Brent Harold / Journal

The point of this column is that there is nothing new in it.

I know that’s not a very promising lead sentence, but it’s true that the latest Dunkin’ Donuts pitch to Wellfleet’s Zoning Board of Appeals is pretty much a repeat of the one about a year ago.

A few days before Christmas George Zografos went before the ZBA to ask once again for permission to enhance his business in town with a drive-through window.

Once again a roomful of residents and part-time residents had to rearrange busy holiday schedules and drag our aging bodies out into the cold to explain why such enhancement would not in fact enhance our town.

Neighbors of Dunkin’ Donuts explained once again to the board the negative effects on the quality of their lives of the restaurant’s outdoor lights, noise, and trash. Others explained how they hadn’t changed their minds since the last such hearing about not really needing any more summertime hassles at a very busy point on Route 6. Still a dozen or more others, unable to attend, had to sit down and write out their objections in letter form (and the assembled crowd had to listen to them).

According to the law, the applicant must demonstrate that benefits of the proposal outweigh detriments. Zografos’s designers had tinkered with the design of the approach to his window, trying to reduce objections about danger . But such tinkering seemed almost willfully to ignore the main issue, the obvious (obvious at least to virtually all the those who attended the meeting) detriment to a very important thing around here, town character.

The DD emphasis on the benefit of convenience, for instance. As mentioned by one speaker, there are doubtless more convenient towns than Wellfleet, distant 20 minutes from the nearest super market and better part of an hour from a real mall. But we choose to live here despite, some of us even, perversely enough, because of that very inconvenience.

This is a town which when it realized that our zoning was such that Dunkin’ Donuts could move into town without so much as a special permit, as happened in 2010, overwhelmingly in town meeting passed an anti-franchise law to close that barn door.

Since his Dunkin’ Donuts was the proximate cause of the bylaw you might think Zografos would be content and grateful with the original store that barely slipped in under the wire.

The law allows this one guy, who lives at the other end of the Cape, to force a roomful of citizens once again to spend an evening to defend the quality of our lives. The last hearing ended with his being allowed to “withdraw without prejudice,” giving him the right to this return performance. This meeting ended the same way, with the board convinced that (lest the applicant appeal to a state court without the interests of locals at heart) the safest way for the town was to once again permit Zografos to withdraw without prejudice. So now if he wants he has a third shot at us.

Should we feel sorry for the lone businessman forced to take on a whole town? Ayn Rand would no doubt see it as the fast food visonary thwarted by the small-minded masses. Perhaps Zografos sees it this way himself.

Actually the process seems tilted in favor of the single business owner vs. the citizens of a town. It may be legal, but it doesn’t feel right. The repeated ZBA appearances begin to feel like pestering, like contempt of the town by this business owner (backed by the implicit threat of the resources of a billion dollar corporation).

A more democratic process would require the applicant to earn the attention of the ZBA and the citizens by demonstrating the need and likely desirability of his proposal with a petition signed by half the people in town.