To the editor:

Question 7 raises two serious concerns for the cities and towns of Southeastern Massachusetts: the further erosion of local control over land-use decisions and a potentially damaging unintended consequence for communities that need to construct or expand public sewer systems.

The communities of Southeastern Massachusetts are remarkably diverse. They include cities, suburbs, small towns, farming communities and coastal communities. Their infrastructure, environmental constraints, development patterns and capacity for future growth are equally diverse.

Yet Question 7 would impose a single statewide zoning standard, allowing single-family homes on qualifying residential lots of at least 5,000 square feet with 50 feet of frontage where public water and sewer are available.

That would override locally adopted zoning in communities that have made different choices about appropriate lot sizes and development density.

Those choices belong at the local level. Planning boards, town meetings, city councils, elected officials and residents are in the best position to balance the need for housing against infrastructure capacity, water resources, wastewater disposal, transportation, environmental protection and the character of their communities.

Massachusetts needs more housing, and the Commonwealth has an important role in helping communities produce it. But there is an important distinction between providing communities with the resources and incentives to create housing and taking away their authority to decide where and at what density that housing should be built.

Question 7 crosses that line.

There is also a second consequence that could be particularly serious in Southeastern Massachusetts.

Our region urgently needs additional wastewater infrastructure. Much of Southeastern Massachusetts continues to depend upon individual septic systems. At the same time, communities face increasingly serious problems involving nitrogen pollution, impaired rivers and estuaries, drinking-water protection and the need to support appropriate economic and residential development.

The Commonwealth itself recognizes the magnitude of this problem. Legislation now before the Legislature specifically addresses financing essential wastewater infrastructure needed to respond to nitrogen pollution in Southeastern Massachusetts.

These sewer projects can cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Even with substantial state and federal assistance, communities must persuade taxpayers and property owners that the environmental, public-health and economic benefits justify those enormous investments.

Question 7 could make that task substantially more difficult.

Under Question 7, extending public sewer and water would do more than provide infrastructure. It could also trigger a statewide right to develop qualifying lots at a density that local zoning currently does not permit.

That means a town could build a sewer primarily to clean up a river, protect an estuary or solve a public-health problem and, as an unintended consequence, lose much of its ability to control the development that follows that sewer.

For many communities, particularly smaller towns, that could fundamentally change the political calculation surrounding sewer construction.

Residents who might support sewering to improve water quality could oppose it if they believe the project would also remove the town’s ability to control future development density. A project that is already extraordinarily difficult and expensive to approve could become impossible to move forward.

And therein lies the contradiction.

Massachusetts is asking Southeastern Massachusetts to make enormous investments in wastewater infrastructure while Question 7 would attach a significant loss of local land-use control to making those very investments.

The Commonwealth should be making it easier for communities to build sewers, not giving them a new reason not to.

Housing and wastewater infrastructure should not be competing state policies. Properly planned, they reinforce one another. Sewer systems can support additional housing and economic development while protecting water quality — but only if communities can determine where that growth should occur and what level of development their infrastructure can reasonably support.

That is what local and regional planning is supposed to accomplish.

Question 7 turns that process around. Instead of allowing communities to determine where growth should occur and then plan infrastructure to support it, the installation of infrastructure itself could determine development rights.

That is the wrong relationship between infrastructure and land-use planning.

Massachusetts can address its housing shortage without forcing communities to choose between maintaining reasonable control over their future growth and constructing the wastewater infrastructure they desperately need.

The Commonwealth should give cities and towns the resources to do both — not take away local control as the price of building a sewer.

Jim Whitin

Westport

Whitin is chairman of the Westport Planning Board.