On Cape Cod, housing and water projects routinely compete against each other for limited land.
This is the case in an ongoing dispute between Provincetown and Truro over the location for a new wellsite.
Both towns need more water, and arguably the best place for a new well is on a piece of land that is supposed to be used for housing.
That's according to Paul Benson of the Provincetown Independent. CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with him recently to learn more.
Gilda Geist Why do Provincetown and Truro need a new wellsite?
Paul Benson Provincetown's municipal water system is many decades old and it draws from groundwater that's in the town of Truro. The groundwater in Provincetown is too salty to use. And that groundwater in Truro comes on pipes into Provincetown, is processed into drinkable water and then some of it comes back to Truro to serve the north area of town, as well as the police station, fire station and elementary school. The towns have a shared water and sewer board with four members from Provincetown and three from Truro, and they make decisions on how to run the water system. It's time for a new well to expand capacity. There's more demand in both towns. Actually, the demand's almost evenly split between future plans in Provincetown and in Truro. There's plenty of groundwater, but the infrastructure to extract it requires a lot of protection areas. You have to own a whole 11.5-acre circle of land, so getting that done takes a lot of advanced planning.
GG Your article focuses on this hydrogeology study, of which the primary results are now in. So what was that study for and what did the results say?
PB They assessed about 33 possible sites that could support these 11.5-acre circles and found that most of them are not suitable for various reasons. There are three that are quite good, one of which is on a very large piece of public land where Truro is planning a big housing project. That's land that voters bought in 2019 at town meeting specifically for the purpose of housing. There is another smaller parcel of land deep inside the National Seashore, which may have some access issues. And then the third parcel is privately owned. It's actually not owned by the town at all. So those three are the best sites to draw a new water supply from, and the fact that one of them is the Walsh property—where Truro has been planning a big housing project—that's in some ways the best one, closest to the existing infrastructure and it's the one where the town of Truro has really big plans, is sparking conflict between the two towns.
GG If there are three sites and one of them is the Walsh property, why can't they just choose a different site?
PB The other two sites do have issues. One doesn't have road access and it's surrounded by National Seashore, so it's not entirely clear that the Seashore would cooperate in the town's effort to extract it. And the other, again, is currently privately owned. To use the Walsh property—which has about 28 acres of developable land at its southern edge, where the town has been planning 160 units of housing—[you'd have] to take 11 [acres] of it away in the very center, [which] leaves about 16 acres that could still be used for housing. And so what it means is compressing Truro's plans, which have included both apartment buildings and duplexes, and maybe even build-your-own lots—some much less dense development, as well as some much tighter development. If you compress it all into a smaller area, you're really trading away those backyards and garden spaces, and some of the amenities that people in Truro are really attached to for the housing that they envision.
GG What's the next step here? What are the folks involved going do to try to resolve their disagreements?
PB Well, there's a series of points at which the towns need each other. The water that Truro needs for this new housing development is extremely likely to be coming from the Provincetown water system. Obviously, the water system relies on water that comes from Truro. So, it's one of those situations where [it's] sort of like a condo complex. You may not completely see eye to eye, but you have to come to some agreement in order to move forward. So, the towns will probably work towards that. It's not clear what that will mean for the housing project on the Walsh property, whether it really does shrink into a much smaller footprint, or whether the towns pursue another site despite these other obstacles, or whether they can't agree for a while and have to circle back to this. It's just not clear exactly what's going to happen.
