WESTBOROUGH, MASSACHUSETTS — The town has scheduled a public hearing for Nov. 2 on Amazon's appeal to operate a drone pad, a ground station from which the retail troop's airborne couriers would depart with parcels. The bylaw that decides whether such a pad is permitted is still being drafted. Both facts appeared in the same announcement, presented as one fact. Locals present treated the sequence as unremarkable.
The gap, measured from the town's own documents: declared, a bylaw under construction; printed, a hearing with a fixed date. The hearing precedes the bylaw by one scheduled evening. The bylaw precedes itself by an unscheduled number of weeks. In the town's native units, the distance between ruling and rule is known as "the process."
"The hearing is on the calendar, and the calendar does not negotiate," said Marlene Ostrander, the town's Deputy Administrator for Regulatory Sequencing. "The bylaw is on a different kind of calendar. The two documents will meet when they meet." Asked whether a rule could lawfully be finished after the ruling it governs, Ostrander said the town "prefers to let the sequence express itself," and declined to say what it was expressing. "Nothing here is late," she added. "Some things are simply later than the things they govern."
The bylaw is being drafted by a subcommittee that has met four times and produced a heading, a preamble, and eleven placeholders — a yield of 2.75 placeholders per meeting. The heading, the subcommittee confirms, is final. "We will know what the rules are by the time we need to say what they are," said the chair, Ray Kowalczyk. He confirmed the unwritten sections cover "edge cases." The matter calendared for Nov. 2 is, by definition, one: it arrived before its rule.
Carried one digit further, the method means the finished bylaw's first test will be a case already decided. Should the board approve the pad on Nov. 2, the bylaw will arrive to find its inaugural precedent waiting, pre-agreed, and will open its career by concurring with it. The draft itself sits on the town's waiting list — the queue of the queue, as locals explain it — behind items that are also waiting.
Filed as the town posted it: hearing, fixed; bylaw, drafting; gap, standard.
