b"C H A P T E R E I G H TFrom that moment on, a Zoning Bylaw has been a fact of life for Chatham property-owners. As aficionados know all too well, it has never stayed intact for long.Conditions keep changing. Take population. The 1960 census showed 3,248 Chathamites; by well into the Nineties, the head count had more than doubled. As for housing units, at the end of World War II, there were 1,315; by 2000, that total had quadrupled and then some, to 6,700. Inevitably, the pressures of more people wanting more houses put an earlier Zoning Bylaw to the testand calls for amendments regularly followed. This has kept local lawyers like John Farrell, William Hammatt, and Bill Riley busy for decades, tweezering intricacies under a magnifying glass, analyzing and questioning proposed revisions.After Town Government was reorganized in the mid-Nineties, the new Town Manager, Tom Groux, took some time to get his feet on the ground, then in 1997 brought on a new staff member attuned to zoning matters. He was Kevin McDonald, who had worked for Groux in Duxbury and Winchester, Massachusetts; both men attended the FCW Quality of Life conference in September 1998.As director of Community Development, McDonald , speaking there, opened the playbook on the Zoning Bylaw and how to modify it. In a kind of chalk talk, he diagrammed the basic steps:You can go to the Planning Board. You can ask for zoning changes. You can go to Town Meeting. You can vote for those changes. And you can affect the density and the destiny of a town like Chatham in a very simple way.It would oversimplify matters to say that McDonalds tutorial alone triggered FCWs later course of action. But it certainly didnt smoke-screen the options.Let the Process Begin!If there was one feeling that people took home at the end of that Quality of Life (QOL) meeting, it boiled down to this: Lets keep this exchange going! FCW was more than willing to do it. And so, in particular, were directors Debby Ecker and John Geiger. Along with Barbara Streibert, they had done the main pick-and-shovel work preparing for that conference. Now, in the fall of '98, their energies still peaked on the meter.Zoning Bylaw revision: that surfaced as the prime target for the Ecker/ Geiger team. To them, the QOL session had pinpointed that option. But rather131"