2009 Archive

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Today's Head Scratcher

It appears that down in Cape Pablo, you know, on the other side of the Canal, they’ve been spending a little too much time at the beach; and not enough time in Pab’s math class (yes, just math, no trigonometry required). Evidently, at the Truro Town Meeting they took a vote on whether or not to change a zoning law that effects condominium development. I won’t go into the boring details of the zoning issue, suffice it to say that the vote was 136-70.

Now I’ll go slow for you Wahey’s without calculators so pay attention. They needed a 2/3’s vote in order to pass the zoning change. So they called in the Town Accountant, Trudy Brazil, (good thing she’s an accountant) to figure it out and all by herself, she confirmed that 136 votes were indeed 2/3’s of the total 206 votes.

WOW! Game over, right? WRONG. It seems an anonymous (obviously didn’t want to have his calculator confiscated) caller notified the Town Clerk, Cynthia Slade, that 2/3’s should be carried out 4 decimal places to .6666 to be accurate and therefore the vote needed should have been 137. Hmmm. So Slade called around to some other towns in Pab-land and got varied opinions. Hmmm. I guess Provincetown uses .66 as the multiplier. Hmmm. So now Slade’s going to bring in the Attorney General to decide.

Two other proposals, one to limit the CUBIC FEET of residences in town was defeated, Whew!, dodged a bullet there; and another to limit the size of cottage colonies to 450 SQUARE FEET was postponed. Can’t blame them there, better wait for that new calculator.

See, and you all thought there was no math involved in politics.



POSTED BY STAN at April 29, 2009

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