Gloucester Daily Times
---- — To the Editor:
Regarding editorial headlined “Hotel foes owe answers” (the Times, Monday, Aug. 13), we are advocates of a master plan respectful of Gloucester’s marine industrial needs for the future, not foes of a well-planned, well-located hotel.
Only a court and other authoritative official bodies can decide the legal merits of what we allege about spot zoning, conflicts of interest or environmental land use concerns.
What we know for a fact is that, without serious infrastructure improvements to Commercial Street and the Fort area, the marine industrial jobs on the Fort which should keep fishermen and lobstermen working for decades, cannot survive, much less thrive, in competition with a shiny, space-hungry hotel.
We are new to the legal process and will have our clerical errors cured, but the absence of a respectful master plan for the Fort area is no clerical error; it is as substantive as a problem can get.
Let’s all focus on our collective local future, complete a decent business plan as a community to modernize marine industrial jobs, and let the courts decide the legal issues.
JAMES TARANTINO
Gloucester
