Boards & Commissions

Key Boards & Commissions

• Planning Board reviews subdivisions, site plans, and major development. Elected, and its terms are five years, the longest on the town ballot alongside the Housing Authority’s.
• Board of Zoning & Building Appeals hears variances and special permits, which is where a project that does not fit the zoning bylaw goes next.
• Conservation Commission protects Pembroke’s wetlands, rivers and open space, and publishes its own guidance book and filing information for work near water.
• Advisory Committee is the town’s budget watchdog. Pembroke’s act requires the Town Manager to lay his proposed balanced budget before this committee and the Select Board at a public meeting at least 90 days before the Annual Town Meeting, so it sees the numbers before Town Meeting does.
• Board of Health oversees inspections, clinics, and public health rules. Elected, three year terms.
• Community Preservation Committee recommends how the town spends its Community Preservation Act money on open space, historic preservation, recreation and community housing, and Town Meeting votes each project one at a time.
• Herring Fisheries Commission looks after the herring run and the streams the fish climb, and publishes its own maintenance plan and migration route map. Few towns have one, and Pembroke’s is one of the reasons the run is still there.
• North River Commission represents Pembroke on the river that forms its eastern boundary and that carried its shipyards for two centuries.
• Historic District and Historical Commission works on the town’s historic places and the district that protects them.
• Water Commissioners are elected, serve three year staggered terms, sit as the board of commissioners for the Department of Public Works, and set the town’s water rates.
• Library Trustees are elected, and they appoint the library director outright. That appointment is written into the town manager act as an exception to the manager’s own power, so this is a board with real hiring authority.
• Housing Authority runs the town’s public housing. Elected, five year terms.

For the full list of more than thirty bodies, current members, vacancies and schedules, see the town’s own Boards & Commissions index.

How to Serve

1. Find an opening on the town’s Boards & Commissions index, which lists every body and links each one’s own page.
2. Submit a board and commission application. Pembroke publishes the form under Find it Fast on its own website, so this step is a download rather than a phone call.
3. Interview if asked, and await appointment.
4. Serve: attend the public meetings and help make decisions for your town.

There is a second route that does not wait for a vacancy, and it is the one worth knowing before you turn eighteen. Several of Pembroke’s bodies are working committees rather than regulatory boards, including the Open Space Committee, the Recycling and Sustainability Committee, the Cultural Council, the Commission on Disabilities and the Pembroke Drug Prevention Coalition. Committees like these take residents who show up and volunteer, and a student can be useful in one long before a ballot has their name on it.