EDITORIAL

Let TYC rebuild

Seven years later, it's plenty clear that some people won't be happy until the Tiverton Yacht Club is dead and buried.

Tiverton should not stand by and let that happen and if a zoning change is what it takes to get the TYC back on its feet, so be it.

The fire that leveled their historic clubhouse one night in 2003 wasn't the worst thing that happened to the TYC and its members. Sadder still is the ordeal that has followed.

Rebuilding and resuming the social and sailing activities that have occupied them there for better than 60 years ought to have been a straightforward process. It has been anything but thanks to objections every step of the way by several neighbors.

Spurred on by an odd court decision or two, they have attacked the club from all angles. In legal briefs and at town meetings they've protested the new clubhouse drawings, the septic system (too small, too big), parking, storage, boat dock -- you name it .

These objectors went strangely silent when the new overseas owners of a sleepy boatyard across the street unveiled plans that would transform that place and the neighborhood. Traffic assumptions, parking, new docks stretching over a football field into the basin, and extensive facilities on barely three acres for a 'world-class marina' met with scarcely a peep from those nearby. Yet this small club and its local members have encountered nothing but roadblocks.

The change the club proposes would create a .'Waterfront Zone" along a stretch of 13 lots on the east side of Riverside Drive now zoned R-40 (only four of those 13 actually meet R-40 requirements). It would make the club a permitted use rather than a non-conforming one and it would reduce lot size requirements to a half-acre and thus better reflect what's actually there. The Planning Board has supported the proposal, as have the town planner and Harbor Commission.

For generations, this affordable, family-friendly yacht club has been the only place in this waterfront town where young people could learn to sail and swim and where people of all ages could gather to share their love of boats and the water. But after seven years of getting by with tent and temporary toilets and paying legal bills that never cease, that tradition is hanging by a thread.

The neighbors have every right to be heard -- and they've succeeded with the club repeatedly trimming the size of its proposed house to a small fraction of what once stood there.

But the real aim seems to be to finish the job that fire started -- to bleed the club's membership rolls and bank account with never-ending legal maneuvers until the TYC is no more.

Tiverton would be diminished by its loss.

WHERE T0 WRITE:

Sakonnet Times, 1745 Main Rd. Tiverton, RI 02878. Letters may also be sent to: sakonnet@eastbaypapers.com