Planning boards. Like opinions, belly buttons and, ahem, other things, everybody’s got one in their city, town or village. In some ways, these unelected panels have more impact on a community’s present and future than its elected officials. Sometimes, exponentially more impact.

They’re vitally important, but their function is not well understood by a lot of people. As civic meetings go, planning board meetings are among the most difficult for both reporters and community members to sit through, much less comprehend. They are often long, jam-packed with arcane verbiage — “Seeker? What the [expletive] are they looking for? This thing’s been going on for three hours!” or “’Negative’ is good and ‘positive’ is bad? Why, God, why?” — and what happens at them and why is hard to explain to regular people.

Yes, there are many misperceptions and non-comprehensions about what the planning board does, even among planning board members themselves. But the biggest is that planning boards have the power to reject a project just because they, or others in the community, don’t like it.

A recent example happened in the Town of Hurley. Three years ago, a development company filed a site plan application to build a Dunkin’ Donuts on a small gravelly parcel at the intersection of Routes 28 and 375. Such a thing was allowed for this parcel in the town zoning code: an “as-right use” means an applicant doesn’t have to seek a “use variance” from the zoning board of appeals or a “zoning change” from the town board as part of the approval process. In a case like this, the planning board’s role is supervisory: it works with the applicant on the plan to make sure it follows town and state laws. But while planning boards have a lot of clout in deciding how a project is laid out, in this case what the Hurley Planning Board did not have over it was the power of life and death. That’s because what the owners want to use it for is allowed by the town’s zoning. (When it’s not, that’s when you have to go to the other boards, get their approvals, and then go back to the planning board to hash out the details.)

Whether certain planning board members knew they didn’t have this power or they mistakenly thought they did is unclear, to us at least. (One of the least-populated towns in Ulster County, Hurley suffers from, ahem, a disproportionate amount of internal strife, including some flung right at your Editorial Team. We’re still navigating around these bad vibes, which has prevented us from learning more about this story’s backstory.) We suspect they knew what they were doing, but more about that in a minute. And we need to point out that the board was by no means united in what they did.

As one might expect, the Dunkin’ plan met resistance in the community. Not without reason — 28/375 is a tricky intersection in the sense that many on 28 don’t slow down for it, barreling through at highway speeds if the light’s green. And, like most intersections in this part of the county, it gets clogged up at rush hour. But there was also the common Ulster County sentiment that all national franchise-style businesses are the devil and must be fought off by any means necessary. And fight they did — to make a long story a little shorter, the board voted to reject the proposal.

In this state, if someone thinks a government decision was made against its own rules, a.k.a. “arbitrary and capricious,” their remedy is to go to state Supreme Court and file an “Article 78” motion, which asks a judge to nullify that decision. The Dunkin’ developers did this, and after an extended judicial process, an Appellate Court panel saw it their way. During this process, some pretty sketchy behavior on the part of some planning board members came to light: an illegal off-the-books meeting between board members and developers, for instance, and a poorly done traffic report that made the situation at the intersection look worse than it actually is.

But it was an on-the-books “gateway” meeting between developers and the county and town planning boards that we think answers the question of whether certain planning board members acted out of innocent ignorance or deliberately misused their power.

From the ruling: “The [Hurley planning] board’s decision appears to have been in response to local public opposition, evidenced at least in part by the comment at the gateway meeting indicating that a ‘mom and pop’ restaurant would be more desirable than the project and would have an easier permitting process. It is well established that such concerns are not a proper ground upon which the board may base the denial of an otherwise permitted use.” This is Planning Board 101; if members of Hurley's actually did not know this, they should not have been on the board in the first place.

Under what amounts to judicial gunpoint, the planning board reversed itself and approved the Dunkin’ plan last month. To say the least, there needs to be some personnel changes and training sessions for this bunch, but that’s up to the Hurley Town Board, in whatever form it will be after Election Day, to decide. Many might applaud the planning board making a principled stand against Coolatas, Munchkins and Wake Up Wraps, and we get that. We like indie breakfast places better too. But what’s the point of a board making a move they know is unlawful and will be overturned down the road? We fail to see any, but then again, we don’t serve on a planning board in the Orneriest Town West of the Thruway Not Named Woodstock. Maybe they thought it would be a lot easier to get into it with the court than have to hear about it from their angry neighbors for the rest of their lives.

It did remind us, though, of a time a few years ago when a majority of the five-member Kingston Planning Board also engaged in “planning board nullification.” The site plan in question was RUPCO’s, for its Landmark Place project. The concept was to take the old county infirmary on Flatbush, renovate it and add another building to provide several dozen units of “supportive housing” for senior citizens.

To say the neighbors were opposed to this project is like saying Aaron Rodgers’ season-ending injury Monday night is a “minor setback” to the Jets season, or that the rental market in town is “tricky.” The neighbors hated it like sin, and constantly spoke against it at every public meeting where speaking about the project was allowed. But RUPCO knows what they’re doing, and the project finally came up for its final approval at a special planning board meeting called for that exact purpose in the summer of 2018.

Things, ahem, did not go as planned. After Planning Board Chair Wayne Platte Jr. literally spent 17 minutes reading the resolution aloud, a roll call vote was taken. Even though they were bound by duty to vote yes, board members Charles Polacco, Bridget Smith-Bruhn and Jamie Mills surprised everybody in the room by voting no. The three offered bupkis in the way of reasons why, but anyone familiar with the 20-month process could see it was a protest vote against RUPCO and the concept of more affordable housing in Kingston in general. Sometimes, juries decide to acquit someone who clearly did it, usually because jurors thought the accused was, while literally guilty, morally innocent. This is called “jury nullification.” It could be said that Polacco, Smith-Bruhn and Mills practiced a form of “planning board nullification.”

As noted, RUPCO knows what it’s doing and got the rejection overturned in short order. The project was built, is now open and was featured last month by Affordable Housing Finance magazine. As far as we know, the neighborhood hasn't been overrun by the seniors and the complaints made about it lowering property values now seem ludicrous.

Both these sagas pose a lot of questions: Should planning boards have more control over projects, including the ability to reject a proposal on aesthetic issues? Should towns, in the midst of a building surge in Ulster, take a good look at their zoning laws and make sure they reflect what the public wants their community to be? Should the state take a look at the State Environmental Quality Review Act and try to make it easier for local people who are not experts in bureaucracy to deal with?

Good questions, all. Maybe one day they’ll get satisfactory answers. In the meantime, we urge planning board members near and far to know their own codes inside and out, follow the law and stay in their lane. Because when they don’t and take for themselves power they don’t have, the only winners are the well-paid lawyers.