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National Park Service

    DUNE SHACKS

    Two More Local Families Are Picked to Apply for Leases

    Owners of historic restoration company in Falmouth are selected for Adams shack

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The National Park Service’s leasing contest for eight dune shacks on the windswept back shore of took another step toward resolution on March 1 when the Tasha and Beebe families were notified they had been selected to negotiate 10-year leases for the shacks they have maintained for decades.

    Carl Tasha and his dog, Obediah, outside his family’s dune shack in the late 1990s. (Photo courtesy Andréa Tasha)

    The Tasha family has been caring for the dune shack of Harry Kemp, the “poet of the dunes,” since he gave it to Herman and Sunny Tasha in 1960. Emily Beebe and her family rebuilt the disintegrating Leo Fleurant shack starting in 1994.

    The shacks are on the National Register of Historic Places partly because of the artists and writers who sought solitude there, including Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Jack Kerouac. The leasing contest drew national press coverage after the Park Service released rules that allowed applicants to offer unlimited money for the leases — raising the possibility that wealth would determine the future occupants.

    Protests ensued, and a series of elected officials objected, including U.S. senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, who wrote that allowing wealth to influence the leasing contest was an affront to the history of the shacks.

    In November, however, two applications were picked that had not relied on extra rent: the Clemons-Benson family, who have cared for the shack they call “the Grail” since the 1970s, and a group of four friends including Talilla Schuster, whose father, Lawrence, had lived full-time in the Braaten-Schuster shack for almost 30 years.

    A teenaged Andréa Tasha at her family’s dune shack in the late 1980s. (Photo courtesy Andréa Tasha)

    Now, two more applications have been picked based on long experience and local knowledge rather than extra rent, Emily Beebe and Andréa Tasha confirmed.

    Meanwhile, a fifth dune shack — which actually comprises two buildings, the Adams shack and its guest cottage — was unique in having no longtime caretaker competing for a lease. Marcia Adams, 94, her daughter, Sally Adams, and their friend David Quinn withdrew their application in October, saying the Park Service’s shifting rules and deadlines had exhausted them.

    The Park Service’s leasing panel later offered the right to negotiate a lease for the Adams shacks to Mike Gallagher and Ethan Howard, co-owners of Village Green Restoration in Falmouth, which specializes in historic structures.

    “We are excited and honored by this unique opportunity and appreciate the importance of the dune shacks to the Outer Cape,” Gallagher said. “In keeping with their history, it is our intention to use the shacks as a place of reflection, retreat, and artistic endeavor.”

    Gallagher, Schuster, and Peter Clemons all said they are still negotiating their lease terms with the Park Service.

    A Sigh of Relief

    “After many months of uncertainty, we are breathing a collective sigh of relief,” said Sunny and Herman’s granddaughter Andréa Tasha, who owns Mooncusser Tattoo in Provincetown.

    “Sunny used to sing that her shack was ‘east of the sun and west of the moon,’ and we intend that the spirits of Harry Kemp, Sunny Tasha, Carl Tasha, and Paul Tasha will remain there, resting in power,” she said.

    Sunny’s ashes were scattered at the dune shack, her son Paul Tasha told the Independent last August, as were half of Harry Kemp’s. (The rest were scattered in New York.)

    Emily Beebe and her friend David Quinn raising the Fleurant shack in 1996. (Photo courtesy Emily Beebe)

    Paul Tasha died on Jan. 5 at 71 — two months before the leasing panel made its decision.

    “Paul didn’t want to be scattered out there if we were going to lose the shack, but maybe now he would want to be,” Andréa said. “People have been married out there and conceived out there. It’s a sacred space to our family — and not only to us.”

    Andréa said she met a man at a convention in Yarmouth who had a tattoo of the wooden table outside her family’s dune shack on his arm.

    “He said he had spent a beautiful afternoon there, ate his lunch at that table, and felt inspired,” she said. “People value the dune shacks as part of their own lives and part of Provincetown’s history. We’re grateful to everyone who’s been inspired to stand with us.”

    ‘Can’t Stop Smiling’

    Emily Beebe applied with her then-partner Evelyn Simon for a long-term lease for the Fleurant dune shack in 1993. Leo Fleurant had lived year-round in the shack, but he died in 1984, and the structure was boarded up and left to disintegrate.

    Emily (left), Delilah, and Jacqui Beebe at Leo Fleurant’s dune shack in 2023. (Photo courtesy Emily Beebe)

    “There were holes in the roof, the floor was rotten, and nearly everything had to be replaced,” Beebe said. After the dune shacks were found eligible for the National Register in 1989, “the Dept. of Interior’s standards for historic renovation applied,” Beebe said. “We really leaned into those rules in our proposal, and I think that’s why we were successful.”

    Beebe, Simon, their friend David Quinn and his father, Warren Quinn, raised the shack, put new pilings under it, and restored the structure from there.

    Last year Beebe, who is Truro’s health and conservation agent, applied for the shack again with her wife, Jacqui Beebe, who is Eastham’s town manager, and their daughter, Delilah, who graduated from Nauset Regional High School in 2022.

    “I pulled out all my files and layered in photographs and documents so that everything was in alignment with their criteria,” Beebe said. “I wanted them to know how completely I understood their process — and how passionate our family is about being out there.”

    After the Park Service notified her that her application had been selected, Beebe said it was “such a relief that my face can’t stop smiling. I ran out of my office and told my coworkers, because they’ve been putting up with all my anxiety. Then I called Jacqui, and then I called David and told him it’s time to celebrate.”

    The most difficult part, Beebe said, had been helping her dune shack neighbors, the Adams family, empty their shacks in August.

    “Every day for weeks, David and I were helping them clean out,” Beebe said, “trying to take some of that energy and make a new home for it in Leo’s shack. They were crushed, and it was excruciating. The entire neighborhood was just gutted.”

    LEADERSHIP

    For New Park Supt., the Job Is ‘a Homecoming’

    Back at the Seashore after 27 years, Jennifer Flynn says she won’t be leading from her office

    By

    WELLFLEET — Jennifer Flynn, whose 32-year career with the National Park Service began on Cape Cod and has since taken her to canyons, coasts, historic sites, and headquarters nationwide, has landed back where she began, now in a managerial role. Her first official day as superintendent of the Cape Cod National Seashore was Nov. 28.

    Jennifer Flynn took over as superintendent of the Cape Cod National Seashore on Nov. 28. (Photos courtesy National Park Service)

    In a Nov. 29 interview, Flynn talked about her management style. “In-person and direct communication is the most effective,” she said. “I’m not a fan of managing from my office.”

    Being office-bound hasn’t often been an option for Flynn anyhow. She started at the Seashore in 1991, the summer before her junior year at Mount Holyoke College, and returned each year through 1996. During that period, she worked at the Race Point Ranger Station and drove the dunes as a law enforcement and oversands ranger.

    Flynn anticipates her role here being not so different from her job at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, where she was superintendent from 2017 to 2020. While she’s enjoyed a career specializing in emergency services, “I was intentional about coming back to a park,” Flynn said. “I like the diversity of the work as a park superintendent.”

    Flynn has returned to Cape Cod every year for vacation since her 1990s Seashore years, she said.

    Her work with the NPS took her west as an emergency dispatcher at Yosemite National Park and at the park jail there. She then honed her experience as a law enforcement ranger at Mississippi’s Natchez Trace Parkway before being relocated to the Grand Canyon.

    There, Flynn worked “the most adrenaline junkie job in the National Park Service.” She performed “every kind of search and rescue that we do,” she said, venturing into back country on the ground as well as by helicopter, conducting rescue missions as a flight medic.

    Flynn at the Province Lands Visitor Center in July 1994.

    Flynn had her two oldest children in those years and found that balancing parenthood and emergency medical response work required a shift. That’s when she went to Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia and served as chief ranger. She has also managed basic training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia.

    Flynn’s most recent job was in Washington, where she managed the NPS emergency services portfolio — “basically, anything that dealt with life and safety,” she said.

    Through all her moves, the Cape Cod National Seashore has held a special significance for her. “The Cape is where I met the National Park Service,” Flynn said. “I am incredibly grateful that at 20 years old I figured out where I fit.”

    According to NPS’s Linzy French, the Seashore superintendent oversees 55 year-round employees and, as of this year, 110 seasonal employees. The superintendent also manages communication with the six towns in the Seashore’s jurisdiction — the four outermost towns as well as Orleans and Chatham.

    Flynn’s predecessor, Brian Carlstrom, left the superintendent job here in early October for a post in Denver as deputy regional director of the Park Service’s Intermountain Region. Leslie Reynolds was acting superintendent before Flynn’s arrival.

    During Carlstrom’s final few months on the job, the Seashore was criticized for straying from its agreement under the Dune Shacks Historic District Preservation and Use Plan regarding how the shacks would be leased.

    Flynn drives an ATV in the early 1990s on Race Point Beach, where she worked as a management assistant.

    Flynn says communication with the public and towns in her jurisdiction is important, but she declined to comment specifically on the dune shacks: “As long as I was in D.C., I was committed to being present and finishing my work there, and I just haven’t gotten up to speed on that issue here yet,” she said.

    Once she is, she said, “My commitment to the community is we will be as transparent as we possibly can be.” She added, “I think that’s just how we’re going to have to earn trust.”

    Otherwise, she said, “I think part of why folks get frustrated with government in general is that it all seems very arbitrary.”

    As for specific goals, Flynn said it’s too early for that. “I haven’t come in with a preconceived idea about where I want to be in 12 months,” she said. “That needs to come in meeting with the towns and talking to the park leadership team and understanding the landscape we’re in.”

    Flynn spent her first couple of days on the job getting acquainted with staff at an all-employee meeting and reviewing municipal government directories. She said she was looking forward to a winter of meeting with town boards to “have conversations about what’s important to the towns and how the Seashore can support those objectives.” A first meeting was set for Dec. 5 with the Wellfleet Select Board.

    Flynn said she plans to reach out to Rich Delaney this week. Delaney, executive director of the Center for Coastal Studies, chairs the newly reconstituted National Seashore Advisory Commission. Flynn said she expects the commission will be meeting again by early February.

    Flynn’s two eldest children are grown now, and she has a high schooler who’s finishing up the semester in Virginia and will move here over the holidays. Her husband retired before she took her last job in D.C., and her parents both live in Western Massachusetts, where she grew up.

    “I’m really looking forward to being part of this community again,” Flynn said. “It is in every way a homecoming for me.”

    DUNE SHACKS

    2 of 8 Leases May Go to Local Applicants

    But one previous dune family gives up, worn down by the process

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The National Park Service’s public leasing contest for eight dune shacks in the Cape Cod National Seashore took a major step toward resolution on Nov. 15. The right to negotiate 10-year leases has been awarded to three groups of applicants, two of them with connections to longtime residents.

    Josiah Mayo stands outside the Braaten-Schuster dune shack. Mayo and his co-applicants Talilla Schuster, Chad Avellar, and Hanna Kisialeva were selected by the Park Service to negotiate a 10-year lease on the shack that Schuster’s father, Lawrence, lived in year-round for almost 30 years. (Photo by Paul Benson)

    Peter Clemons and Marianne Benson, who have lived in a dune shack they call “The Grail” every summer since 1974, will be offered a 10-year lease along with their adult children, Andrew, Elizabeth, and Tommy Clemons.

    A team of four applicants — Talilla Schuster, Josiah Mayo, Chad Avellar, and Hanna Kisialeva — will be offered a 10-year lease for the shack that Schuster’s father, Lawrence Schuster, lived in year-round for three decades beginning in 1984.

    Both groups told the Independent that they were exhausted by the leasing process but were celebrating.

    At the Adams shack, however, the story was different. Marcia Adams, 94, and her daughter, Sally Adams, initially applied for a lease for the shack that Marcia and her husband, David Adams, had purchased in 1953, before the Cape Cod National Seashore took ownership.

    They applied together with David Quinn, a friend who had taken on an increasingly important role in caring for the shack in recent years.

    Marcia Adams, dune shack neighbor Nat Champlin, and David Adams in an undated photo in front of the Adams shack, which the Adamses had purchased and repaired in 1953. (Photo courtesy Sally Adams)

    Emptying out the shack and its guest cottage in time for the Park Service’s initial deadline to vacate, Sept. 1, was onerous, according to both Quinn and Sally Adams. But by the time the Park Service extended the deadline to Sept. 29, they had almost fully moved out. Quinn turned in the keys to the shacks on Aug. 25.

    The Park Service continued to review their application, asking them on Sept. 29 how they planned to manage sand accretion without the motorized equipment they had been using for the last six years to keep the footings of the shacks from being buried. The Park Service told them they could not use such equipment going forward.

    They were given 15 days to answer, Quinn said. They received an email on the 13th day saying they could perhaps use motorized equipment after all, if a park ranger supervised them.

    “That’s when we decided that we just didn’t want to go any further,” Quinn said. “The entire process has been a mess and a source of anxiety and distress, and we lost the fight and didn’t want to have all their memories ruined.”

    “Our family had the very best of times over 70 years there,” Sally Adams wrote to the Independent, “and the shacks remain an integral part of our family fabric.” The ashes of her father and both her brothers are scattered there, she said.

    Quinn said the experience had been “gut wrenching” and blamed “incompetence in the upper echelon” of the Park Service, though both he and Sally Adams said the National Seashore rangers are excellent and deserve recognition.

    The Park Service has chosen another applicant to negotiate a 10-year lease for the Adams shack according to a Nov. 16 report in the Boston Globe, but the agency has not said who they selected.

    Two Families Continue

    “It was a tough summer,” said Andrew Clemons. “Grace Bessay, who gave this shack to my parents, called it ‘the Grail’ because she believed in it so much. She would have fought this, and I knew I was going to fight it.”

    The Clemons-Benson family. Left to right: Tommy Clemons, Peter Clemons, Marianne Benson, Liz Clemons, and Andrew Clemons. (Photo courtesy Peter Clemons)

    Over the course of the summer, Peter and Andrew spoke to news outlets across the Northeast about the Park Service’s leasing program, which included a clause allowing applicants to offer an unlimited amount of extra rent to make their proposals more competitive. That provision was not in the agency’s management plan for the dune shacks, which had been developed in a public process from 2009 to 2012.

    “I can’t afford a lawyer; all I have is my family’s story,” Andrew said. “We’ve done a good job of keeping it a family-oriented shack, being part of the community, doing the upkeep — so what are they going to do, kick us out because somebody else makes more money than we do?”

    Private residential use was the only type allowed in the Park Service’s request for proposals. In a phone call in May, Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom had tried to assure Peter Clemons that other applicants for private residential use of the Grail were unlikely to be picked if his family submitted a well-written application.

    Lawrence Schuster and his daughter Talilla Schuster celebrate Christmas at the Braaten-Schuster shack in the mid-1990s. (Photo courtesy Talilla Schuster)

    In public, however, Carlstrom defended the clause allowing unlimited rent as a “sound business practice” — even after it was criticized by the select boards of Provincetown and Truro and all of Cape Cod’s elected state and federal lawmakers.

    Ultimately, after several deadline extensions, the Park Service picked the Clemons-Benson family after all.

    “Obviously we’re grateful that we didn’t have to be evicted,” Peter Clemons said. “We’ve been on pins and needles, but it felt more like a knife edge, really.”

    Raising a Shack

    The Braaten-Schuster shack was Lawrence Schuster’s year-round home for almost 30 years, said his daughter, Talilla Schuster. He had outfitted his shack with solar panels and a mini-wind turbine, she said, but around the time he turned 70 he decided he was too old to live in the dunes and moved to Maine. He is still the permit holder for the dune shack.

    The team of friends who raised the Braaten-Schuster shack on May 7, 2023. Left to right: Mike Winkler, Katie Button, Chris Gipson, Nate Winkler, Arthur Reis, Michela Murphy, Josiah Mayo, Talilla Schuster, Genevieve Martin, Gustavo Rosa, Laura Ludwig, Sean Webley. (Photo courtesy Talilla Schuster)

    Mayo said he had been reasonably confident that the application he filed with Schuster, Avellar, and Kisialeva would win — mostly because they had put a great deal of time and money into raising the shack out of an encroaching sand dune.

    Raising a shack can easily cost $50,000 or more, Schuster said — although free labor from friends can help. The team of four had filed documents to raise the shack in May 2022 and received official approvals that August. It would have been lifted that fall, Schuster said, except their friend Nate Winkler’s heavy equipment was all in use at the Vineyard Wind project.

    “We wound up lifting the shack in early May,” Schuster said — after her father had been notified there would be a leasing contest in December 2022 and after the rules allowing applicants to offer extra rent had been released on May 1, 2023. They moved forward, figuring their work could only help their application’s chances.

    Nate Winkler uses a four-tube hydraulic lift truck to raise the Braaten-Schuster shack. (Photo courtesy Talilla Schuster)

    What made the extra-rent option disturbing, Mayo said, was that “it’s an indication that they really don’t understand the culture or tradition out there at all — so they’re capable of anything.” Limiting residential use from Memorial Day to Labor Day was also a red flag, Mayo said.

    “People in our local economy work in the summer,” said Mayo, “and it’s clear they weren’t thinking about them. Who are you really intending on putting in these shacks if you rule out people who work here?”

    Now that they have been selected to negotiate a lease, Mayo said, they can find out what those seasonal occupancy rules will mean in practice.

    “We think they just phrased it poorly — that they’re really just saying they won’t maintain the roads in the winter,” Schuster said. “The jeep road can actually be easier to drive in winter, so we’re hoping that won’t be a sticking point.”

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Nov. 23, 2023, misspelled Talilla Schuster’s first name.

    DUNE SHACKS

    As Leasing Deadline Nears, a Glimpse Into NPS Reasoning

    ‘Have some confidence in the process,’ Carlstrom told one family

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The National Park Service’s effort to write new 10-year leases for 8 of the 18 dune shacks in the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District on the back shore of Provincetown and Truro is approaching a major deadline on Friday, Sept. 29.

    After originally telling families that have leased the shacks for decades to be prepared to vacate them on Sept. 1, the agency extended their permits to Sept. 29. By then, the agency should have selected the winners of the new leases.

    Park Service officials have refused to comment publicly on the current leasing competition beyond saying that it “largely follows” the Dune Shack Preservation and Use Plan that was negotiated in 2012. Provincetown and Truro town officials dispute that.

    Called either the Al Fearing shack, the Fuller-Bessay shack, the Clemons-Benson shack, or simply the Grail, this dune shack has been cared for and lived in by Peter Clemons and Marianne Benson since the 1970s. It is one of the eight shacks the National Park Service is attempting to lease with a new Request for Proposals. (Photo by Jane Paradise)

    Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom refused to answer most of the questions the Provincetown select board asked on Aug. 28, saying only that “the RFP process is underway, and I really can’t speak to it because it is underway. A lot of work has gone into it. We want to maintain the integrity of that work, and I can’t speak to any specifics on it right now.”

    Carlstrom did speak in more detail in a phone call with longtime dune shack leaseholders Peter Clemons and Marianne Benson in June.

    Clemons told Carlstrom at the outset of the call that he was recording it. On the call, Carlstrom said, “We do appreciate what the dune shacks are about, what the Peaked Hills Historic District is about, and are trying very hard through this leasing opportunity to perpetuate that.

    “I have the intent to honor the integrity of the shacks going forward, so that your kids and grandkids and great-grandkids can continue to have the opportunity to enjoy them just as you have,” Carlstrom said.

    “It sounds good the way you just said it, but it’s not reflected in this paperwork at all,” Clemons replied. “There’s not a trace of what you just said in the RFP.”

    “If you want it to continue on as it always has, you need to construct your proposal to reflect that,” Carlstrom said.

    “We’re all broken-hearted,” said Benson during the call. “We felt we were really good stewards, and to end it this way is just heartbreaking.”

    “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as ending,” Carlstrom said. “Again, I would encourage you to put together a robust proposal that meets the necessary requirements within the RFP and have some confidence in the process.”

    Benson described the public process that helped develop the Use Plan and asked Carlstrom why it had been discarded.

    “The RFP is based off the Preservation and Use Plan, which is held up as an example for that kind of document throughout the Park Service and the preservation community,” Carlstrom said. “We have to crosswalk between that and the RFP. And you’ve got to be willing to look at the process we’re forced to contend with from a bureaucratic point of view.”

    What’s in the RFP?

    Carlstrom’s argument to Clemons and Benson was that the goals of the Use Plan may not seem apparent in the RFP’s text — but that an extremely close reader will find them there.

    “I can understand there’s a lot of fear and concern around this,” Carlstrom said. “I have a great deal of confidence that in six months we can have a very different conversation.”

    There is no mention of the Preservation and Use Plan in the RFP itself. There is a single reference to it in the official “Question and Answer” page on the Park Service’s website.

    The 28th question on that page is “Do the evaluators have the cultural, historical, environmental and shack specific knowledge to properly evaluate each RFP?”

    “Yes,” the Park Service wrote in reply. “All documentation has been shared with the selection panel, including but not limited to the historical preservation plan (E.A.) and the Wolfe Report.”

    (The Wolfe Report was produced by cultural anthropologist Robert Wolfe for the Park Service in 2005 and documents the families that have been connected to particular dune shacks for decades.)

    Selection criteria number 2 in the RFP asks for a detailed maintenance plan. Selection criteria number 4 asks respondents how “your experience and background qualify you” to “maintain these unique properties.” Selection criteria number 1 asks for “any other details you believe are relevant.”

    The RFP also states that across all these criteria, “Proposals with detailed responses providing information that is both relevant to each criterion and specific to the shack you would like to lease will be rated more highly than proposals with generic or vague responses.” That sentence is printed in bold italics.

    “You need to read the RFP very carefully and construct your proposal accordingly,” Carlstrom said.

    Many details of the Use Plan do not appear in the RFP. “Commitment to participate in public access opportunities for the historic district” is a selection criterion in the Use Plan. It is not present in the RFP.

    “Hybrid use,” in which a leaseholder occupies a dune shack in the summer but allows artists-in-residence in the winter, was specifically encouraged in the Use Plan and specifically disallowed in the RFP.

    Nonetheless, Carlstrom told Clemons and Benson that the RFP contains the negotiated provisions of the Use Plan within it.

    “This has been in development for over a decade,” he said. “It has taken a long time to get to this point. I sincerely hope you’re developing a proposal and will be submitting one.”

    DUNE SHACKS

    Provincetown Asks for Mediation With National Park Service

    Dune shack families’ deadlines are extended to Oct. 31

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The select board has asked Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom to bring in professional mediators to help with ongoing controversies over the Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars, on the Outer Cape’s windswept Atlantic shore.

    Andrea Tasha, left, and Galen Malicoat holding a sign at a protest in July urging the Park Service to honor its 2012 dune shack management plan. (Photos by Paul Benson)

    “Although the NPS’s stated commitment to follow the Use Plan is clear, there is broad misunderstanding and disagreement regarding the execution of the plan,” the select board wrote in a letter sent to Park Service officials on Aug. 14 and referring to the Dune Shacks Historic District Preservation and Use Plan signed in 2012.

    “There has been a lack of dialogue with NPS,” the letter continued. “We all have not had the opportunity to understand how the NPS is interpreting and executing the terms of the agreed-upon Plan…. We believe a facilitated dialogue will increase public understanding of the NPS’s decision making and promote cooperation between the Park Service, the dune dwellers, and the larger Provincetown community.”

    The letter was addressed to Carlstrom and was also sent to NPS Director Charles Sams; Assistant Secretary of the Interior Shannon Estenoz; and William Hall, director of the Interior’s Office of Collaborative Action and Dispute Resolution; along with Truro’s select board and state lawmakers.

    That same day, Aug. 14, the Park Service sent letters to the families who have long held leases on eight dune shacks that are part of the public leasing contest the agency announced on May 1.

    “The RFP evaluation panel is well underway,” wrote Joan Horgan of the National Seashore leasing team, “but it appears they will not be able to complete all selections by the originally anticipated date” at the end of August.

    Those families had originally been told to be ready to vacate their shacks on Sept. 2 if they did not win a 10-year lease. Now they have until Oct. 31, on the condition that they allow the NPS and winners of new leases to arrange site visits during October.

    Janet Armstrong, who received a notice-to-quit letter in June requiring her to leave her family’s shack in early September, also received an update from the Park Service last week. Carlstrom called to offer her a one-year special use permit for the Armstrong shack, which is not currently part of any public leasing contest and which the Park Service was planning to board up until it could arrange such a contest.

    “I told Brian that this dune shack cannot be boarded up, that this was not the legal and correct course of action to take, and that this was not what we agreed to in the Use Plan,” Armstrong said. “He said he could offer me a one-year special use permit, and when I asked why he had offered Sal Del Deo two years and me one, he said he could perhaps offer me two years,” Armstrong said.

    Teresa Baksa, left, and Bronwyn Malicoat protesting at the intersection of Bradford Street Extension and Provincelands Road in July. The Park Service had recently boarded up Frenchie’s dune shack, which had been left to Sal and Josephine Del Deo.

    Armstrong had further conversations with Horgan at Carlstrom’s direction, although Horgan was not sure about a two-year special use permit, Armstrong said.

    Armstrong decided that she needed time to think — and to consult attorney Bruce Bierhans — before proceeding.

    “I told Brian that it’s not just me and it’s not just Sal — I’m concerned about the other shacks, too,” she said. “I think we’re all in this together, and I don’t want to say, ‘OK, I’ll take a year,’ when everyone else is still fighting and suffering. I’m not ready to say yes or no.”

    The 2012 Use Plan provides explicit instructions on how to evaluate applications for long-term leases and how to organize “transitions” when long-term leaseholders have died. The Park Service has not been following those instructions, by boarding up dune shacks before leases have been issued and by removing the selection criteria identified in the Use Plan and replacing them with an option for applicants to bid as much annual rent as they want in an effort to win a lease.

    That last change — offering applicants the chance to leverage wealth to win a dune shack — has come under withering criticism, including from the select boards of Provincetown and Truro, U.S. senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Rep. Bill Keating, and even protestors on Route 6.

    Markey, Warren, and Keating wrote to NPS Director Sams on July 13 that a focus on financial factors would be a “catastrophic affront” to the history of the dune shacks. That letter still has not been answered, a spokesperson for Sen. Markey confirmed this week.

    The Park Service has also refused to provide the Independent with any proof that it followed a legal process to change the Use Plan since it was adopted in 2012.

    Michela Murphy, who has been advocating for the dune dwellers, drafted the letter the select board approved at its meeting.

    “The Park Service is saying that they’re in fact going by their 2012 plan, and there’s nothing in the RFP that demonstrates that,” Murphy said. “Any questions that have been asked about the process and the criteria for judging have been stonewalled.” Mediation could open up a dialogue that could help the public understand the Park Service, she said.

    Meghan Finn, a former Provincetown resident who is now a conflict mediator in Boston, spoke during the public comments period of the meeting to explain how mediation could be an aid in the dispute.

    “I want to emphasize the neutrality of the process, the possibility for dialogue between all parties,” Finn said. She added that the Office of Collaborative Action and Dispute Resolution at the Dept. of the Interior “is really set up to create these dialogues between many constituents: the town, the community, the National Seashore, and NPS officers.

    “I just can’t speak highly enough of the process,” she said.

    DUNE SHACKS

    As Deadlines Draw Near, Park Service Clams Up

    Silence from agency’s director, but Seashore supt. offers falsehoods

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Janet Armstrong is not sure exactly when she has to leave the dune shack where she took her first steps as a toddler in 1952, 71 years ago. It could be 90 days from the date of her notice-to-quit letter from the National Park Service: June 2. But the digital signature on the document was dated June 9, it was postmarked June 12, and she received it on June 16.

    Janet Armstrong outside the dune shack her family bought in 1948. The Park Service is planning to board up the shack in September, and Armstrong says it will not be properly cared for if the agency’s Preservation and Use Plan is not followed. (Photos by Paul Benson)

    Whichever date turns out to be correct, the shack is due to be boarded up by the Park Service sometime in the first two weeks of September.

    Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom has told the select boards of Provincetown and Truro that there will eventually be a public leasing contest for the Armstrong shack — and for Frenchie’s shack, which Sal Del Deo, who will be 95 on Aug. 12, has cared for since 1953, and which was boarded up on June 29.

    Those two shacks were not included in the public leasing contest for eight other dune shacks that was announced on May 1.

    As things currently stand, Armstrong is supposed to vacate her family’s shack in September, taking all her property with her — then bid on the boarded-up shack sometime in the future — and if she is lucky, move everything back into it a year or two from now.

    “This is not what’s in the plan we made,” said Armstrong, speaking of the Dune Shacks Historic District Preservation and Use Plan, which was finalized in 2012 and originated with a Dune Shack Subcommittee report that took two years, a mediator, and more than a dozen public meetings to create. Armstrong served on that subcommittee, and she said she cannot understand why its work has been discarded.

    “The plan said that no shack will be vacated and closed, ever,” Armstrong said.

    Indeed, on page 25, the Use Plan says that until a “transition has been implemented (notification of transition, designation of shack in terms of general use, leasing or special agreement processes, award of lease or agreement), the occupant would remain and be provided a special use permit, issued annually.”

    The special use permit would end on the date a new leaseholder is set to take over, the plan says.

    Janet Armstrong and her husband, Gil Berke, inside the shack, which had to be moved away from the eroding back shore and rebuilt in 1983.

    Animals can crawl in through holes invisible from the outside and wreak enormous damage on a boarded-up shack, Armstrong said. Weasels, woodpeckers, birds, and mice are major offenders, but even simple roof leaks can create dreadful messes.

    The National Seashore will not be able to maintain these shacks on its own, she warned, and simply boarding them up will not protect the historic structures.

    The Independent asked National Park Service officials including Director Charles Sams and Deputy Director Lena McDowall why the agency has departed so significantly from its own Preservation and Use Plan, which has the status of a “formal decision document” according to the agency’s 2015 National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) Handbook.

    The response — which came from Supt. Carlstrom — simply said, falsely, that the agency was following the 2012 plan.

    In addition to boarding up dune shacks, the agency also did not use the additional lease selection criteria that were exhaustively negotiated with the Dune Shack Subcommittee, according to Armstrong, and specifically established in the 2012 plan.

    Page 71 of the agency’s NEPA Handbook describes exactly how changes to such a plan can be made, and the Independent asked Park Service officials to describe any efforts it has taken to follow those procedures and document its changes to the 2012 plan. They did not answer.

    Stonewalling

    When Supt. Carlstrom canceled his July 24 meeting with the Provincetown Select Board — on the day of the meeting — board members said the Park Service was “stonewalling” and “harming our relationship with them.”

    The agency is not stonewalling only Provincetown and Truro, however.

    U.S. senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. Bill Keating sent a joint letter to NPS Director Sams on July 13 asking for a “thorough RFP review process that respects the history of the dune shacks and properly centers the concerns of the community.

    “Although the ability to fulfill the financial commitment of the lease must be considered,” they wrote, “evaluating lessees disproportionately on an applicants’ financial means would be a catastrophic affront to any public accessibility goals and the shacks’ legacy as a place where artists and others with limited means have convened, worked, and built a community.”

    The current RFP allows applicants to offer any amount of annual rent above the assessed market-rate rent as a competitive factor toward winning a lease — which critics have said turns the current leasing contest into a bidding war that favors the rich.

    The New York Times described that conflict this week with the teaser “Tradition vs. Capitalism on Cape Cod” on its front page.

    As of Aug. 8, at the Independent’s deadline, the National Park Service had not sent a written reply to Markey, Warren, and Keating, a spokesperson for Markey’s office confirmed.

    A Deadline Approaches

    Sal Del Deo’s son, Romolo Del Deo, said he is working with local attorneys Bruce Bierhans and Anthony Mavronicolas, who are donating their time, to try to talk the Park Service into mediation.

    “More and more people are understanding what a huge mistake this is,” the younger Del Deo said. “The question is whether the machinations of bureaucracy can be impacted in time.

    “Honestly, I have been reading their procedures, trying to figure out what they have been up to, and to me it looks like they just decided to cowboy this,” Del Deo said. “They didn’t follow their procedures. They didn’t follow their agreements. They just went off and did this thing, and they seemed to believe that no one would call them on it.”

    The Tasha shack, given to Paul Tasha’s mother, Sunny Tasha, by the poet Harry Kemp in 1960, had an “open door” policy for nearly all of its existence, as in this photo from September 2018. Paul put a lock on it not long after, when a hashtag on Instagram started leading dozens of people to take selfies there, said his niece, Andrea Tasha.

    Paul Tasha also served on the Dune Shack Subcommittee and is applying with his niece, Andrea Tasha, for a 10-year lease on the dune shack that poet Harry Kemp gave to his family in 1960. Like the other families whose dune shacks are in the May 1 RFP, the Tashas are supposed to remove all personal property and quit their shack on Sept. 2 — even though the Park Service may not have decided who won the lease for their shack by that time.

    “Those meetings were long, and I never missed a meeting, and we came up with these qualifying criteria and everyone was OK with them,” Tasha said. “Slowly but surely, we hammered them out. And there was no talk about bidding as much as you wanted to, offering 20 grand or 50 grand or whatever in order to influence the bid.

    Paul Tasha at his metalworking shop in Provincetown. Tasha served on the Dune Shack Subcommittee with Janet Armstrong and 12 others, working with National Seashore employees and mediators from the Consensus Building Institute to write their report.

    “We came to an agreement, everyone was on the same page, and now you lied again,” Tasha said, speaking of the Park Service. “You can’t say you’re gonna do certain things and then not do it. It’s dishonorable.”

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Aug. 10, incorrectly reported the name of one of the lawyers working with Romolo Del Deo. It is Anthony Mavronicolas, not “Anthony Nichols.”

    CONFLICT WITH THE PARK

    Parking at Nauset Light Causes Rift Between Eastham and NPS

    Select board says the Park Service is violating their 2022 agreement on the beaches

    By

    EASTHAM — The select board and Town Administrator Jacqui Beebe are demanding that the National Park Service allow Eastham residents full access to the parking lot at Nauset Light Beach, accusing the Park of violating an agreement with the town over use of the lot.

    A diagram of the Nauset Light Beach parking lot, with the Park Service section in green and the Eastham section in pink (Courtesy Cape Cod National Seashore)

    Beebe and board chair Art Autorino said they would be sending a letter to National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom this week following more than 50 reports that Eastham residents had been denied access to the lot, Beebe said. The letter demands that Carlstrom resolve the issue within one week.

    The parking lots at Nauset Light and Coast Guard Beach, the other Park Service-managed beach in Eastham, are divided into two parts: one-third of the spaces are reserved for Eastham taxpayers and the other two-thirds are designated for visitors with Park Service passes. Normally, select board members said, the NPS portions of the lots are fuller, while there tends to be space in the areas reserved for Eastham locals.

    But over the last month, Beebe said, the town has received dozens of reports of Eastham residents being denied access to free parking in the NPS portion of the Nauset Light Beach parking lot when the Eastham section has been full. A daily pass at Park beaches costs $25.

    The letter argues that the Park Service’s refusal to accept Eastham taxpayer stickers violates a 2022 agreement setting terms for parking at the two beaches. It states that the NPS must “continue to maintain and provide Taxpayer parking spaces at NPS-managed lots, to honor current year taxpayer stickers, and to allow Taxpayers to park anywhere in NPS-managed lots.”

    The letter also says NPS ignores the terms of a 1965 deed conveying the beaches from Eastham to the Park Service on the condition that Eastham taxpayers reserve “the right to use [Nauset Light] beach and adjacent waters for swimming, the adjacent parking area, and without charge.”

    “The deed is not ambiguous, and the Board will not agree to relinquish any rights for its residents and taxpayers,” Beebe and Autorino wrote in the letter.

    The letter demands “that the agreements be honored immediately.”

    National Seashore Deputy Supt. Leslie Reynolds on Monday defended the Park Service’s interpretation of the 1965 deed and 2022 agreement, saying that Eastham residents were not entitled to park in non-Eastham spaces without paying.

    “We still manage our lot for the visiting public, which we charge a fee for,” Reynolds said. “So, if the Eastham lot fills up and an Eastham resident comes over to our lot and says, ‘I can park here because I’m an Eastham resident,’ the answer would be ‘No.’ ”

    Reynolds maintained that the terms of the deed were being honored. “They are swimming, they are parking, they are enjoying the beaches like it says in the deed,” she said.

    But Autorino, Beebe, and select board member Aimee Eckman all said the agreement and deed required that Eastham residents be given free access to the entire parking lot, not just the spots reserved for Eastham residents.

    “It’s pretty clear-cut — we can park in any spot,” Autorino said. “We allowed the Seashore to take over our beaches. But the caveat was that we would always be able to park for free.”

    “We want to have them hold up their end of the deal, fair or not,” Eckman said. “I just don’t get why they’re digging their heels in.”

    The letter to the Park Service makes no mention of legal action. But during a July 24 meeting, the select board hinted that such a move might be on the table if NPS refuses to change its position.

    Carlstrom “has to understand that if he continues to say we can’t do it, then our recourse is legal,” Autorino said. He suggested giving Carlstrom one week to respond.

    Beebe said if the Park Service does not resolve the situation, “We would confer with counsel about any next steps.” She said the board may go into executive session with town counsel during its next meeting on Aug. 8 if needed.

    The Park Service and the town also seem to disagree over the legal weight of the 2022 parking agreement. Reynolds insisted that it was “not a contract” and not legally binding. “A general agreement is more like, we agree to this, and it’s on paper, and you have two signatures,” she said.

    But Beebe said she understood the agreement to be legally binding, saying the divide between “contract” and “agreement” was a distinction without a difference. Autorino concurred: “Why is it not a legally binding contract? They signed it, and we signed it.”

    “The most upsetting part of this for our select board and for me personally is that we have always had a really close, collaborative working relationship with the Park,” Beebe said. “How can we sign an agreement and have such different views of what that agreement actually says? It seems shocking to me.”

    During the July 24 meeting, Beebe said she had spoken to Carlstrom, who she said defended the Park Service’s actions out of “fairness” concerns for nonresident beach visitors. She said Carlstrom wanted to amend the agreement and clarify the Park Service’s interpretation. But town officials said they were uninterested in renegotiating the five-year agreement, noting that the negotiations for the 2022 agreement had been protracted.

    Those negotiations largely concerned the loss of parking space at Nauset Light Beach due to erosion, which Reynolds said was ongoing: “Someday, that parking lot will be in the ocean.” She said the Park Service was engaged in long-term planning to establish offsite parking for the beach.

    This is the second time in the past few months that the Park Service has been accused of failing to uphold its side of an agreement with Outer Cape towns. In May, the Park Service issued a request for proposals to lease eight historic dune shacks in Provincetown and Truro that appeared to ignore a 2012 agreement about how the properties could be leased, prompting objections from select boards in both towns.

    ‘ONGOING CONVERSATIONS’

    Park Service Boards Up a Dune Shack, Then Changes Course

    The Park is now ‘exploring all legal options’ to allow some use of Frenchie’s Shack by Sal Del Deo

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — While the country geared up for the long July 4th weekend, the National Park Service formally evicted Sal Del Deo, 94, from the dune shack he has cared for and made art in since the 1940s.

    A Cape Cod National Seashore trails and maintenance crew member boarding up Frenchie’s shack on June 29. A portrait of Josephine Del Deo, who helped create the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961, looks on. (Photos by Tatiana Del Deo)

    The next day, the agency appeared to begin the process of un-evicting him.

    As of Monday, July 3, at press time, the shack was still boarded up and locked — but National Park Service officials confirmed that the agency is now looking at ways to allow some use of the shack by the Del Deos and would be having “ongoing conversations” with the family.

    From eviction to ongoing conversations took only five days.

    A team of park rangers and facilities crew members — including law enforcement officers with guns and handcuffs — came to the dunes on the back shore of Provincetown on June 29 and enforced the agency’s notice to the Del Deo family to quit the shack.

    Park rangers and maintenance crew arrive on June 29 to enforce the Park Service’s notice to the Del Deos to quit the premises.

    Sal’s son, Romolo, and daughter-in-law, Tatiana, were there, and although Romolo Del Deo argued that the notice to quit was not a legally valid eviction — a maneuver that would have afforded the family an opportunity to contest the matter in court — he said he agreed to leave the shack rather than be arrested for obstructing the rangers’ work.

    The rangers and crew members boarded up the shack’s windows and doors. The Del Deos took food, linens, and mattresses back to Sal’s year-round home in town but left everything else, including artwork.

    The next day, Friday, June 30, Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom called Romolo Del Deo around 8 p.m. According to Romolo, Carlstrom began the call by saying, “I am calling you at the direction of the Secretary of the Interior.”

    National Seashore staff, including roads, trails, and facilities manager John DeFoe, assess how to properly secure the shack’s porch.

    Romolo said that Carlstrom “expressed his concern about the situation,” asked how Sal Del Deo was feeling, and said that Park Service authorities “were doing everything they could and would be getting back to you shortly.”

    Tracy O’Toole, chief of external affairs for the agency’s Northeast Region, confirmed that call in an email, writing, “The National Park Service continues to explore all legal options for allowing some use of the shack by its longtime users and looks forward to our ongoing conversations with the Del Deos.”

    Several events took place last Thursday and Friday that may have helped change the agency’s approach.

    On Thursday morning, at a meeting brokered by the Secretary of the Interior’s office, state Sen. Julian Cyr and state Rep. Sarah Peake spoke with Park Service officials including Assistant Director Dana Trytten and Director of the North Atlantic Region Gay Vietzke. Staff from the offices of U.S. senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. Bill Keating also attended.

    Romolo Del Deo, park ranger Russ Hughes, and chief ranger Michael Valora inside Frenchie’s dune shack during the eviction.

    Cyr told the Independent the meeting was productive. “In a government-to-government meeting like this one, you essentially get to present your case,” Cyr said. “We explained that there’s a real history here related to these dune shacks, including a history of distrust of the Park Service.” About the shacks, Cyr said he and Peake explained, “They’re not like renting a cabin somewhere — they’re hard to maintain.”

    Cyr said they told the Park Service that its arguments about preserving public access to the dune shacks were undercut by the fact that the new leasing program didn’t allow nonprofit or arts organizations to bid for leases.

    Discontent with the dune shack leasing, they told Park officials, “isn’t going away and will only get louder,” Cyr said.

    A trails and facilities crew member from the Cape Cod National Seashore boarding up the dune shack.

    Romolo Del Deo told the Independent that when Carlstrom called him on Friday, he had been planning a picket-line style protest near the toll booth at the National Park Service’s Herring Cove Beach parking lot for July 4. He said the town manager and police chief knew the basic outline of his plans, but he called the protest off after the phone call from Carlstrom.

    “The rangers who actually evicted us were as decent and as human as they could be,” Romolo added. “They didn’t want to be there. And they told us that if everything could be resolved, they would be happy to come back and help us open the shack back up.”

    Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on July 6, incorrectly identified Tatiana Del Deo as Sal Del Deo’s daughter. She is his daughter-in-law.

     

    EVICTION

    Del Deo Refuses Order to Quit His Dune Shack

    Markey, Warren, and Keating ask Park Service to let him remain

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Sal Del Deo, 94, who has spent 77 years caring for and seasonally inhabiting the dune shack he still calls “Frenchie’s” after his friend Jeanne “Frenchie” Chanel, refused an order from the National Park Service this week to remove his personal belongings from the shack and surrender the keys.

    Sal Del Deo, 94, outside the dune shack he has cared for since the 1950s. He refused to turn the keys over to the National Park Service on June 27. (Photos by Elias Duncan)

    Del Deo, an artist and the founder of two Provincetown restaurants, had received a notice in March to quit the shack in 30 days. His son, Romolo, appealed to the Park Service, which extended that deadline to 90 days, a term that expired on June 27.

    Instead of turning in the keys, however, the elder Del Deo made a special trip to the shack, where he was met by Romolo, a handful of friends and supporters, and several news media organizations.

    “I came here when I was 17 and said to myself, ‘This is the closest I’ll ever get to paradise,’ ” Del Deo said. “It was so different from everything I knew, and it has retained that untouched beauty.”

    Del Deo said he would spend his 95th birthday in August here, too. “Maybe I’ll be in the shack, or maybe I’ll be outside, but I’m going to go to the dunes,” he said.

    Reporters from the Boston Globe, the Cape Cod Times, and this newspaper were present to cover Del Deo’s eviction. A crew from CNN interviewed Del Deo at his home in town.

    But no officers of the National Park Service came to the shack on the 27th to enforce the eviction order.

    The state’s Congressional delegation weighed in, however. U.S. senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Rep. Bill Keating issued a joint statement on June 23 urging the Park Service to give Del Deo a temporary special-use permit that would allow him to continue to use the shack, at least for a while.

    On the day of the eviction, the lawmakers wrote to the National Park Service again, saying that “Mr. Del Deo’s extraordinary connections to the dunes demand extraordinary consideration.

    “Simply stated, there is no benefit in removing Mr. Del Deo and leaving the shack vacant for the summer until a formal RFP process can begin,” the legislators wrote.

    “It is vital for the National Park Service to recognize the need for common sense, sensitivity, and compassion while exercising their authority,” the letter continued, “and we again urge the National Park Service to find creative solutions to allow Mr. Del Deo to stay until a public RFP can be completed.”

    Asked for a response to the second letter, Park Service spokesperson Tracy O’Toole said that the agency is “continuing to work with” the Congressional delegation “to address their questions and concerns.”

    A Lifelong Story

    The “extraordinary connections to the dunes” referenced by Markey, Warren, and Keating include not only Del Deo’s decades-long artistic career but also the many achievements of his late wife, Josephine Del Deo, who played a vital role in helping establish the Cape Cod National Seashore.

    Dennis Minsky and Romolo Del Deo in a reflective moment at Frenchie’s shack.

    Her obituary by David W. Dunlap in the New York Times began by recounting the town meeting in 1961 at which she helped persuade Provincetown’s voters to resist the development plans of their own leaders and instead commit the entirety of the town’s Atlantic coast to the new National Seashore.

    Years after that vote, Josephine took action again to protect the dune shacks from the Park Service, which had become intent on destroying them to create a more “natural” landscape. By documenting the long history of artistic and literary figures who have used the shacks as a creative refuge, Josephine helped to establish the Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars National Historic District in 2011.

    That historic district includes Frenchie’s shack, from which her husband is now being evicted.

    “Honestly, when I got the first letter, I assumed it was an error,” Romolo Del Deo told the Independent. “I thought, ‘This can’t be right, and someone has just screwed up.’ ”

    Frenchie Chanel built the shack from driftwood in 1942 and owned it when the National Seashore was created in 1961. By that time, Sal Del Deo had already taken over the care and maintenance of the shack from Frenchie, who was about 40 years Del Deo’s senior.

    Sal and Romolo built the current version of the dune shack between 1973 and 1975, and Sal’s name is on National Seashore permits for that project, he said. The shack sits on pilings built around Frenchie’s original structure, which is now completely submerged in sand.

    When the Park Service concluded its legal taking of the shack by eminent domain in 1973, it granted a “lifetime use stipulation” to both Frenchie and her daughter, Adrienne “Shatzi” Chanel. Left off the document was Frenchie’s other daughter, Jean Schnell Officer, who lives in Tennessee.

    Nonetheless, Josephine told her son that as long as Jean was alive, the shack should pass to her, Romolo said.

    “My mother understood all these plans; she was deeply engaged,” said Romolo. “She told me we were legally entitled to use the shack as long as there were first-generation heirs to Frenchie. That was the gist of my letter back to the Park Service. ‘No, you’re mistaken, Jean is alive and she wants us to be there. We are not illegally occupying the shack at all.’ ”

    The Park Service’s Dune Shack Historic District Preservation and Use Plan, finalized in 2012, specifies that at the end of a “lifetime stipulation,” such as the one Frenchie and Shatzi had, one-year special-use permits should be continually given to “next of kin” until a public leasing process can be concluded.

    Those “transition procedures” were meant to give the existing shack custodians a chance to compete for a long-term lease and also ensure that the shack is maintained while that public leasing can be organized.

    This is also what senators Markey and Warren and Rep. Keating are now asking the Park Service to do: use their “significant discretion to issue Special Use Permits to allow Mr. Del Deo to remain in the dune shack he has worked in for nearly 80 years.”

    Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom has previously told the Independent that he has no such discretion. “My hands are tied” by a federal court order, he said. When asked to provide the court order, NPS spokesperson O’Toole sent a copy of the eminent domain taking from 1973.

    At no point has the Park Service explained why it could not follow its own plan and write one-year special-use permits for Jean Schnell Officer, who was Shatzi’s next of kin. That would allow Del Deo to remain as caretaker of Frenchie’s shack until public leasing could take place — at which point he or his family could compete for a 10-year lease on the shack.

    A Larger Battle

    At the dune shack on Tuesday, Romolo told reporters that what is happening to his father is just “the most insanely ugly example” of a wider failure by the Park Service.

    Romolo Del Deo (center, in black hat) and a dozen friends wait for Sal’s arrival at the shack on eviction day.

    “It’s not just about us here for one more summer,” said Romolo. “What’s happening to the other eight families is just as bad.”

    The public leasing of eight other dune shacks is currently underway, and that contest will not be judged on special criteria from the Preservation and Use Plan designed to protect the historic district. It does, however, include the option to bid far above assessed market rents in an effort to beat out competitors.

    Protesters on Route 6 and the select boards of Provincetown and Truro have argued that wealth should not determine dune shack leases.

    At his dune shack on Tuesday, Sal said the same.

    “All of you younger people are going to be denied this great privilege, unless you have a lot of money,” Sal said to the assembled friends and reporters. “That really is the nub of the whole problem. It’s making money off a way of life we started, many, many of us, all the way back to Eugene O’Neill’s time.”

    State Senator for the Cape and Islands Julian Cyr, who is from Truro, and state Rep. Sarah Peake, who is from Provincetown, are meeting with senior staff of the Dept. of the Interior on Thursday, June 29, along with staff from the offices of Markey, Warren, and Keating, Cyr told the Independent on Tuesday night.

    They plan to argue that the selection criteria the Park Service has issued should not be considered equally, and that “rent offered” should be de-emphasized while “experience” should be weighted heavily.

    “It’s not every day that state legislators get an audience with senior officials at a federal agency, and we’re planning to take full advantage of the opportunity to defend our constituents,” Cyr said.

     

    SHACK ATTACK

    Amid Protests, Dune Shacks Eyed by Bidders

    Carlstrom defends leasing rules; a second eviction notice is served

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — At least 45 people were given tours last week by National Park Service officials who are running the current bidding contest for eight of the 18 dune shacks of the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, on the back shore of Provincetown and Truro.

    EVICTION IN THE PARK

    Sal Del Deo, 94, Is Ordered to Leave Dune Shack

    The Park Service has ‘missed the forest for the trees,’ he says

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The leasing contest that the National Park Service announced on May 1 for eight of the 18 dune shacks in the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, on the back shore of Provincetown and Truro, will not be the last one.

    Sal Del Deo outside the dune shack that he still calls “Frenchie’s,” 41 years after her death. (Photo by Marnie Crawford Samuelson)

    A ninth dune shack that Jeanne “Frenchie” Chanel built in 1942 and that her friend Salvatore Del Deo and his family have helped maintain since 1953 is also going to be put into a public leasing competition in the near future.

    Del Deo, 94, received a letter in late March from a Park Service realty officer telling him he had 30 days to remove his personal items from the shack and surrender the keys. After an appeal from Romolo Del Deo, Sal’s son, the Park Service sent a second letter extending the deadline to 90 days — a term that will end in late June. The Park Service will conduct a competitive leasing process for the shack, the second letter confirmed.

    Cape Cod National Seashore officials did not respond to written questions from the Independent about further details of the Park Service’s plans for the shack.

    Sal, a celebrated artist and restaurateur, has spent summers in the shack since 1946 — 15 years before the Cape Cod National Seashore was created. He spent his first nights with his future wife, Josephine, there in 1953 — a “premarriage honeymoon” that was a gift from Frenchie, who believed the shack was for lovers, Romolo said.

    Sal said the notice to quit is a “betrayal” of Josephine, who died in 2016, and who, by all accounts, was instrumental in persuading Provincetown to entrust the entirety of the Province Lands to the new National Seashore in a pivotal town meeting vote in March 1961 — an event described by David W. Dunlap in her obituary in the New York Times.

    Josephine Del Deo enjoying the dunes in the 1990s. (Photo courtesy Romolo Del Deo)

    “It’s a betrayal, really, of the goodwill that we all finally embraced with the Park,” Sal said.

    After fighting to help create the National Seashore, Josephine fought the Park Service’s destruction of dune shacks in the 1970s and ’80s. She played a major role in gathering the documentation that helped establish the Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District, which was formally protected in 1989.

    Toward the end of her life, then-National Seashore Supt. George Price invited her to speak to a class of new rangers at Salt Pond Visitor Center in Eastham, Del Deo said.

    Price said, “ ‘I want to introduce Josephine Del Deo, who did so much to create this park,’ ” Del Deo recalled. “ ‘If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t be here, so listen to what she has to say about the history here.’ ”

    About two years later, at a graveside service for Josephine, Price asked Romolo if he could speak. In full uniform, Price delivered a nearly half-hour eulogy of her lifetime of achievements, including preserving the Province Lands for posterity, Sal said.

    “It came out of the blue, and I was startled, but I was also proud of my wife that she had made such a dent in this bureaucracy,” Del Deo said. “That she could infiltrate her personality into this big, monolithic thing known as the National Park.

    “I wish Josie were here now,” Del Deo added. “I feel very inadequate. She was like David and Goliath — except that her credo was ‘We can all live together.’ ”

    A Lifetime Lease

    Unlike the current leasing contest being held for eight of the shacks — which directly contravenes the National Seashore’s own Historic District Preservation and Use Plan from 2012 — there is not much question about the legality of the quit notice Del Deo received. After a federal “taking” of the shack in 1973, the Park Service gave Chanel and her daughter Adrienne “Shatzi” Chanel a lease on the shack that would last for both of their lifetimes.

    Frenchie died in 1983, and Shatzi — whose legal name was Adrienne Augustine Antoinette Schnell — died in Sparta, Tenn. in 2016. Her obituary ran in the Sparta Expositor.

    Unlike a typical lease, these lifetime arrangements, or “reservations of use and occupancy,” did not involve rent payments or any routine correspondence, Del Deo said. He continued paying taxes to the town of Provincetown for the shack, as he had done for many years, but almost seven years went by before the Park Service discovered that Shatzi Chanel was no longer living.

    The eight dune shacks that are currently up for lease were all formerly on long-term “reservations” similar to the one the Chanels had. In each of those cases, when the long-term lease expired the Park Service wrote one-year special-use permits, sometimes for many years in a row.

    Romolo said he had hoped the Park Service might offer one-year permits for the remainder of Sal’s life.

    Sal Del Deo and his son, Romolo, in front of the dune shack they rebuilt together in 1973. (Photo by Marnie Crawford Samuelson)

    Unlike the other long-term leaseholders, however, the Del Deos are not named on the Park’s “reservation of use” for that shack. Only Frenchie and Shatzi are. Frenchie did will her shack to Josephine and Sal, according to both Sal and Romolo, but inheritance law is not binding on lifetime leases.

    “For years, the Park was working with us, acknowledging they knew we were out there — it’s not exactly a state secret,” Romolo said. Sal’s name is on the official permits for a major reconstruction project from 1973, Sal said, and their whole family is in Dr. Robert Wolfe’s ethnographic report on dune shack history and culture.

    “Sal has probably the longest history of continuous dune shack use of anyone,” Romolo said. “It’s 77 summers, except when he was in the Korean War.”

    Despite Supt. Price’s eulogy of only seven years ago, that history seems unlikely to move current National Park administrators, Romolo said.

    “Bureaucratic systems try to simplify things so they can manage them,” Romolo said. “I’m sure they’re well-intentioned and think they’re doing an excellent job.

    “But the Park has a mandate to preserve cultural diversity as well as natural diversity, and eradicating the dune dwellers would definitely destroy that,” Romolo added. “Once the dune dwelling community is gone, it will be like any other living thing that has been wiped out.

    “There’s no one person who can’t be replaced,” Romolo went on. “I don’t know if there’s a remedy for our situation. But this kind of experience and knowledge and cultural depth is not easily transferable — and I wish I knew how we could preserve the other dune dwellers.”

    Sal said the Park Service is treating the shacks like real estate — and that their significance to these towns is much deeper.

    “When I saw this place, I said this is like the beginning of life on Earth,” said Sal. “It’s elemental, spiritual.

    “I’m a painter and a pantheist, and I love nature,” Sal continued. “We’re big, compared to the tiny little things that are in the woods, and we walk there, not knowing that we’re stepping on something that’s alive. Inadvertently, in our innocence, sometimes we destroy things.

    “I think of the Park as being like that,” Sal said, “a huge monolithic thing. They mean to do right. But sometimes they miss the forest for the trees — and they’re destroying an oasis that people had created out of nothing but flotsam and jetsam.”

    DUNE SHACK LEASES

    Two Oversight Agencies Could Halt Park Service’s RFP Plan

    But so far, neither agency appears to be willing to take action

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The National Park Service has not responded to Provincetown and Truro, whose select boards have both asked for the suspension of the current request for proposals from bidders on 10-year leases for eight of the 18 dune shacks in the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District.

    Both towns have said that the RFP does not align with the Dune Shack Historic District Preservation and Use Plan of 2012. The boards also requested a joint meeting with the Park Service and the Mass. Historical Commission.

    Dune shacks blend into the landscape of the Peaked Hill Bars. Left to right, the Fowler shack, managed by the Provincetown Community Compact; the Bessay-Clemons shack, part of the current RFP leasing program; the Chanel-Del Deo shack; and Hazel Hawthorne Werner’s Thalassa shack, managed by the Peaked Hill Trust. (Photos by Paul Benson)

    The RFP has a July 3 deadline, at which point the agency is free to begin awarding leases.

    The Mass. Historical Commission is one of two agencies that has official powers of inquiry regarding Park Service activities in National Historic Districts, which are regulated by the National Historic Preservation Act. Under that law, both the commission and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) have formal roles to play.

    The advisory council, an independent federal agency, can determine that “the terms of a programmatic agreement are not being carried out” — in which case the Park Service could not rely on that agreement to justify its actions and could have to begin an entirely new historic resource preservation plan from scratch.

    The ACHP and the state historic preservation officer — in Massachusetts, that is Brona Simon, executive director of the state historical commission — each have the power to dispute whether Park Service actions have upheld their obligations under the law. When such a dispute is lodged, according to federal regulations, “All work that is the subject of the dispute will stop until the dispute is resolved in accordance with the procedures in this section.”

    In other words, those agencies have the power to force the Park Service into a serious accounting of how its RFP is consistent with its written Preservation and Use Plan of 2012.

    The current RFP differs from that plan in at least four areas: leasing selection criteria, seasonal use restrictions, the length of leases offered, and the ability for applicants to offer rent above market-rate prices.

    Park Service officials have repeatedly told outside agencies that it is following the Preservation and Use Plan.

    In February, for example, Sen. Ed Markey’s office was told that “the NPS is proud of the collaborative process that occurred during the Dune Shack Historic District Preservation and Use Plan Environmental Assessment (EA) Section 106 process.”

    The plan “was developed with significant public and local government involvement,” the agency wrote, adding that “at this time CCNS is merely implementing the Plan/EA leasing plan.”

    On May 1, however, the NPS released the current RFP, which contravenes that plan — and its assurances to Markey.

    The ACHP can also issue an advisory opinion at any time “regarding the adequacy of the NPS’s compliance with Section 106.”

    The Agencies Clam Up

    Both Markey’s correspondence with the Park Service and a February advisory council meeting with National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom took place at the urging of a constituent, Gail Cohen.

    A spring sunrise like this one seen from the Ray Wells shack the Thursday before Memorial Day in 2021 will be forbidden to new leaseholders of eight of the dune shacks according to the terms offered by the National Park Service, which allow residential use only from Memorial Day to Labor Day for the next 10 years.

    Cohen is not a dune dweller but says she has advocated on their behalf since 1989, when the shacks were determined to be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Cohen provided emails from Markey’s office and from the ACHP to the Independent that verify these interagency exchanges.

    The agencies themselves, however, would not discuss them. Markey’s office, the ACHP, and Brona Simon of the Mass. Historical Commission all refused interview requests. The Park Service refused to permit an interview with Bill Burke, the National Seashore’s Section 106 coordinator.

    Markey’s office referred written questions to a communications team, who would say only that “our office has been in touch with the National Park Service to elevate the community’s concerns.”

    When pressed for details, the communications director added that “the Senator’s Office has asked NPS to respond to the concerns raised by Provincetown and Truro as soon as possible.”

    The ACHP’s press department wrote that “the Programmatic Agreement specifies certain steps the NPS must take to fulfill its Section 106 responsibilities for the leasing program. We recommend you follow up directly with the NPS regarding questions about its actions.”

    When asked about the consequences to the NPS for violating Section 106, ACHP lawyer Kelly Fanizzo wrote that “the possible consequences of noncompliance with Section 106, including noncompliance with an executed Section 106 agreement, are typically litigation (an entity suing the federal agency) or public attention / public pressure on agency management and leadership.”

    The ACHP did not provide any information about its meeting with the Park Service in February.

    The Mass. Historical Commission was even less forthcoming. At first, communications director Debra O’Malley would say only that “the Massachusetts Historical Commission does not have the authority to enforce Section 106.” She directed further inquiries to the ACHP.

    When presented with follow-up questions, O’Malley directed the Independent to read the Code of Federal Regulations — and added that the agency was “declining to speculate on what may or may not trigger the sending of a letter of inquiry.”

    Why So Coy?

    Neither Gail Cohen nor Tom King, who was a director at the ACHP for a decade and helped coin the “traditional cultural places” concept that underlay Dr. Robert Wolfe’s ethnographic report on the dune dwellers in 2006, was surprised that the two agencies have hesitated to question the Park Service.

    A fire in the woodburning stove of the Fowler shack in November 2021. Both the residential and the nonprofit-managed dune shacks run for three seasons, not one, and some people, including Stan and Laura Fowler, stayed in the dunes year-round.

    “There’s all kinds of things these agencies could do,” King said, speaking of the MHC and the ACHP. “They have the authority to ask questions and demand answers.”

    The response of the ACHP so far is “typical,” King said. “They don’t want to have a fight with the Park Service. They don’t want to have a fight with anybody. So, they keep their head down and fob off anything like your inquiries back to the Park Service.”

    According to the dispute resolution clause in the 2008 Nationwide Programmatic Agreement, a sufficiently strong objection from either agency could stop the RFP program from moving forward until its effects on the Dune Shacks Historic District have been resolved. That is exactly what the select boards of Provincetown and Truro have requested.

    Neither agency would describe to the Independent what might trigger them to send a letter of inquiry to the Park Service, however — much less a formal dispute.

    Supt. Carlstrom, in an email that arrived just before this week’s deadline, said that the letters from the Provincetown and Truro select boards do not, in themselves, constitute a dispute under Section 106.

    “What bothers me is, they’re not responsive to we the people,” said Cohen. “They’re about to eliminate the last remnant of the real dune shack community, and these agencies are just covering themselves.”

    HISTORIC PRESERVATION

    Truro Board Joins Opposition to Dune Shack Plan

    Park Service’s lease terms negate years of public planning, say critics

    By

    TRURO — This town’s select board has joined Provincetown’s in objecting to the Request for Proposals the National Park Service issued on May 1 to invite bids on 10-year leases for eight of the 18 dune shacks in the Peaked Hill Bars Historic District.

    The Clemons-Bessay shack closed for the winter in November 2021. If the Park Service’s current RFP is not withdrawn, residential occupancy in this and seven other dune shacks would need to end on Labor Day for the next 10 years. (Photo by Paul Benson)

    As the Independent reported on May 11, the Park Service’s RFP ignores a years-long public process and the agency’s own signed agreements from 2012, which describe how lease solicitations should be written. The RFP omitted all of the selection criteria approved in 2012 by Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. George Price and Northeast Regional Director Dennis Reidenbach, and it includes an option to compete with other bidders by offering to pay more rent.

    On May 22, Provincetown asked the Seashore to suspend the RFP, “redefine” it to include the 2012 agreement, and remove the option of bidding up the rental amount.

    The select board also asked the Seashore to “reevaluate the impact of unprecedented seasonal restrictions which limit the occupancy of the dune shacks” to the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

    On May 23, the Truro Select Board authorized the writing of a similar letter.

    “How they’re handling this is an outrage,” said board member Bob Weinstein. “These shacks existed from day one for people who had no money, and to make money a requirement in an RFP is a violation of the cultural and artistic history of Truro and Provincetown.”

    “This RFP is classist and reeks of a money grab,” said board member Stephanie Rein. She added that if new leaseholders did not understand the dune environment, they could “unwittingly cause irreparable damage” to the historic district.

    The deadline for bidders is July 3. Because of the short timeframe, the select board authorized Weinstein and Rein to write and send a letter on behalf of the whole board without waiting for the board’s next meeting on June 13.

    Select board member Sue Areson said she could reach out to “former colleagues in the media all over the country” to help publicize the letter once it is written.

    Leasing Terms

    By most accounts, the objections are not about whether the Park Service should offer long-term leases on the shacks but about how it should be done. More than a dozen public meetings from 2009 to 2011 were conducted on precisely that question. The Dune Shack Subcommittee of the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Commission wrote its report in 2010, and its recommendations were modified and then formalized in the Park Service’s official Dune Shack Historic District Preservation and Use Plan in 2012.

    Mildred Champlin and Andrea Champlin at the Mission Bell dune shack last September. (Photo courtesy David W. Dunlap, Provincetown Encyclopedia)

    The Use Plan added five selection criteria to the Park Service’s standard leasing terms. They include knowledge of the surrounding environment; capacity to perform maintenance; commitment to public access; commitment to the “values of the historic district and the continuation of tradition”; and availability and intent to use the shack.

    The plan also endorsed 20-year leases and the possibility of “hybrid uses,” in which dune shack leaseholders could allow artist-in-residence programs in the winter.

    None of those terms are in the current RFP.

    “I’m dumbfounded by this,” said Mildred Champlin, 92, who leases one of the few dune shacks that still in private hands and not part of the new re-leasing plan.

    Champlin’s late husband, Nat, bought the Mission Bell shack before the National Seashore was created in 1961. Following an eminent domain lawsuit, the Park Service gave the Champlins a lease on Mission Bell for the lifetime of their children in lieu of payment for taking the property. Her three children now range from 54 to 63 years old.

    “The maintenance is endless,” said Champlin. “You have sand moving, covering the shack and then uncovering it. You shovel it out, or you shore it up. It’s constant.”

    The work does not take place only in summer, Champlin said. Winter nor’easters are by far the most dangerous storms on the north-facing dunes of the backshore.

    The blizzard of February 1978 that destroyed Henry Beston’s “Outermost House” in Eastham also scoured the backshore dune to within 12 feet of Mission Bell. “We had to pound holes in the icy sand to get fencing in front of the house,” Champlin said.

    The nearby Adams shack had to be moved entirely that winter. Photos show it perched on the edge of the dune.

    The ever-shifting sand accumulated until there were 100 feet of grassy “front yard” between Mission Bell and the dune’s edge, Champlin recalled. Then 75 feet vanished in one week during the so-called perfect storm of October 1991.

    “We drive out to the shack at least once a month, even in winter,” she said. Even if leaks and wind damage were not a problem, simply managing the mice requires that much attention.

    “There is nothing more disgusting, I can tell you from experience, than a mouse nest in a mattress,” Champlin said.

    Mildred’s daughter Andrea said that it takes years to learn how to care for a shack and that neighbors offer critical support to each other.

    “It takes a long, long time to learn how to live out there,” Andrea said. “We rely on each other. The thing about 10-year leases: by the time someone has figured out how to live out there, they’ll be thrown out.”

    A Way of Life

    Ever since the National Seashore was created, Park Service administrators have tried to exert control over the shacks and the people who occupy them — with varying degrees of success.

    The Clemons-Bessay shack seen from the Fowler shack in November 2021. Shacks run by the Provincetown Community Compact and the Peaked Hill Trust, the two nonprofits that offer short-term stays to artists and writers, are occupied April to November. (Photo by Paul Benson)

    “The way they’ve dealt with the shacks is typical of all their patterns of management,” said John Thomas, a lawyer and musician who served on the Advisory Commission’s Dune Shack Subcommittee. There are good people working for the Seashore, Thomas added — but the imperative of national and regional leadership is to clear the land of challenges.

    “Over time,” he said, “they narrow and reduce. The goal is to minimize all human activity except what they can carefully control.”

    At the May 22 select board meeting, Thomas cited a mandate given to the Park Service by Congress to preserve the “way of life” on the Lower Cape.

    “It’s in two years of Congressional hearings on the National Seashore, and it’s in the introduction to the Senate’s report of the bill,” Thomas said.

    The second paragraph of that introduction reads: “The Lower Cape must also be viewed as a way of life — a culture — which though conditioned by its environment, finds its essence in the people who have lived and are living there. This bill seeks to preserve the way of life these people have established and maintained on the Cape.”

    DEVELOPMENT

    Eastham Board Approves New House in Seashore

    A rare vacant lot, with a $740K price tag, is deemed buildable

    By

    EASTHAM — A 1.3-acre vacant lot located off Cable Road and within walking distance of Nauset Light Beach is on the market for $740,000 — and it is being touted as “a rare opportunity to live in the National Seashore Park surrounded by parkland.”

    That certainly is the truth.

    Most of the undeveloped lots in the Cape Cod National Seashore were taken by eminent domain by the National Park Service in the decade or so following the establishment of the Seashore as a national park in 1961. The landowners were paid an amount based on a fair market appraisal, according to Seashore Planner Lauren McKean.

    There were more than 2,000 such land transactions during the 1960s and early ’70s. Only 615 properties within the 43,000-acre park remain under private ownership, McKean said.

    But the vacant property at 0 K St. was approved last year by the Eastham Planning Board for construction of a 2,980-square-foot modern farmhouse. The status of the lot, as well as the size of the proposed house, have both been vigorously contested by National Seashore staff.

    Ben Zehnder, the attorney representing the current owners Frank and Linda Noto, had pursued site-plan approval to establish that a house could be built on the lot. That approval by the planning board has boosted the presumed value of the property from the town’s assessment, $51,100, to its current asking price of $740,000. The lot went on the market on Nov. 1, shortly after the expiration of the period during which the approval could have been appealed.

    According to Denise Kopasz, the real estate broker who listed the property, the Notos had planned to build a house there but have instead put it on the market “due to a change in family circumstances.” They currently own a house on the adjacent lot.

    The Cape Cod National Seashore includes land in Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, and Chatham. Owners of properties that were developed before 1959 could secure a “certificate of suspension of condemnation” from the Seashore. Those certificates suspended the right of the National Park Service to take the land by eminent domain and allowed the owners to retain their ownership rights in perpetuity. Properties without buildings had no such protection.

    The vacant 0 K St. property, along with an adjacent property with a house on it, had a single deed and were under the same ownership as far back as the 1940s. When the park was established, the owners secured a certificate of suspension of condemnation covering the pair of properties, saying they considered the undeveloped area a part of the lot with the house on it.

    The two properties have changed hands a few times since then and have continued to enjoy protection under certificates of suspension acquired by the subsequent owners.

    The Notos purchased the lots in 1986 and initially approached the National Seashore in 2020 about splitting the two parcels and building a new house on the undeveloped portion. The National Seashore opposed the plan and continues to contend that the owners have treated the two properties as a single lot, which has served to protect the undeveloped parcel from being taken by eminent domain for more than 50 years.

    In a letter to the planning board, Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom expressed opposition to site-plan approval for a house on the undeveloped parcel. “Despite having benefited from this assertion for more than a half century,” Carlstrom wrote, “the Notos now contend that the parcels are separate buildable lots.”

    In the Park Service’s view, building on the open parcel would result in two single-family dwellings on a single tract, said Carlstrom. Eastham’s Seashore zoning district requires at least three acres for a building lot, he said, and the 0 K St. lot comprises only 1.3 acres.

    Carlstrom warned that, if the proposal was approved by the planning board, the certificate of suspension on the Notos’ properties would be invalidated, and the new lot “would be put on the National Seashore’s land acquisition priority list.”

    Meanwhile, the planning board factored into its consideration that the property owned by the Notos is part of the Nauset Beach Plan, a subdivision plan drawn up more than 100 years ago. Many of the lots were never developed, and several streets continue to exist only on paper. Most of those undeveloped properties on the plan were taken by eminent domain by the National Seashore, and the undeveloped lot the Notos own would likely have been taken as well, McKean said.

    The town’s lawyer, as well as Zehnder, pointed out the lot with the Notos’ house and the adjacent undeveloped lot are identified as individual lots separated by a paper street on the old subdivision plan. Since the subdivision predated the adoption of zoning laws, the lots were grandfathered and didn’t have to meet restrictions like the three-acre minimum size.

    And although the 2,980-square-foot new house would be dramatically larger than other homes in the neighborhood, Zehnder argued that it would not affect the character of the neighborhood because it would not be visible from the road.

    The planning board approved the site plan, and the National Seashore did not take the town to court to file an appeal.

    While the National Seashore could now take the land by eminent domain, it has not had enough money to do any land purchasing for the past several years.

    Eastham Town Planner Paul Lagg said the debate over the land at 0 K St. demonstrates the conflict that can sometimes happen when a property falls under two different jurisdictions.

    “They don’t always line up,” Lagg said. “We try as best we can to work collaboratively with the Seashore, but from time to time local zoning doesn’t line up exactly with what the Seashore’s standards are designed to do.”

    Such was the case for the Notos’ lot, Lagg added.

    “For the town’s regulatory purposes, we consider it two lots separated by a paper street, but the Seashore considers it one lot,” he said.

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