The Blairhaven Study Committee is hard at work, looking at potential uses for the five-acre site on Standish Shore. They want to have some firm recommendations in place before the sale of the property is finalized later this summer, which is commendable.

t’s also nice to see that some people who were opposed to the sale, including some wary neighbors, were included on the committee – that speaks well of both the skeptics and the town after the contentious Town Meeting vote in March. Hopefully, the committee’s ideas about what buildings should be kept and what the property can be used for will get a full vetting at a future selectmen’s meeting, and the public will get a chance to weigh in before anything is set in stone.

This is good, because the town should be treading carefully here after the Town Meeting vote engendered such controversy. Much of that was overblown – people’s incorrect recollections of what actually happened that night was at times so factually inaccurate that it bordered on slander. Yet the underlying discontent, based on the idea that there wasn’t a clear idea of what to use the property for, shouldn’t be so easily brushed aside. In fact, there was an attempt to insert language on Town Meeting floor stating that the property would be used for “passive” recreation only, an amendment that was rejected by voters. If that had passed, using one of the buildings for town offices would be trickier, if not expressly prohibited. What’s being discussed now, while it may in the end be a good idea, certainly isn’t passive recreation – and that’s what was sold on Town Meeting floor.

The appeal of the Blairhaven purchase was always the idea of waterfront access. Duxbury already owns plenty of swamps in the middle of town. The idea of having a place besides the harbor where residents could get to the water (there is already a public boat launch near Blairhaven, although that fact isn’t exactly broadcast from the mountaintop) was a good one.

Using the buildings is almost a different discussion. The idea of a harbormaster office seems to make sense, but does the town really need more meeting space, with the Senior Center and now Tarkiln? What will the maintenance costs of a building be? These are questions that should be answered, along with the simple one: is it legal? Otherwise, the project’s opponents can say they had every right to be skeptical.