Petitions Seek To Restrict Use Of Sea Camps Pond Property

BREWSTER – The future of the Sea Camps Pond property could shift to permanent conservation under two citizens’ petitions the Brewster Conservation Trust plans to present at town meeting. If approved, the measures could prohibit any development of housing and wastewater facilities on the parcel. 

 The pond property is a 70-acre parcel on Long Pond, 10 acres of which are set aside for affordable housing and wastewater treatment. The remaining 60 acres are under a conservation restriction.

The first citizens’ petition seeks to revise the Sea Camps comprehensive plan adopted by voters in 2024, essentially overriding the previous vote. 

Seamus Woods, vice president of the Brewster Conservation Trust (BCT), said the revision to the comprehensive plan would designate the 10-acre area as “conservation and water supply protection,” restricting any potential development in the future. If the petition passes, the town would have the option to bring the plan back to town meeting to change it back. 

The second petition is a bit more rigid. It seeks to remove housing, community housing and other municipal purposes (such as wastewater treatment) from the list of potential uses for the Long Pond property. The article also would permanently protect the property as conservation land under Article 97 of the state constitution and authorize the select board to place a conservation restriction on this portion of the pond property.

If town meeting approves the second petition, it would have to go to the state legislature, which could take years to approve, thus halting any movement on the feasibility study. 

While the articles aren’t mutually exclusive, Woods said they do build upon each other.

The citizens’ petitions are a response to the feasibility study that was approved by the select board earlier this year, said Woods. He said the petitions were endorsed by members of the BCT.

 The select board voted 4-1 in favor of conducting a feasibility study on the Sea Camps Pond property to determine whether or not the proposed affordable housing and wastewater treatment project would be suitable for the property. The study is currently underway, led by the affordable housing trust. 

Before the land acquisition in 2021, BCT entered into discussions with the town surrounding its involvement with supporting the purchase of the properties. Woods said at that time, BCT hired Tom Cambareri to conduct a hydrology analysis of the property. 

“His analysis was that basically any drop that lands on any of those 70 acres is either going to go into Long Pond or is going to work its way toward our wells in the Zone II,” said Woods.

Woods said BCT reached back out to Cambareri after the town released hydrology reports conducted by the Horsley Witten Group as supplemental research in discussions with the Brewster Ponds Coalition (BPC) when developing the scope of an updated integrated water resource management plan. Town Manager Peter Lombardi said this analysis was not, in any way, related to housing on the pond property, but was developed in response to the BPC’s concern about town drinking water. 

Woods alleges that the Horsley Witten Group used average pumping rates to conduct simulations. He said the average rates are only correct twice a year because of the disparity in population over the course of an entire year. 

“Doing the modeling at steady state, at average conditions, we thought was a bit misleading,” he said. “Or just not diligent.” 

They asked Cambareri to create models at higher flow rates to see if it changed the capture area in those wells, which it did, he said. 

Select board member Caroline McCarley said what she could infer was that there may be some “science debate on this point, by starting with different kinds of assumptions that have therefore led to different interpretations.” 

Woods said the simulations, because they are based on computer modeling, are making assumptions about the transit of water and will have some margin of error. Woods said the models BCT created were based on worst case scenarios, or extreme conditions. 

Board Chair Mary Chaffee clarified that Horsley Witten Group had gone back and conducted the same tests under extreme conditions as well. Lombardi said the updated mapping and analysis was brought to the attention of the select board in discussions regarding the feasibility study of the pond property. 

The updated analysis by Horsley Witten Group looked at peak summer pump rates. Lombardi said the analysis and findings were not dramatically different from BCT’s analysis done by Cambareri, which found that it would take at least 150 years for any wastewater to reach the wells. 

“The [housing and wastewater] project, as it’s contemplated, may be able to capture effluent that is untreated from those time horizons and treat it now,” said board member Ned Chatelain. He was referencing a simulation graphic that showed time lines spanning decades, indicating that there was not a wastewater path that intersected with a well until after 140 years. 

“In general, I would’ve liked to see these wait a year until the feasibility study was completed,” Chaffee said of the petition articles. “Since that’s an information gathering process and no action whatsoever is taking place until that information is gathered and analyzed.”

Woods said part of the reason for bringing the measures to town meeting now is based on the wording of the 2024 comprehensive plan article for the pond property, which stated that any action, including funding for a feasibility study, would go before voters prior to approval. 

The select board voted 4-1 not to recommend the petition articles. Member Pete Dahl was the lone supporter. 

“We have spent decades buying land in and around this area to protect the water fields,” said Dahl. “Why would we, after spending all this effort to protect it, put it at risk?” 

Dahl added that the town has other areas that it could explore for affordable housing. 

“I stand by the work that the town did painstakingly for two and a half years,” said Amanda Bebrin, select board member. 

The process to develop the comprehensive plan included community input and involvement, which Bebrin said was handled outside of a town meeting venue because discussions were so robust. 

BCT is looking at this through one singular lens, she said, whereas as a select board member, she has to be open to “all the things that are important to Brewster.”

Before the select board voted on the recommendation of the two petitions, assistant town manager Donna Kalinick provided statistics about the attendance rates for past town meetings regarding Sea Camps questions. 

The most attended meeting to ever take place in Brewster history was in September 2021 to vote on the purchase of the Sea Camps properties. According to town records, 1,495 people were at the meeting, 17 percent of the Brewster population. The meeting in 2024 to vote on the adoption of the comprehensive plan saw 608 voters in attendance. Last May, around 295 residents attended town meeting. 

The first petition would require a majority vote to pass, while the second petition requires a two-thirds vote.