The Wine Wars: The Lawyer Brought the Fertilizer to the Zoning Board of Appeals

Last night the ZBA dealt Fox Hill another blow. But first, a word about the town’s troubled relationship with transparency.

Last night’s ZBA meeting was, once again, a bruising evening for the Williamses and the tasting room they so badly want. We will get to the bodies. They are still warm. But first, transparency, that civic virtue the Town of Chatham keeps promising and keeps misplacing.

Board member Lisa Semenetti has been pushing for it. Earnestly. And yet the person whose job it is to post the relevant correspondence before a meeting, a duty the town’s own website advertises with a straight face, simply did not get around to it. I cannot tell you why. I can tell you that I got the letters, scanned them, and loaded them last week. Perhaps the worker bees at Town Hall are logging too many hours on Facebook. Perhaps they couldn’t locate the documents. It is, after all, very hard to find anything when your head is parked up the supervisor’s backside.

So, thanks to that lapse, the room sat in obedient silence while Howard, attorney for the Williamses, got caught up on the matter. The opposition’s letters fi…