Pinkberry trying again at ZBA hearing tomorrow night

[ron_newman]

Pinkberry (aka NE Frog Pond LLC) has re-submitted its application to open a frozen yogurt parlor at 263 Elm Street, formerly the office storefront of Massachusetts Insurance Agency. The Zoning Board of Appeals hearing will be tomorrow night (Wednesday 4/17) at 6 pm in the aldermen's chamber at City Hall.

As before, the city's planning staff have recommended conditional approval. Last time around, the ZBA appeared ready to reject the application despite the planning staff's recommendation, causing NE Frog Pond LLC to withdraw it before a vote could occur.

The new application includes "two petitions (with approximately 370 signatures) in support of the establishment of Pinkberry in Davis Square". I do not know if one of them is this online petition. In case it is, I have informed the ZBA that the online petition has no mechanism whatsoever for ensuring the validity of signatures, as shown by the fact that my own signature was forged onto it numerous times.

See the froyo tag for previous episodes of this saga.

Comments

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

In other shenanigans, they've suspended viewing the "signatures" on that petition. presumably to keep people from checking to see if their names have been fraudulently added.

[ron_newman]

Ipetitions.com did that after my sixth complaint about my signature being falsely added to the petition. From their e-mail to me:

We have removed your signature from the petition, and disabled the signature display. Signatures will not appear on-line, nor will they be searchable. Hopefully, that will prevent spammers from posting bogus signatures.

They could do that, but they claimed that they had no way to log IP addresses of signers, or to require e-mail confirmation of signatures before they could be added to the petition.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

It is absolutely bizarre to me that ipetitions.com would - ostensibly in an effort to legitimize their petition tool - absolutely ensure that there is no way to audit and verify the 'signatures'.

All of this is supersketchy.

I don't much care one way or the other if Pinkberry comes to the Square, or indeed whether iYo stays, or whatever. But all of this smacks so thoroughly of deliberate dishonesty on the parts of various businesses to defraud the community that it just makes me sick.

[ron_newman]

I don't think Pinkberry or NE Frog Pond LLC are doing anything deceptive or dishonest. But they unfortunately chose an online petition site that really shouldn't be allowed to keep operating at all unless they can install some elementary verification procedure for online signatures.