PHOTO BY PAULA MULLER
Signs protesting the Mariner Project that is proposed for Pleasant Street.
It won unanimous site plan review approval from the Planning Board last Monday night so why does it feel like the Mariner senior assisted living project is surrounded by discord and disagreement?
With its cafes, “wellness room” and walking paths, the 89-unit Pleasant Street project sounds like a welcome addition to a community lacking assisted living. In signing off on Mariner’s site plan review, the board examined the proposed project for harmony, safety and convenience.
These attributes aside, Mariner has its detractors, including the opponent who erected an oversized “fat cat” near the development site, clutching a Charlie McCarthy-like puppet labeled “Marblehead resident.”
What is it about a project that has developer ties to Marblehead that so angers residents? This is an important question to answer before Mariner developers stand in front of the Board of Appeals on April 19 seeking their final approval.
Maybe it is time for cooler heads to step into the Mariner controversy and ask a few basic questions. The fundamental one pertains to the reason for building Mariner in the first place: does the town need an assisted living facility? More importantly, does Marblehead want such a facility?
It is important for someone willing to talk to people on both sides of the Mariner battlefield to pin down the exact reasons why residents don’t want the facility. It’s always easy to blame neighborhood opposition to any development on the NIMBY factor – as in, “not in my backyard” – but it is often unfair to level blanket accusations at people who have their life savings tied up in a home abutting a development site.
Getting to the bottom of neighborhood opposition to Mariner allows a potential mediator in the controversy to identify and sort out concerns so that the appeals board meeting does not simply become a recitation of all the grievances and refutations aired during the Planning Board meeting.
The mark of any good community is the care it pays to its youngest as well as its oldest residents. With that measuring stick in mind, maybe Mariner needs to return to port for a stem- to-stern review and, perhaps, even an overhaul.
