GREAT BARRINGTON, MA —
It wasn’t what I had expected to hear. It wasn’t what I wanted to know.
At a Memorial Day weekend picnic with friends from Great Barrington and beyond, Judith Kales said to me: “They started up again. This morning. Early. Sunday. Can you believe it?”
She was referring to the construction and excavation business situated next to her home on Blue Hill Road, an operation that has been under a cease and desist order from Great Barrington’s Building Inspector Ed May for nearly a year.
For two weeks, due to public pressure from selectmen and an outraged public, the owner Gary O’Brien had minimized the deafening and incessant noise from trucks, earth movers, garbage trucks and a very loud race car echoing between the two ridges where Blue Hill Road winds its way to the top of a Berkshire hill on the eastern edge of this rural town. The district is designated as an R-2 zone that does not allow commercial operations.
The moratorium is over.
Now this might seem to be an issue of minor consequence – the kind of feud between neightbors that occurs frequently in small towns, what Great Barrington Town Manager Kevin O’Donnell, in fact, described as “chicken shit.”
But in fact, it is far more than that. It has to do with whether laws meant to protect the interests of individuals can prevail against bullies like O’Brien, a rough-and-tumble burly contractor with a history of thumbing his nose at his neighbors and zoning restrictions. And for whatever reason, O’Brien has had the implicit support of the town manager, who referred a complaint from neighbors about the Memorial Day weekend commercial activity to the lawyer for the violator of the zoning ordinance rather than to the building inspector who has, under statute, enforcement authority for zoning regulations.
In the meantime, the town manager has put a gag order on Ed May — not the first time that O’Donnell has throttled May’s attempt to enforce zoning regulations. In September of last year, O’Donnell ordered May not to interfere with O’Brien, but to “observe” only.
Perhaps the issue will be clarified on Monday, June 6, at 7 p.m. when the Board of Selectmen hold a special session that may or may not be open to the public to address the continued business operations of Gary O’Brien Landscaping and Construction on Rogers Road. The town’s attorney and Building Inspector Edwin May are expected to attend.
What is clear is that the town manager is giving the impression of having dismissed the legitimacy of complaints lodged by Rogers Road residents Tom Jensen, Frances Kollman and Judith Kale over the expansion of an excavation, trucking and heavy-duty landscaping operation.
Last August, Building Inspector Edwin May issued a cease and desist order to O’Brien. Many formal complaints later, many site visits by May later, and $93,000 in fines later, O’Brien is still at it, defying the cease and desist order.
This is not the first time O’Brien has run counter to zoning regulations. Similar violations have occurred in Becket, and more recently, in Otis on West Center Road, where O’Brien had his business until he moved it to Great Barrington last summer.
O’Brien claims, through his attorney, that the activities at his site, which revved up again on the Sunday morning of Memorial Day (as did the piercing roar of O’Brien’s race car) are necessary preparations for the tree farm he is planting in the gravel pit in back of his business’s large garage and vehicle yard. His is an agricultural operation, he maintains – a noisy one, to be sure, that requires numerous trips by garbage trucks and dump trucks and flat beds for logs – but one that is allowed by right.
His attorney, Edward McCormick, also contends that O’Brien’s business practices are permissible because of a 1996 Superior Court judgment that allowed the previous owner, Leamon Roger, to park his garbage truck on the property.
The neighbors disagree. They say O’Brien is using the notion of a tree farm as a cover for his excavation, logging and hauling businesses. And Building Inspector Ed May agrees with them.
“It’s time to end the madness,” declares Thomas Jensen. “This is a residential neighborhood, not an industrial park.”
David Scribner, June 3, 2011