How tough can it be to buy land?

So, about a month or two ago now, we decided to buy a bunch of my parents’ land from them. This should be about as simple a process as a land transfer could be, since we have an agreed-upon price, and we’re not planning on building on the land. However, we’ve had issues with one thing after another, as the plans have gone to the Planning Board, who required some corrections from the surveyor, who did so and sent it back to the Planning Board, who approved the plans but didn’t have enough people there to sign it somehow, and then it eventually got signed and sent to the lawyer, who tried to take it to the Registry of Deeds but couldn’t record it since somehow they don’t have an updated signature list of the people on the Planning Board since the elections that were at the start of May.

So, we’re hoping that it will actually get recorded this week, but that’s that we’ve been thinking for the past several weeks, too.

In the meantime, there have been at least 3 other land transfers that we know of that have happened since the May elections (which only changed one person on the board), all of which got recorded with no problem. It looks like part of the problem is that my mom (who is on the Planning Board) of course didn’t sign our land transfer (conflict of interest and all that, quite reasonably), and so since she did sign the other ones there wasn’t a problem somehow.

So, it appears that my mom’s signature is required for anything to happen in the Town of Charlton.