The Easton Town Council was back on Tuesday night with a relatively long two hour meeting but with some significant substance on the agenda.
The most notable of which was a public hearing to discuss town ordinance 646, which would allow the Easton Village housing development to sell fifteen lots that had been originally allocated for affordable housing, and transfer those funds to the Town of Easton to be used for other affordable housing projects.
Here are fifteen minutes of highlights:
The other interesting part of the meeting was when Geoff Oxnam, Vice President of Operations for Easton Utilities, presented the annual cable programming cost adjustment for 2015. Sadly for customers using Easton Cable, those rates are slated to go up from just over $3 at the low end of service to just over $10 for the premium tier of network channels.
In this eight-minute video, Mr. Oxnam highlights the factors that impacted the increased fees and an interesting commentary on the way the networks were pricing their products:
Doug Davies says
How does moving low income units to historically low income areas uphold the Comprehensive Plan of mixed income communities?
“Compounding the general lack of housing in the lower income markets is
the fact that what housing there is available for this segment of the population is
segregated. Easton is becoming a collection of income‐segregated developments,
where the very poor live in one area, the blue‐collar workers in another area, and
higher income residents live yet somewhere else, and never the twain shall meet.
As was discussed in the Community Character Element, this is undesirable for
our community.”
So the fact that they have exorbitant community association fees should absolve them of making true their promises under the PUD conditional zoning? It’s almost as if it was setup for failure from the beginning. It is not much of a community if you are dictating that you must make above x to live here (which is the undertone of what is being said). That is in stark contrast to the true purpose of the PUD.
Welcome to more income segregation, this time sponsored by the very entity that was setup to defeat it. Disappointing that the squabbles herein are being discussed when this should have all been obvious when the initial PUD application was submitted that we would face this problem. Think long term.