The Tiverton Planning Board spent the closing stretch of its Tuesday, August 4 meeting airing complaints about how it receives information from the town's planning office, and members said the breakdown is affecting decisions on active development applications.
The discussion came under an agenda item labeled Planning Board Policies and Procedures, according to the Tiverton Planning Board's published meeting recording. It produced no formal vote. Instead, the board and planning staff talked through a set of procedural commitments: a weekly emailed update of everything the office receives, a seven-day deadline for meeting packets, and a renewed request for paper copies for members who want them.
One member described receiving a document package she stopped counting at roughly 400 pages about 25 and a half hours before the meeting began. "I worked for eight hours, right? I sleep for eight hours. I'm here for four hours," the member said, adding that late deliveries leave the board looking unprepared. "It makes me feel like — and I'm not the only one who feels this way — that someone's trying to make us look bad when we're this unprepared."
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Under the arrangement discussed, the planning office will send an emailed summary every Tuesday of correspondence, applications and other material received that week, including a note when nothing came in. A member said that would give the board roughly four updates a month and let members plan around a fixed day.
Separately, the board asked for all meeting material seven full days before a meeting, with hard copies placed in members' Town Hall mailboxes on that same timeline. Members allowed for emergencies and vacations. A staff member responded that both requests were workable.
The board also discussed scheduling a workshop on the town's Google Drive folders and its geographic information system, or GIS — the mapping tool that lets users pull up parcel data, past plans and distance measurements. Staff said a permitting portal is being set up with logins for board members, which would let them pull applications directly rather than working through shared drive links.
Email versus mailbox
A recurring complaint was that members cannot tell where a given document will arrive. "We're getting packets, small packets, in our mailbox. We're getting flooded with emails. We don't know what we're supposed to expect in our mailbox and what we're supposed to expect in our emails," one member said, describing a document set that appeared in his inbox at 4:37 the afternoon before the meeting.
Staff read back send dates from their own records — an original transmittal on Wednesday, July 29, and a resend on July 30 after a board member reported the shared-drive links would not open. One member confirmed the July 29 date; another said the material reached him August 3. Part of the confusion, the chair noted, is that the planning office has been setting up separate town email accounts for board members so planning correspondence does not mix with personal mail, and one member had only recently been switched over.
Members also said residents have contacted them privately asking whether the board had seen emails the residents sent, sometimes days before those emails reached members. "I don't know what the holdup is. And it's frustrating. It makes me feel stupid," one member said. A staff member repeatedly asked members to flag anything missing, pointing to a transmittal sheet included with each packet as the checklist. A member pushed back on that approach: "That really doesn't work. We have to have a process in place, right? A standard operating process that does not vary."
No hard copies, no written decisions
A longer-serving member raised three additional items. First, hard copies. He said the board's own policies and procedures require applicants to submit multiple paper sets — he recalled 20 — specifically so the planning office would not have to make copies itself. He said he did not receive a paper agenda for the August 4 meeting. Staff said the agenda was approved after packets went out.
"I keep asking that. I've been asking that for five years now," the member said of hard copies. He asked that material already in paper form in the office be distributed to the three members who still want it, and said purely electronic submissions could stay electronic.
Second, he said the board is not receiving written copies of its own decisions. "We, the Planning Board, make decisions — master plan, preliminary plan, final plan. I never see those, and I don't see them on the website either," he said, noting the decisions are posted at Town Hall and the library. A response from the table was that a binder of decisions is supposed to be kept in the planning office. A member replied that going to the office to read them is not a substitute.
Third, he said the board no longer sees a status report on what applications have come into the office. "Right now I don't know what's come into the office until I see it on the agenda," he said. That request overlapped with the weekly update the board had already asked for.
The missing consulting engineer
The final item was the absence of the board's consulting engineer, Weston & Sampson, from meetings. The member said the firm does good work but that its written comments are no substitute for having an engineer in the room when technical disputes arise between town review and an applicant's engineer.
He said that for years the town's consulting engineer, and the public works director, attended planning board meetings. "None of us are engineers, and we've got some very complicated projects coming before us, and it would really be helpful," he said. He suggested raising application fees to cover the cost if the town's budget does not, noting the board cannot run the function as a profit center but can recover costs. A member characterized the change as "another example of marginalizing the Planning Board." The chair said staff would find out when and why the practice stopped and whether it can be restored; a staff member agreed to look into it.
The stakes were visible earlier in the same meeting. On an application for a construction office and storage building on Stafford Road, board members said they had received Weston & Sampson's review comments only shortly before the meeting and the applicant's written responses the same day. "It just came out today," one member said. Another said he had about 25 minutes to review them.
The board had been prepared to grant a combined master plan and preliminary plan approval that night with conditions. After discussion of how long a separate final-plan hearing would add, a motion for conditional approval was withdrawn and the board instead voted by voice to continue the hearing to September 1, with the applicant first on the agenda. The applicant said he had been pursuing the project since January and faces a deposit of $279,000 to secure the building. "I've been trying to do this since literally last January. I'm losing month by month by month," he said.
The chair tied the delay directly to the timing problem. "If we don't get the information until today or yesterday, we can't possibly do that and have the decisions that we want to have," she said. "So that's the frustration that we have." Staff said they would meet with Weston & Sampson the following day and try to get review comments to applicants earlier so responses can circulate before meetings.
What happens next
The weekly Tuesday updates and the seven-day packet deadline take effect as an informal practice, not a rewritten policy; no vote was taken to amend the board's policies and procedures. The chair framed it as a trial: "So, this is what I'd like to try. See if that works out."
The board's next regular meeting is September 1. It also voted by voice to open a public hearing at a special meeting on September 15 dedicated to the Seasons Corner Market application, a project the board said warranted its own night because of the volume of material and expected public turnout. Board members separately set a site walk for Wednesday, August 12, starting at 10 a.m. at a Bulgarmarsh Road property and continuing to a Spring Street site at 11 a.m.
Residents who want to reach the board on any pending application were directed to contact the planning office. Agendas and meeting notices are posted through the Rhode Island Secretary of State's open meetings portal.