Really, Dedham?
America is in the throes of a real immigration crisis. Record numbers of migrants are crossing the border, propelled by strife in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. The White House is facing wrenching decisions about how to balance compassion, law and order, and financial costs.
And state and local officials charged with handling the influx have been forced to make some difficult choices of their own.
But the choice before one local body last week wasn’t that difficult at all.
Dedham’s Zoning Board of Appeals had a rare opportunity to take a small but meaningful step toward easing the crisis at virtually no cost to its constituents, and it declined.
It should reconsider.
Here’s what happened.
Many of the migrants allowed into the United States have been placed in legal limbo — permitted to stay in the country but not to work to support themselves.
The federal government should be using every possible tool to speed up work permits. The Biden administration is also reportedly considering steps to limit the number of people crossing into the country to claim asylum.
But in the meantime, all those migrants have to go somewhere. And eat something.
In Massachusetts, one of the sites being used to house migrants is a hotel in Dedham.
The controversy arose when the hotel, which was already cooking for the roughly 425 migrants on site, sought to produce more meals and deliver them to migrants in other hotels in the region.
Because this would turn the operation into a “catering” service, the hotel owners had to seek a special permit from the town’s zoning board.
While the state as a whole faces a serious budgetary challenge in housing and feeding so many people, the impact on the town of Dedham of cooking more of those meals there would have been de minimis. The owners, using a kitchen in an old restaurant adjacent to the hotel, weren’t asking for permission to expand the physical plant and weren’t proposing to move additional migrants into the hotel. They just wanted to add an employee or two to the existing operation and dispatch a van to other hotels once a day. While that might technically be catering, it’s undoubtedly not what the authors of the town’s zoning bylaws had in mind when they required caterers to get a special permit.
But the need for the hotel owners to jump through those legal hoops created an opportunity for the neighbors to weigh in. And their reaction was over the top.
One speaker at the zoning board meeting warned that the area would “turn into Mass. and Cass,” referring to the area near Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard in Boston that has struggled with open drug use and homeless encampments.
Dedham’s Zoning Board of Appeals had a rare opportunity to take a small but meaningful step toward easing the crisis at virtually no cost to its constituents, and it declined.
Others railed against “handouts” to immigrants, a position that was both deeply uncharitable — given the migrants’ desperate straits and well-documented struggle to obtain work permits — and utterly irrelevant.
The town of Dedham has no say over what benefits migrants should receive. The question that night was whether it should make the smallest imaginable effort to pitch in on a local, regional, and national crisis. And the answer was no.
The 3-2 zoning board majority that rejected the permit wasn’t all that clear about why it voted like it did.
But Dedham’s zoning bylaws require the board to weigh the “adverse effects” of this sort of proposal against the “beneficial impacts” to “the town or the neighborhood.”
It’s easy enough to drum up “adverse impacts.” More trash, perhaps? But it’s just as easy to point to “beneficial impacts”: activity in a restaurant that had been closed for some time, a couple more jobs in town.
In the end, this was a judgment call. Help out, or don’t.
Two members of the board were willing to forge a compromise: Let the kitchen serve just one additional hotel for the rest of the year and then come back to the panel.
But for the majority, even that wouldn’t do. The zoning board can do better.
And if it won’t, the town should alter its bylaws so that this kind of small change isn’t subject to board approval — and to the exclusionary impulses of a single neighborhood.
In a crisis, it’s hard to know what’s right sometimes.
But sometimes, it’s easy.