Provincetown had its town meeting on Monday, and made some big decisions about proposed subsidies to restore winter airline service to the town, and gender neutral bathrooms.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with Paul Benson of the Provincetown Independent to get the highlights.
Gilda Geist There was an article on this year's town meeting warrant that would have allowed the town to give an annual subsidy to the airline Cape Air. What was the purpose of that article?
Paul Benson Sure, so, Cape Air did year-round service from Provincetown to Boston for 35 years before canceling it just before the winter of 2024. And these two winters [have been] without winter service. It's a connection point to Logan, to points onward. There are people who go to medical appointments in Boston who like to use it. And trying to restore that connection has been a policy goal. There's federal money that supposedly can do it, but we sort of all know that federal money has been in a state of rolling crisis these days. So the town leaders brought this idea that it is possible to do an operating override, which is a permanent tax expansion to pay $332,000 a year for Cape Air to run five flights every week in the winter. And it essentially guarantees their income and make sure that even if the tickets don't sell, they're not bleeding money.
GG So Article 12 didn't end up passing. How close was it and what is your understanding of why the article failed?
PB I don't think it was particularly close. It didn't quite get a majority. It got about 45 percent, and it would have taken two-thirds to pass. The fact that it was a permanent tax expansion bothered the finance committee, rather than a one-time expenditure of free cash. The fact is that not a ton of people use this winter service. There are technically alternatives. You can take a bus to Boston if you really need to get there. And because everyone would have had to pay for a service that only a few people use, people argued that it's like a road or a bridge or any other form of infrastructure that air traffic is essential service. That argument wasn't persuasive to enough of the voters to get to two-thirds.
GG There were 48 articles on this year's town meeting warrant. Other than the Cape Air stuff, what were some of the most important decisions that were made Monday night?
PB Well, the one other article that got 15 people up to the microphones, besides Cape Air, was a plan to renovate the public bathrooms that are right outside the main parking lot near MacMillan Pier. The town passed a non-binding referendum to turn those into gender inclusive, gender neutral, all-one-space-for-everybody bathrooms last year. And the plan to do so was now on the ballot. It was a $380,000 plan, and it didn't fully renovate the building because it's in a velocity FEMA zone and to fully renovate the building would have meant lifting it up onto pilings and cost more than $1 million. So this compromise plan did still leave two halves of the bathroom. There were still urinals on one side. The trans and non-binary community said that it still fundamentally felt like two separate, gendered bathrooms and it really didn't hit the mark. There was a lot of discussion on the trade-offs between what was practical and what was economical and what's in line with the ideals that the voters had asked for. And after some discussion, that also didn't get to the 50 percent mark, which is what it would have needed to pass.
GG So what's the plan going forward for the gender neutral bathrooms?
PB Well, they're going to have to now try to do it all over again. What they're up against is when you renovate a building to 50 percent of its value, FEMA says you have to raise it out of the floodplain. So to try to get under that number, still create one big space that all genders share—with separate stalls, lots of dividers, lots of privacy, but still a one gender space—to try to get that accomplished while staying under $500 million to avoid having to lift out of the floodplain is going to be their job. And they'll have a whole nother year to try to figure out if they can get that done. And in the meantime, it's going be the same as it is now, which is just the old men's room and the old women's room, both say unisex on them, but everyone sort of lines up on the side that they were used to lining up on before. It's still basically gendered bathrooms.
Read Paul's full story in the Provincetown Independent this Thursday.
