street between Franklin Street in the West End and Dyer Street in the East End. Within that district, ground-floor commercial spaces such as restaurants, galleries, retail shops, and hotels could not be converted to residential condos or single-family homes. (Article 36 would expand the overlay district a quarter mile farther east, to Cook Street.)

Article 37, the form-based zoning code for Shank Painter Road, would effectively require new buildings on that street to include “active commercial uses” on ground floors and multi-family housing above. The code aims to slow vehicle traffic and create a more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly corridor that can eventually support many new units of multi-family housing.