[Roberta Cameron]: We're going to call the meeting to order. We'll take roll call. Kayla Lessen?
[Maria D'Orsi]: Here.
[Roberta Cameron]: Roberta Cameron? Here. Harry Weaver? Here. Penelope Taylor? Here. Lisa Sun? Here. Mayor Brianna Longo? I'm here. We're going to take all things a little bit out of order tonight but that's okay with everybody. We're going to start with the working groups and we'll start with the declaration of trust is ready to be signed by all members. We'll sign the declaration before the notary and we'll have De'Aria from the mayor's office who is a licensed notary.
[Maria D'Orsi]: So this is urchin. There's a signature pinch at the end. We have to sign their name and then fill in the date. Oh, I ripped it. Oh, gosh.
[Alicia Hunt]: I have another copy. Okay, I'm sorry.
[Penelope Taylor]: I'm very excited. Would you like to use a book?
[Unidentified]: They're so. Yeah. Perfect. And this will get filed?
[Moogoor]: Yes, in Registry of Deeds.
[Unidentified]: You have the procedure for filing at the Registry of Deeds? Not yet.
[Moogoor]: I have to stay at the ESS's office.
[Roberta Cameron]: Yeah. You have to get a check made out in advance to the Registry of Deeds. So however that happens in the city, in your city system, you get the check made out in advance and then you can go and walk it and drop it off at the Registry of Deeds. You can mail it. Can you? Yeah. But the most complicated part is having to check it out for the exact amount in advance. I think it's in other documents, it should be like $105. Okay. I know mortgages are $205. You want to check that out?
[Maria D'Orsi]: Yeah.
[Roberta Cameron]: Thank you, Daria. Thank you.
[Unidentified]: And I'm pretty sure you guys are not arguing, but... Thank you all. It's amazing. Thank you. Thank you, Dario. Not a problem. Thank you, guys.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Thank you. Congratulations. That was one of my new user solutions, so check that out.
[Roberta Cameron]: Nice. Mine was to pick something to celebrate every day. Instead of waiting for September 25 to bring me something to celebrate, I think everything celebrates. I like that. And now the second part of working groups is the action plan. Roberta, Penny and myself were on the action plan committee. And I'm going to leave one of you all to update if that's okay. Sure, we can both give our part. So we've been working on drafting the narrative that goes with the data that we presented last month or a couple of months ago. So that we'll have all of the data portion of the plan. And we have held one focus group meeting with service providers. We had a great response from about 27 service providers in the region who are interested in providing input. So we met with about half of them in the first meeting. So we'll meet with the remaining this month. I think we're still working on a date to hold that meeting.
[Moogoor]: The potential dates are January 14th, 17th or 21st.
[Roberta Cameron]: And so after we have this input from the stakeholder service providers, then we'd like to pivot toward holding a public meeting so we can get public input and what the community needs are. And so it's actually about now is the time that we need to be planning to organize the public meeting. And then after the we hold a public meeting, then we'll start working together with committee members, with the trust board members to go through what will be the meat of the action plan, our purpose and goals and strategies so that we can develop that plan with an understanding from all of the input that we've gathered so far.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: So that's, one question to the chair. public meeting at a scheduled trust meeting on Wednesday? Is that what you're thinking, or will it be a separate night? I think it would be a separate night.
[Roberta Cameron]: Any other questions about the workgroup on the action plan? Maybe I could ask, actually, if there are any parameters that we should think about with respect to the public meeting? night or what time would be good to hold it, where, and any thoughts about who to invite or how to put the invitation out there so that we get a really robust.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Through the chair, the city can help with the comms piece, whatever you need, and PDS has a newsletter, too. It's just a matter of picking a night, right? Wednesdays work great for me because it's just a guaranteed night. I don't have to take my kids anywhere without having to scramble. So, I don't know if we could do like a 5 o'clock meeting and then do a listening session at 6 or something like that.
[Maria D'Orsi]: That sounds good for me here. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's a good idea.
[Penelope Taylor]: I think we're meeting the action plan group later this week, so we can put forth that we can propose. a night to end the agenda. And then I personally would love everyone in our trust to help with outreach and make sure people are invited to participate in the community meeting because it is broad. It's not just service providers and developers. It's the whole community. So I think that will be an important piece, too. And we'll hear all about the city supports and make sure we're connected.
[Moogoor]: And just to add to that, Friday afternoon meeting is going to be a public meeting. So if any of you are interested, please feel free to join the working group. And the working group has met the last five times on September 10, September 23rd, October 21st, November 22nd, and on November 26th. And we are hoping to have the meeting notes ready for the next affordable housing trust meeting. So let all of you have access to the meeting notes.
[Roberta Cameron]: Thank you. Thank you. And the meeting for Friday is already public, right?
[Moogoor]: Yes, yes. It's on the state's calendar.
[Roberta Cameron]: Thank you.
[Moogoor]: Is that a working group meeting? Yes. For the action plan? It's an action plan working group meeting, but it's a public meeting. Gotcha.
[Roberta Cameron]: All right. And on to the next topic, which is item number four, application updates and funding and technical assistance. And let's see, Aditi, can you provide us with an update for the CPA funding against CHAPA?
[Moogoor]: It's a good idea, but CPA has, or CPC has approved our funding request, so the next step is to go before the committee of the whole, and that is on... It's your... January 21st. And... It is a remote meeting. We have to respond to the Council's questions if they have any. We would go before the City Council on the 28th of January. At that meeting, we don't have to be present. Teresa, who's the CPA manager, will be our representative.
[Roberta Cameron]: And you said the Committee of the Whole is Tuesday, January 21st. At what time? I just wanted to see what date. You said the City Council meeting is going to be.
[Moogoor]: That's on the 28th. I have to confirm the time of the 21st. I have sent an email to all of you. I can see the meeting invite. Yeah, I can check in if it's on the calendar.
[Penelope Taylor]: I can make myself available. I don't know. I just tell the time on my calendar. Yeah.
[Moogoor]: I think it is 7 p.m., but I'll just check. 6 or 7. Yeah. Let me check. In the meantime, I'll just update on the CHAPA's technical assistance. So unfortunately, we didn't receive the technical assistance grant from CHAPA, but they've offered to provide some sort of technical support. So we have a meeting with CHAPA on the 20... I think it's on the 20... Sorry, I'm trying to... It's on the last week of January. So find out what sort of technical support are they interested to provide. And then in the next meeting in February, I'll update you all with the details. Yeah.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: the public works facility committee meeting on January 21st at 7? I have 6 p.m., says the committee of the whole. The whole Tuesday, 21st, 6 p.m.
[Roberta Cameron]: And then the meeting with Chapman is actually January 24th at 11 a.m.
[Unidentified]: I put a tentative. I'll be present, yeah.
[Roberta Cameron]: Okay, so next item on our agenda, we're waiting for updates from the Office of Planning and Development and Sustainability.
[Moogoor]: Yes, so Daniel and Halisha will join us at 5.30. want to talk about the action plan or any other topics that are listed on the agenda, we can discuss that until they come.
[Roberta Cameron]: Do you want to talk about the stakeholder meeting a little bit on some of the feedback that we got on? I have my notes attached here.
[Unidentified]: I wasn't feeling too refreshed in my memory about the meetings.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: And while you look for that, actually, if it's not on the agenda, I probably shouldn't bring it up. Never mind. I'm working on some funding for the trust. A couple avenues.
[Moogoor]: We do have updates for funding.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Working on selling two lots up in the heights that there are interested parties for, and I have looped in the council, especially Matt Leming, who's interested in revamping linkage. And obviously the President, so we are moving forward, going to go to the Council, I believe, on the 21st to get approval to put out an RFP. So be extra transparent and ask for permission to put out an RFP to sell those lots. And then I'd like the proceeds, we'd like the proceeds to go into the Affordable Housing Trust. So they're valued at over 600,000. I think we'll put a minimum price on there, probably about half. And I think there is some ledge, but that's just one thing I'm working on. And our hope is, and Councilor Leming's request is, that we use that funding, I think it was either 80 or 130, to update linkage. Yes. and then I am working with Tufts University with regards to their dormitory. No matter what they give to the trust, if it's eventually approved, we'll not remediate some of the issues that the neighborhood may face, but I am working that avenue too. And yeah, it's potentially half a million.
[Roberta Cameron]: That's really helpful. I think it is really relevant for the action plan to be able to compile any possible known funding sources. Just thinking about funding. I don't have my notes in front of us, but there was a grant that we were going to get from when we first started talking about the trust. There was the CPA application and match money.
[Moogoor]: There wasn't much, I mean, but we do have something called MVDC, Mystic Valley Development Corporation. Okay, there it is. The three cities together are developing part of Medford, I think Medford, Everett, and Malden, part of this commission. So one of the developers has promised verbally to provide $250,000, if my memory serves right. Okay.
[Roberta Cameron]: Yes. So we don't know anything on that yet.
[Moogoor]: Not yet. MEU has been drafted and we're waiting for that to be executed. Yes.
[Roberta Cameron]: So I just looked up my, I have my notes from the stakeholders meetings in front of me. And just to sort of break down what was done at the stakeholders meeting, the first stakeholders meeting, Roberta and I did a presentation. Thank you, Roberta, for putting together the PowerPoint on that. We did the introductions and then we broke up into two separate working groups in the Zoom and we're asking developers and, I guess it was a breakout room for developers and a breakout room for supportive services. In the breakout room for developers, we had asked the developers, what opportunities do they see to create affordable housing in Medford? What other housing issues would they want to come from the trust besides housing construction? How much is it costing to develop units, affordable units, or provide assistance per unit? Should we consider a cap on the funding per unit? It's not DHCD anymore, it's EOL. Yes, very much like they do. And then we asked them to walk us through sort of how they go about creating a pro forma, a budget for funding sources for developing housing. I think I don't have the questions that were asked at the supportive services breakout room.
[Penelope Taylor]: So, if my notes are correct, we can ask what can Metro do as a city for the service providers? I would say I came away learning more about the gaps of hearing what services are provided and then what is needed to really ensure that those services are stabilizing folks and letting them stay in Medford. So some things like a flexible, more flexible pool of rental assistance funds, kind of in general, maximizing the money and the trust that can be nimble to fill those gaps. Another thing that came up was just Some of it was like kind of the paperwork that goes behind getting people into programs, so reducing barriers and burdens as far as that goes. And there's a lot of emphasis on collaborations, like people who are already working here working together, and again, filling those gaps, but being more powerful together to think through these problems. I'm trying to see, there were some like specific ideas I was trying to find, some deeper developer subsidies. kind of reflection on programs that are already running and what could make them better or more effective. And then, like, what they would change about some programs that they're either involved in in Medford or Somerville or other communities. So kind of thinking about the sweet spot for developer subsidies, for inclusionary zoning, and kind of the Transportation gaps for warming centers and resources. So there's just like, you know, we'll give the full notes, but there's like a really, I feel like getting sort of a regional perspective with them, the folks who are actually on the ground in Medford and can kind of look around and see what's working great, but what needs like more robust support and then what's missing. So that's my summary.
[Roberta Cameron]: That sounds like the conversation that we had with them. Yeah. And I was very, a little bit, um, it was really helpful to learn how much the organizations are doing, who are already working in Medford. Um, so, but I still think that there's a gap in terms of helping people to know about those programs.
[Penelope Taylor]: Yeah. And then I think one of the gaps you're up to is kind of stateful, a gap and an opportunity I'll say is like state programs and how our program would interface with them. For instance, I think it's ABCD helps a lot of people apply for RAP, like emergency rental assistance, but there's like a $7,000 cap on RAP for a year. And sometimes that's just not enough to stabilize the family and they're a little limited at what else they can access. Conversely, in terms of aligning with the state, there was a lot of encouragement to consider that the state will be a major funder and try to make sure that we are aligning with their programs and setting up our infrastructure to be as compatible as possible and enticing for their funding as possible.
[Roberta Cameron]: It seems as though there's like really a collaboration among communities Medford and East and then Somerville and that direction. Somerville, Cambridge, you know that. And so it, like, I don't know, like, it could be helpful to not have to reinvent the wheel if we could create some more cross-pollinization between those two regions. But also, there's only so much funding to go around. So I don't know whether we can use our funding to help create those opportunities.
[Maria D'Orsi]: Is there anything that came up in the developers? Breakdown issues, maybe like structural issues besides construction costs, interest rates.
[Moogoor]: I think finding open cash match.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Was finding properties an issue?
[Roberta Cameron]: They didn't really talk too much about the properties. They did talk a lot about city owned properties and trying to Um, it was really a lot of just the cost of constructions and the cost of interest rates, materials, et cetera.
[Penelope Taylor]: I just noticed an interesting note. I had one of the barriers that was brought up was just criteria in the lotteries, like for inclusionary units and things like that. So just really trying to keep things simple when building things to make sure we're not creating a burdensome situation. Research as well, so. Important to think about, I guess they had the 33 unit development and Wakefield we heard about, but they only wound up getting 11 people in the lottery because the criteria was too much criteria. And so then they had to like, totally regroup. So I thought that was a bit of a wake up call to not over to me. I was like, let's not over means test it, but just kind of think about how to.
[Roberta Cameron]: It might also be a signal that the affordable units don't match the level of need. So if they're all affordable at 80% area median income, maybe they've already served that population and they need to find other... Variations? Yeah, other areas of affordability. Although the 80% area median income could be Section 8 units, So layering subsidies with other programs, but then you might need to do marketing specifically to Section 8 administering agencies so that they direct their clients to apply for those units. But stopping your, or setting your affordable limits at 80%, you're missing, unless you have a voucher in place, you're actually missing a large population that doesn't make 80%, that doesn't have affordable, a voucher, so it's... Yeah. But where's the... Yeah. You have to be able to make it. Both are in need.
[Moogoor]: One of the barriers highlighted in the affordable housing developer session was funding timeline. That should be aligned with the state or federal funding as well.
[Roberta Cameron]: We talked about whether or not the trust should have a roll-in application process or just one RFP that goes out and have applications come in. and then start trying to rate the applications. But because of the way the state does their application processes, they need their conditional commitments fairly quickly. And so having a role in application process for the trust would be helpful.
[Penelope Taylor]: see a note to the mayor's earlier question about like sites. And if that came up, someone mentioned that like, we're in a really good position to analyze potential sites for affordable housing because we are on the ground, we're looking around. So just that those, you know, just kind of reiterating that we're in a good position to see those opportunities and really consider the ones that are most compatible, so. Thank you.
[Unidentified]: Are we okay to go?
[Roberta Cameron]: We're going to go back up to the second item on our agenda, which is updates from the Office of Planning and Development and Sustainability. I don't know her exact time name.
[Alicia Hunt]: She did go be not in the building and come back. Hi. I think I've met most of you in person, but not everybody. So I'm Alicia Hunt. I'm the director of planning. I work for the mayor, and Aditi works in my office, as Danielle does. Would you mind just telling me your first names? Like, I've been working with Roberta for years, but just to put the names with the faces. My name's Kayla. Penny. Hi. Lisa Ann. Lisa's son. Harry. Great. Thank you.
[MCM00001729_SPEAKER_03]: I just because I saw the names I was involved in sort of the appointments and stuff and I met some of you before but I just I've seen your name on some comments like things like that on Facebook so it's nice to put your face to it.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah I was glad that I could be here and I think you're holding the meeting a little earlier than usual so that we could be here which I also appreciate we almost always have either a community development board meeting on Wednesday night, or now on alternate Wednesdays, we're meeting with the city council and their planning and permitting committee on the alternate Wednesday night. So it can be really hard to get us on a Wednesday night. So I know that ADT presented a bunch of stuff about where zoning and the housing production plan stood and stuff like that with you guys last month. And she and I were talking earlier that it would be helpful for me to provide some updates on that. And in some cases, actually, I don't want to say clarifications, but this zoning project is an active ongoing thing and therefore is kind of a moving target. You know, every two weeks there's something different than we've made some new recommendation or decision. And one thing I did just want to make sure everybody knows is that if you go to the URL medfordma.org slash zoning, We have a web page there that I'm trying really hard with our comms department, and it's on me. They're very good about updating whenever I send them to update the whole process. And one of the things is that there are some reference documents on there that can be useful as well as... Do you mind pulling that web page up? We hadn't discussed doing that. My screen is... Yeah. So there are some reference documents as well as what we're doing is every meeting that we're having that is a public meeting, we are trying to put up the presentation. If we can put it up in advance, we're putting it up. If there's a document going to the council, we're putting it up. And then afterwards, we're linking the video from the meeting. And actually, some of that is I had a graduate student working with us and he's been away for a break. So some of the most recent meetings aren't up yet. But I find that that's a really good way to just sort of like what's, in fact, Aditi was saying to me, is the missing gap zoning on our SharePoint somewhere? And I said, go to the webpage and that's gonna be the most recent last version. So you can see all the meetings are listed and all the links. So that's where I pointed her to the zoning amendment, but you can also see like, you can, pretty reliably, these are gonna be the most recent versions of everything. And actually, Aditi, on that page under that, I was going to do that, but one other thing that's on there that as you guys were talking, I realized would be really useful to you. On that page, if you scroll down a little further to resources, it's citywide maps. And if you click on actually land use maps, these are actually maps that were made by our consultants for us. And I think there's a bunch that are land use and there are a bunch that are zoning. And so these just sort of provide these were intended to help us with some of the decisions that we're making right like residential clusters is useful zoning is of course getting outdated as we speak. But and I think the one above actually put it together with the zone yeah so it's nice about this one is that they took the zoning in our neighboring communities and they said what's the closest zone like what is the nearest so like that the light yellow. in the other communities are all single family zones or that those communities had the single family zones. And so that was sort of a way to see Medford in more context. And then like the next one is literally just that map, but just clipped to just Medford. And then there's another group, I don't know if you want to scroll through, but like median income. I don't remember off the top of my head what's on all of them, right? And I don't want to present them to you tonight. I want you to know that these exist. And that this work was done this past summer. So it's really the most recent. And I think the other one, the one he had on vacation, is that? No, that's just the one. And it may be that that land use, so one of them has, and if we don't, no, okay. If we don't have it, let me just check, We've done a bunch of work on where the zoning, oh yeah, so if you just keep going, there's value versions and then there's front building, building setbacks and stuff like that and dimensions and lot sizes and how much compliance and non-compliance and stuff. So there's really, you can do a deep dive and you can go into this for hours, but I wanted you all to know that those are there and they're linked off of that. And that's what we're basing a lot of the work on. And so then the other thing is before you go to the zoning, but if you go back to the zoning webpage, if you go, which one did I click on? This is the presentation for December 11th. So you have just that zoning presentation and just scroll down in it to, I think it's the fourth slide. It looks like this, that one. That's so this one just kind of lays out and just so we're clear, we've asked them to change North Medford and South Medford. That's not what they really, really meant. The consultant who was putting those labels, we thought that's what she meant. And she just meant the northern half of Medford, everything above the river. And then she meant the southern, everything below like the hillside in South Medford area. So we're updating that to just be like, the two residential sections. And so the first in January, we're going to be working on basically all the single family zones and looking at that. And how should that be? What should those be? And we'll work on as well, dimensional standards, development standards. And February, we're going to be looking at the multifamily zones. So I have mentioned to Aditi that those would be some good meetings for her to be attending with us. And then she can like there when they're probably mean they're probably means you're welcome to go to any of you are, but she could then say, oh, the affordable housing trust should know about this one. Let me send you these materials. Let me give you this update. And right now we have penciled in 80 years for February, because our consultants feel like the information that we have out of the state isn't solid enough. And she doesn't want us to spin our wheels. working through ADU new policies through the state if they're still coming out with regulations. So once the regulations have settled down a little bit more, the plan is to tackle ADUs and making sure that what we have is compliant with the state. And then do we want to change anything? And don't let us change anything that would be not compliant with the state. So that's going to be in February.
[Roberta Cameron]: Just in case anybody's on watching public or going to watch the meeting,
[Alicia Hunt]: ADUs is Accessory Dwelling Units. So these are the little units that people can add as of right that the state has now said that everybody has to be allowed to make as of right, but there are guidelines that are coming. So we're going to look at that again in February. Those are allowed in Medford now. Right now, the Medford ordinance is that they need to be owner occupied. I believe that the state has said that they can't require owner occupied. The state law, one of the reasons we're still waiting for a little bit of guidelines on that is because when you read the regulations, you couldn't read them to say that you could have built an ADU on a commercial building. And you're like, well, why would you build? That doesn't make any sense. But it's not clear enough. So we're waiting for some more guidelines to just kind of, what does that really mean? Thank you. And then we will go on to work on the commercial areas, the various squares and regions in Medford. And I will tell you that the reason some people want us to really look at West Medford and Wellington, they're pushed out some. Hi, Danielle. Sorry. I didn't wait for you. Some of the reason they are pushed down is because we are doing some studies. So we are actually going to do what's called the Wellington Transformational Study of that region. And we had gotten some grant money to do it. We put it out to bid two years ago. It wasn't enough money. So we've gotten some additional money from the Gaming Commission to do that. And we received five proposals today. So, I can tell you that project will move forward, but I haven't even opened a proposal yet, which were the Wellington area study. And we are also doing a West Medford, so we got money to look at West Medford as well, and we're leveraging that money to do a citywide SWOT analysis, and it's really focused more on economic development, not housing, but a strength, weakness, and opportunities. And those are also intended to be, that's intended to be the commercial districts, whereas West Medford single family would be part of this northern Medford single family that we plan to do sooner. So this is all sort of coming. Things will be changing. And what I'm saying to a lot of people is, if you look at something in Medford and say, but will the zoning let me do it? That question isn't really the most wonderful question that we're asking right now, because the zoning is very quickly changing. But it is worthwhile for people to say to us, this is what I would like to do. And this is the zoning I would need to do it. Because we will feed that into the decisions we're making. I mean, you could imagine that if we were thinking that four stories was the right height in a commercial district, and there was a developer saying, but I really want to do ground floor commercial and four stories residential above it. And we're like, well, that's five stories. Maybe we would consider it with five stories. Why make them go through the variance process if it's actually what they want to do? If they say to me, it's not financially feasible to do four, I need five. We'll take that into consideration. We are not making any zoning simply because a developer asked for it. However, I have been encouraging developers to tell me what they want because I don't want us to change the zoning to something that they're not going to build, right? It's got to be buildable or it's pointless. That's a long way to a question about that.
[Roberta Cameron]: Are you talking to or hearing from nonprofit developers and hearing what they want?
[Alicia Hunt]: So that's something that DT had been doing some work with and Barbara before her about looking at smaller parcels and nonprofit projects. And so I've been asking her to sort of like feed through what what we're hearing and they've been really. On the ground, trying to figure out specific projects. I will tell you that I have not been sort of going and finding developers and asking them for money for things other than they're showing up and they're saying, I want to build on this to gap. What do you want to build? And I know 1 of the areas you're interested in the MBA zone. there's a developer who wants to build in the MBTA zone. And they said to me, but we have some concerns with the zoning. And I said to them, tell me exactly what you want changed. And we'll look at it to understand what the problem is and whether it's a, you just need to pony up and you just need to pay for it. You need our zoning or is what you're looking for a reasonable. And that's actually one of the ones that I'll touch on because apparently there are some state imposed setbacks on some of the state roads that are in their deeds. And their required setbacks in their deeds are larger than what we were allowing under the MBTA zoning. So it was like a direct conflict. And so that is something that we are very much looking at and saying, okay, maybe actually we need to change the zoning to recognize state required easements. or we can get the state to change them.
[Roberta Cameron]: So just a suggestion would be because we don't have relationships right now with many non-profit housing developers building in Medford, they might not have answers to the question of what would you want the zoning to do in Medford because they're not even thinking about it. They don't have any experience in Medford. So I wonder whether... We do.
[Alicia Hunt]: We can bring them through in touring. Okay. And so, yeah, so we do actually have relationships with today.
[Roberta Cameron]: Have they looked at our zoning enough to be able to have opinions about what is working or not working? I'm trying to remember who is the developer in the room?
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah. Yeah. So he's brought us two projects that he's looking at, and then it's somebody else looking in North Medford.
[Moogoor]: Yes, Caribbean Development Corporation, CIDC. Caribbean Integrated Development Corporation.
[Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, I was just thinking that if we have trouble getting those answers from developers because they're not currently in Medford, maybe reaching out to neighboring communities that have more non-profit development activity and finding out from their planning departments whether they're seeing lessons learned in their zoning that maybe we could avoid pitfalls based on the experience of some of our neighbors if we don't have the answers.
[Alicia Hunt]: The other group that we've been talking to, but it's slightly on the side, I don't know that they've really looked at our zoning, but we could ask for their experiences, the Arlington Housing. Of course, we've been meeting with, we've talked with them a couple of times about developing housing.
[Moogoor]: We could also pose this question in our upcoming focus group sessions. That would be a good question to add to our list of questions.
[Alicia Hunt]: And some of it is that It's not necessarily the question of what do you not like in our zoning? What would you want? What are the heights and setbacks? What are you looking for in general is what we're kind of asking. Because what you'll find is that this is not really just tweaking. This is saying here's what makes sense. And some of it is like our setbacks, if you've ever looked at them, have a weird formula of I can never get it right. Height plus length divided by six or something, which means that the taller your building, the further back it is from the road and tends to be sitting in a sea of parking, which is just not how we want to see buildings built anymore. So some of it is just saying, I don't even care what you think about that setback. That is going. We've had trouble looking at things like, I want to say it's the required open space. That's right. The required usable open space.
[Danielle Evans]: Required usable open space. And the required open space is a function of how many units are on the site. So it basically says for each unit you need this much instead of a percentage of the lot. Makes it difficult to density. Right.
[Alicia Hunt]: Which is sort of why I'm saying it's less what they think of our current zoning and more like what kind of zoning would they want to see. in order to make this a buildable project or a doable project for them?
[Danielle Evans]: Like, it's hard to, like, kind of do, like, a test fit with our existing zoning because there's so many variables that you have to get so far along, and then you figure out whether you need things. Like, with open spaces, you don't know how many units you have. All this stuff, and so it's tricky. Like, we don't have, like, you know, FAR or just building footprint percentages.
[Alicia Hunt]: where we're looking to change and looking to make things make more sense and be easier for somebody to develop a project. We don't want the upfront costs to be so hard because the zoning analysis is so hard. We have people call us and say, can you tell us if I'd be allowed to build this? I'm like, well, the question is a use question that I can look at. But if you want to know what density and how many units you can put on this parcel, I was like, I can't tell you. I literally can't, not under our current zoning. You need to say, like, how many units, and then we have to do all these calculations. I'm like, it's kind of nuts, frankly. So are you trying to get to form-based code, or? I don't think that we're ready to go quite that far. Yeah. So much as, and then, so you were going to, do you want to pull up the other one you have open, is our, the mystic app zone. Yeah. That's this one, yeah. Oh, no, that's your presentation, but it's in there. So one of the things that I know, I was talking to Aditi earlier, one of the things that we've been changing is, so we've been doing incentive zoning. And one of the things in the incentive zoning, sorry, I keep thinking in terms that you're all planners because I know many of you are. And so if I start going over, like, if you don't want to say so. So, the idea of incentive zoning is that there's a certain amount of and we're using it for height. height that you can build by right but then if you want to go taller you have to give us certain things and I know Aditi shared that with you last month and she was having trouble explaining the affordability requirements. Well the bottom line is what we put in the MBTA zoning was too confusing and I realized that when we were saying we would like the incentive zoning throughout the city to be essentially the same. There might be some things that you So in MBTA zoning, we gave you a bonus if you did commercial, because we were not allowed to require commercial on the first floor. On NYSBG-AB, we are requiring commercial on the first floor. So you're not getting a bonus floor for that. So there are some variations. But one of the things I went and reread the affordability requirements, and I said to my consultant, I do not remember what this means, and I cannot explain this to somebody. Therefore, it's wrong. We have to change it to be something that a reasonable person can read and understand. So we came up with this new table. The numbers are designed to work out to be very, very similar to that, but it's laid out more clearly. And so the way you would read this, so there are two things, and this is actually just more units. So that's a good one to start with. And that's so we have in our incentive zoning in our inclusionary zoning. So that's the zoning that requires affordable units. It varies by how many units in the building. So that's what you can see in the first two columns. 10 to 24 units, you're currently required to do 10%, 25 to 49, you're required to do 13% of the units affordable, and 50 or more units, 15% affordable. So then we said, well, if you do more affordability, more units that are affordable, you can get an extra floor. And this is the numbers that have been recommended to us as being affordable, people will still build to in Medford. So if you do 3% extra and that you get an additional floor, and so the 3% means a total of 13% affordable units, 16% or 18% affordable units get to a floor. And then for two additional, for two floors instead of one for two, you would do 5% additional and that would bring you up to 20% for the larger buildings. What is not in here yet but will be probably in the next round of zoning that we approve and by that I mean like what comes through in January or February will be that right now you may be aware that we don't do it's called fractional payments. So if it turns out that you were supposed to build 3.2 affordable units, right now you have to round up to four. And what we see is that developers are reducing the size of their building, making bigger units so that they only round up to three units instead of having to get four for 3.2. So what we're going to be allowing are fractional payments so you would do three units of affordable and he'd give us cash for the 0.2. And the cash will come to the Affordable Housing Trust. So that will be an income stream for this board. What we don't have figured out yet, I've asked the consultants for, is what is the formula? How much is that 0.2, right? Like, how do you convert that into dollars? If any of you have recommendations, you know things, they're off doing research. I'm not asking you to do that. but if you've seen something that you like somewhere else, this is a very good time to pass those formulas along to us. Are they reaching out to other communities? I'm certain that they are. That's one of the things that they tend to do is look at what other, I don't know if they're calling them or if they're doing the online like data search, like I said to them, you go find out what everybody else is doing and come back to us.
[Roberta Cameron]: Somerville, sorry, Somerville does do fractional payments and they do have a, for rentals,
[Alicia Hunt]: fairly easy. And that's part of it, that people can understand it, that developers can figure out what it's going to cost them. That's good to know, especially that, and some of it is the formula easy to understand. That's one of the things we're trying to do is not make this a black box for everybody. So that is coming because you'll look at these numbers and you'll say, but you're going to end up with fractions everywhere. Yes, that's good. We can turn those into cash.
[Roberta Cameron]: So a question is for especially in the corridors where there are going to be a lot of smaller units that are incorporated into the zoning, what to do about projects that are under 10 units? Are they not allowed to participate in the incentives?
[Alicia Hunt]: There are other incentives they have to use, simply because Of the fact that what would really happen, right? So if it's 10% of 9 units, now you're a fraction. And is that affordable for a developer that 8 units are market rate and 1 is an affordable unit? Like, at those numbers, when we start talking about fractional payments, it's not completely off the table, but you are looking at smaller developers?
[Roberta Cameron]: And then another question is, can they level up another floor just on the basis of fractional payments?
[Alicia Hunt]: I'd have to do the math to see how that comes out. It looks like it might.
[Roberta Cameron]: Yeah. Like if you had 10... So can they buy a floor?
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. If you had 10 units and one unit is 10%, And now 13%, it's gonna be 1.3, that is definitely, that's what they're doing there.
[Penelope Taylor]: Can I clarify something? That all whole numbers would be a unit that people couldn't just pay instead of building a unit? Yes. Okay, thank you.
[Alicia Hunt]: That is something that we also, I've been hearing for many years, is very important, is that you don't let them buy out of the whole thing. Only the fraction would be a fractional payment. And then the other piece here, if you scroll up, is actually deeper. No, down. Sorry. I use the language differently. My kids do that, too. They scroll the opposite way I said. So this one is for deeper affordability. So to do some, it's 65% of AMI instead of 80%. So they're affordable by people who have lower incomes. It still is the 10, 13, and 15%, but you would do 8% at 80% and 2% at 65. I honestly don't understand exactly what we mean that's going to happen at the 10 to 24 units. At 20 units, you could do the 5 and 5, and you can do one unit at 80 and one at 65. How we would actually make this work if somebody came to us and wanted to do it, we would have to sort of figure that out. But at least these are numbers that are understandable and this is a table that a reasonable person can read and understand.
[Roberta Cameron]: So just so I make sure that I'm understanding what you're saying properly for a 10 to 24 unit if they want to buy an additional floor and offer units more at 65% they don't have to go to 13% affordability instead they're breaking the breaking the 10% between the two, 80% and 2%.
[Alicia Hunt]: In my experience in the last four years, it is very hard to get a developer to go to deeper affordability. They just don't want to do it because it's long-term money that they are not recouping on those apartments because this is in perpetuity and they have to meet the SHI. They have to be on the list, the state list of affordable housing in perpetuity. They can't get out of this. Medford used to allow people to get out of it after 10 and 15 years. And we're like, we're not having that anymore. So that's, I just want to be real clear about that having changed. So this is the mystic app zoning, and it's been passed. I do feel like if I can remember correctly, that there's still there's what I consider almost typos in here. So some of the plan is that as we do each round of updates, we are finding things that we could do better. And so then in June, we're actually holding June for cleanup. And so the idea is that we would go back and anything that we've changed further, we would then fix across the board. And a real easy example is if you go in this table and scroll down to where it's the green, the lead stuff. Oh, no, it was still in that table. I'm right so the bottom line so what is we've been we haven't quite passed green score that is actually been so the green school score is coming with the it's been referred by the City Council of the community development board. But the bottom line is certifiable as lead platinum or equivalent in the MBTA communities it actually had is certified as LEED Gold for one story and certified as LEED Platinum for two stories. And what our climate planner pointed out and raised is that LEED Gold is very similar, very close to what people are being required to do by the extended stretch code that we have passed here in Medford. So we were kind of given that away for free. So we're removing the lead gold option and lead platinum is a stretch now. It's something a little harder. And the difference between the word certified and certify a bulb, you don't actually get certified until the building has been open for a year. So that was creating like a dissonance problem. And the reality is we want them to be all those check marks. We want to see that they have done all those things from their lead consultant. But if they choose to not go ahead and get the certification, we don't care. We want them to do those green things. So we've changed the language to certify a ball in the stuff going forward. But that's the kind of like. It's kind of small, it needs to get propagated back through previous things. We expect that's going to happen in other places as well. There are a couple of things like we can't change our current table, dimensional table and take out The setback of that height divided by width, height plus width divided by 6 until we have new setbacks for all the different zones. And once we have something else, then we can go back and edit it out of the old version. So there'll be some cleanup throughout. If for any reason any of you are looking at our zoning and you see things you think we need to change, this is an amazingly good time to tell us about it. Telling us next year will just make us feel like this.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: One question, because I know I always ask it through the chair. Are we doing anything with the smaller developers that are doing one home here, one home there, and that have done 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, but haven't added to any affordable ability stock that we have?
[Alicia Hunt]: I have yet to have somebody tell me how we can do that legally, if anybody knows of a way or has believes it. We're open to that. So it's one thing when the developer is doing 10 units together, they did a subdivision over on Winthrop Street. That is something that under our new zoning, my understanding is we can do that one of the 10. That one predates that. I believe, but we should be able to what, but what you're talking about is the gentleman that we know that he's, he's got three, your projects at a time. Definitely. If you know of a way to do, we have, we asked, um, Emily. Oh, yeah. Okay. And Jonathan. So, so, you know, Emily is our consultant on this. She was the project manager on our, uh, comprehensive plan. So she is very familiar with that. And Jonathan Silverstein is the lawyer working with her on this. Jonathan's well-known for land-use law. He used to be with KP Law. But if you know of Mark Bobrowski, who wrote the big land-use law book, he is actually kind of in training to take over Mark's legal practice.
[Roberta Cameron]: And I have a question regarding split lots. So I know it's coming up. There was a big meeting about it, various in various places where somebody comes and split their lots to try to maybe not have to do the inclusionary pieces of it. will your zoning make it so that if they do split the lots that they can talk about a larger developer saying i'm putting two buildings and that each one is one right there's exactly they've taken a lot and they've now split it into three different parcels and they're i'm going to say phases they'll build it in phases but in those phases should if it meets the criteria for your inclusionary units should still be
[Danielle Evans]: inclusionary 27 units over and three lots instead of anybody even come close to propose I think about here our current visionary learnings addresses that segmentation not be able to do that and also adding on to the subdivision about having able to set aside a lot Jonathan actually brought up that that's probably it's I think he was going to take that out of our, even if there's a legal challenge and there's something going through the courts right now that he might take that ability away so I wouldn't know.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay. So, yeah, I will say Danielle is an expert on the language and what's literally in the zoning and I'm more like the big picture.
[Penelope Taylor]: Can I ask a question about the deeper subsidies piece? So, and apologies, this has been like a math week, and I'm not a particular math whiz, but I guess, I was just, on line one, so I see the potential, if you're looking at, let's say, 24-unit building, if it was all 10%, then that would produce two units and put .4 as cash. That's easy. With this split, Uh, it produces 1 unit, and then the rest is cash because it's, it's less than 2. Um, so. I don't know, I guess.
[Danielle Evans]: Can you say that again? Because this is the bonuses, like there's already the floor. Well, the 10% is the floor.
[Alicia Hunt]: But what they're saying is that you could do, so the way this is written is you could do 8% because it works really well. And I'll say that most of the projects that have been in front of us in the last couple of years, have been 150 and more units. So we have four, nine and under. We haven't seen very much at all that has hit this 10 to 50 units. I don't think we've permitted one in the last four years. Okay.
[Penelope Taylor]: Well, I guess I'm going to talk through what I was observing. So I think 24 is the largest number. And so if it was like a flat 10%, then that would produce 2.4 units and the 0.4 would be in cash. But if you split it, 8% of 24 is like, it's like 1.95. So that proves one unit with a lot of leftover. And then the 2% is like less than half a unit. So with this equation, they only they're being, they're only being asked to produce one unit instead of two, and then more of it is as money, but they're getting the same.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm not sure that you could use that first, the one additional floor. You could do the two additional floors and split them half and half, right? One at 80% and one at 65%. And that would work. But I'm not sure that we would let them I'm still not following you.
[Danielle Evans]: So how many units are they going to pay? 24-unit building. So in this model, 8% of the 24 is 1.95. So that's one unit.
[Penelope Taylor]: And the 0.95 is cash. It's a percentage payment. But then the 2% doesn't even make an entire unit. 2% of 24 does not even create an entire unit. So the net affordable unit gain is just one instead of two.
[Roberta Cameron]: But you'll get the cash so you could do you could do one of two things you could probably you could negotiate with the developer instead of doing the fractional payment you'd maybe give the second unit at 65 or you can take the cash for 80 percent and the cash.
[Penelope Taylor]: Right so it's a sort of a unicorn product there aren't that many types of those projects showing up so and then it is it at your discretion to decide? If you give them the gray, they may take it.
[Alicia Hunt]: I have seen fractionals only below 0.5% and above 0.5, you round up. And that may be one of the things where we come out with the consultants may come forward with that one. And if that's one that makes sense. I mean, you're so close to 0.5.
[Danielle Evans]: And I think we're not taking away the option to provide the unit. Sometimes they might just want to provide the unit and not feel the cash payment. I think it's a choice. We weren't mandating a fraction of payment. I will say we haven't reviewed any language yet.
[Alicia Hunt]: So it's all hypothetical.
[Roberta Cameron]: They can choose. City will always take the unit if you want to take the unit. I've just raised hand in a public meeting to read any emails. I tend to raise my hand and then it thinks I want to raise my hand. It comes up on screen. If you have it set that way, there's a setting to recognize raised hands as actual.
[Unidentified]: That's new.
[Roberta Cameron]: Interesting. Yeah, I just want to make sure if there's anybody out there that has something to add.
[Alicia Hunt]: Something else, you wanted me to, the MBTA zoning, and that's where I started to sort of move into that. We do have, so the reality is, if you look at that area, it's a pretty built out area. There is some potential that on the upper right quadrant, there are some buildings that have really large parking lots that under the new zoning, those parking lots could become developable if they wanted to. And a lot, there is a big, the lower right is basically all MBTA. We do have a project proposed for that shaft cutout out of the MBTA lot. Criterion, I don't know if any of you are familiar with them. They've done a bunch with Rivers Edge. They have been working with us. We changed, we did a plan development district for them. We changed the zoning. We did a mass change for them. I check in with him periodically. He's still working on it. He ran into some issues with the state, with the river and Chapter 91 that has been slowing him down. but that's planning to come. And then there's another parcel over there that, over the years, I've actually heard from a couple different developers interested in it, and we are talking with them. They're the ones who have raised for us this whole issue with the easement. Apparently on Route, and I don't remember which is which, there's Route 28 and Route 16, and on one of their borders, they have a state easement that requires a 25-foot setback and on the other, a 20-foot setback. And we required a maximum of a 15-foot setback. So that's one of the things that we've been discussing. Should they put it forward to the council as they change? Should we put that forward? They actually also asked about the certifiable versus certified on the lead. That may have actually been the first time I heard it. I went to our climate planner and she's like, Yeah, that's right. You need to change that. They had one other question about lot coverage that I don't think we're going to get on. So there is some that's coming and we are expecting that we'll need to do those changes to the MBTA communities. But that's kind of, that's it.
[Moogoor]: Talk about MBDC briefly.
[Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, it's what is the makeup of the building types currently in this area? Is it mostly commercial?
[Alicia Hunt]: It's real. It's actually mostly. I would say multifamily with some ground floor commercial. So actually the upper right quadrant is commercial. Like there's a bank, there's 5 Cabot Road, like CHA is going in there, there are offices and stuff up there. The CAPI site, the National Development site. Yeah. So the left hand, all those small parts, that's station landing. Um, so if you're familiar with station landing, that's what you're looking at, really. And Fells Lake Plaza, isn't that included?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Where there's potential with CVS's and all those blocks of stores there, as well as stop and shop and side lots, you could potentially build up.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah. And that whole area where the stop and shop, et cetera, are we do think has a lot of potential, but that's a lot of what the Wellington transformational study. 1 of the things that we recognize when we first started to look at this area was that it's a very tight thing between traffic transportation. and density and how do you make it all work in a way that makes sense. So that was part of what we wanted to study for. It's also an area with a lot of commercial and some industrial and jobs. And this is a tough thing where you want more housing, but you don't want to lose the jobs to housing. So how do you make that all work? And that's part of what this study is that I have five proposals sitting on the desk that I haven't opened yet. So you want to do anything else on this and then I can explain a little bit the mayor's probably more familiar with MVDC than even I am but I have some I mean we have the history and that did you have a slide or you know it's the area so if you're looking at the upper right quadrant it's the area above that where the porch was yeah the porch restaurant that whole five parcels there and they're building their I don't know if they have the building permits yet, but they have all the other permissions up to building permit for building a new building, a residential building, and they have one more lot.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: do you want to do a google map yeah and that'll help you understand what we're talking about yeah they don't pay taxes like the normal parcel would they're part of a pilot agreement between and we never gets 88 of taxes malden gets 12 and then everett um has some monies that are dedicated to them through the original agreement so ted and i sit on the board um they're not too happy with medford right now because the language in the prior agreements say that once 15 years has gone by from the completion of the building, it will fall onto our tax rolls versus stay in the pilot, which was, they said this is kind of a forever thing and we're arguing, obviously, this is not, we weren't giving up this land forever, but the MVDC will be around for quite some time since they're still building.
[Alicia Hunt]: So in the early 90s, Late 90s and early 2000s, this whole area was an industrial wasteland, truly. You've seen photos of it. There was a barge in the river. There's everywhere, a HUD loan, a section 108, MVDC was formed to pay back the 108 loan. So it was the first time I got an invoice from HUD asking for an annual payment on this loan. I was like, oh! And then within like a day, I got an email from Malden saying, have you gotten an invoice from this? You need to send it to us. We'd pay it for you. And I was like, oh! Lovely, that's great. So we are still paying off the loan that was used for the major cleanup that's there. If you ever get the chance to get out into River's Edge, the building 200 River's Edge has models and photos and stuff about this. John Priato, who was the developer in the end, is really proud of this work and he's really engaged I actually understand that he was a New York City developer who moved up here and now this is where his offices are and he's actually training his son to take over the business for him. So they're pre auto lane associates. And they have been developing these buildings. So there's the dark one sort of in the middle there, that one, that was the first residential. And then the two commercial buildings that are like office buildings are along the river and the Tufts Boathouse. So I believe it's this commercial building that's just about 15 years old or the residential building that we're talking about how it would start paying taxes directly to Medford. Um, and then across the street is the building where the porch was, there's a new restaurant getting ready to open in there. And there's a lot of parking and there's residential above and great section up there. That's had been surface parking, but they are getting ready to build a residential, a large residential. I want to say 300 ish unit. Yeah, that's good. About not up there.
[Unidentified]: Right there.
[Alicia Hunt]: So the left side is going to be on the order of 300 units. Maybe it's 250. To keep the park. So it's right below the park. Yeah. And then on the right-hand side, they're leaving that vacant. That had always planned to be another office commercial building. And for now, they're just holding, sitting on the land because they're not sure. They never had vacancies until the pandemic. And now they do actually have vacancies in the commercial office building. So they're not building another one quite yet. So that's how why it's an area. Our zoning does not apply there. When they wanted to build this building, the site plan review went through actually the MVDC, which the people who manage the MVDC said to us well we give a lot of courtesy to Medford and the developers we have a wonderful relationship with the owner there so he was like of course we're going to come meet with you what do you want and he met with me and Danielle and we kind of channeled what the planning board would ask for that for there and then it went to the MVDC for approval but he had already incorporated like everything Danielle and I had asked for including she was able there are no inclusionary requirements In this area, and the previous inclusionary negotiation were that, like, they were just there was not much there the 10 year. Yeah, that's 10% it was like, 5% for 10 years or something. So basically we asked for more affordable. We asked to meet our inclusionary zoning. They almost had a heart attack. So that's how Danielle negotiated the payment to the affordable housing trust. And frankly a lot more affordable housing than they were planning on. Which was not a lot.
[Danielle Evans]: I think there's one or two that are deeper.
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. So that's sort of the background of that that area. And again, their taxes won't come straight to the city, they'll go into this fund, the fund does pay off the loan, and then can pay for other things, and we get some of the money. And then over time, they should come off the tax rolls too. I mean, I've read the documents, it was very clear to me.
[Roberta Cameron]: Yeah, just a question about that area. First of all, I don't know if everyone has been over there, but it's the most beautiful park in Medford is just the waterfront. It's so beautifully developed. Is there any way. Connecting better that area with the rest of the city so that the rest of Medford can enjoy that place. And so that those residents can get to the rest of Medford.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, let me come up and show you that. So, I mean, there's this stuff that goes down under the thing, but there's our dream. Was it an orange? Like, this is how great this developer is. He literally. called me up and said, I think you should come see. I think we could do this path. Let me take you and show you what I'm thinking of. And so here, this area, I don't know how well you can zoom in on this, but this is the orange line. And this is, the orange line goes underground and there's a land bridge here. And at the time that he took me, he drove me around to here and we walked in on this. And you can walk right up to here. And then there was a fence, and he's like, Alicia, I think we should build a path here. And there was an abandoned rail line up here. And since then, the MBTA has started running a commuter rail on here and some freight rails up on this land bridge. So we would have to figure out how to cross those rail lines. Or did the MBTA put them back on the ground? I don't know. But what we want to do is a path. So this rail spur exists. And I've talked to every developer along here. This actually comes all the way along here and wraps around down to Riverside Ave, or almost quite. I have talked to every developer. 40B is open to this and willing to participate. These guys just did the Bulletin Woods, and they actually redesigned how they were addressing this edge so that they could be open to a path there. DJs heard me and understood. but they have a fence and they would probably keep their fence anyhow. On their side, there's a wetland along there that makes it a little tough. And then this is a car wash. So we would love to have that. We call it the orange line connector. The other thing is frankly- Was there talk of an overpass too in the past? So we did get some money from the Gaming Commission to actually do A feasibility study, but the staff person who had requested that, and we're going to do that. She ended up leaving. She's got more money to be a bigger job. And so we haven't had anybody with the bandwidth to take that project back up. But it's it's one of that I'm kind of passionate about because it was it was really it's an exciting project. We'd love it would really connect this whole neighborhood of the river and John's idea. The developer was that we would put red light there. And it would make it easy for people. He was like, people could cross, and we could connect right over to my property. And then that whole neighborhood, all those people could come over here and access the river on my property. Do you ever hear that from a developer?
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: He's a nice guy.
[Alicia Hunt]: He's a good developer. And it was his idea. He was like, we could put in a crosswalk. It would be wonderful. And he would help pay for some of it, a little bit. But, yeah, sorry. No, that's fine. I love that one.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: Oops, sorry. I got to run. I got a 6.15. I'm sorry. Thank you. Nice to meet you.
[Danielle Evans]: Bye.
[Breanna Lungo-Koehn]: I love your resolution.
[Alicia Hunt]: See you later. Yeah, thank you. So, and then the paths do connect down. They go under Route 16. They don't go between Route 16 and the river. Sorry, from, yeah, just go south. So the paths are lovely. And then they cross under there, and then it stops. So that developer, Criterion, is where they, that there. He is, he's actually a partner of John Priattel's. He is perfectly, he is ready to build his section of the path there. We have designs, John Priattel actually paid Tetra Tech to design the path all the way down to the end. And we have been working through the permitting process, and MassDOT, we even got an earmark to build it. But I got to tell you, when MassDOT manages a project, it takes like three times longer and it's twice as expensive. They keep telling me though that I don't have to worry about how expensive it is. They are going to build it. But we But it's taking a really long time. If you scroll down to the end, you can see that there's a path that ebbs. So John actually paid for the design and the construction of all the rest of that path. And that's not even on his property. He used to maintain it too. But now he's gotten the DCR to take it over. So this would be the missing link. Great. Yeah. Sorry, I sound so wistful. It's one of those projects I've been working on for like six years, and this is ridiculous. It sounds that way. I was passionate about it.
[Maria D'Orsi]: Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: And we also have a plan. So if you know under Route 28, there's a boardwalk on the Somerville side. We have fully designed the boardwalk on the Medford side to go under Route 28 there by Assembly Row. It's fully designed. It's a, again, a mass dot project. It's on the tip.
[MCM00001729_SPEAKER_03]: It is supposed to be advertised and go out. You can walk from Costco to across subred right there. Oh, no. That's the Amelia Earhart Dam. I was going to say, I'll walk out of there instead of driving out of there, because that place is amazing. I'll park on the other side.
[Alicia Hunt]: That's the Amelia Earhart Dam. There is a new bike path, though. The northern strand goes out, goes into Costco, into the back of that there. My son has taken that. Really? Yeah.
[Roberta Cameron]: Is this the bike path?
[Alicia Hunt]: It's on the other side. If you go to the north, where it says Revere Peach Parkway, there, over on the right side. You see it there? That? Yeah. One time he was like, if I bike there, would you come pick me up? And I said, you have to bike back out of that shopping center. You find a place outside of that shopping center, and I will come pick you up. Yeah, so that's the Amelia Earhart dam is actually really important to this to the city of Medford for climate reasons. Okay, it prevents so this this whole area in that green and everything used to be title and used to be salt marshes and that dam makes us a freshwater river. And it prevents storm surge, and it prevents storm surge from coming and flooding Medford. And so one of our concerns with sea level rise is that it will get overtopped. That's another project that we work with as a region on that. So, yeah. Are there other things? I feel like I made your meeting go really, really long. I'm quite the talker.
[Roberta Cameron]: That was really helpful. A lot of good information. Thank you for coming. Besides the zoning, is there anything else that is helpful to know about policy or plan implementation?
[Alicia Hunt]: I think in the big picture that a DTS probably talked about, we have looked at one of the parcels, the city owns overall. Oh, there's a Medford square RFP, which I feel like is left. I don't know bothers me that it's up. It's making me fuzzy lean forward. So we've looked at in general all the parcels that the city owns and which ones are vacant and which might be developable and before DT Barbara took some nonprofit developers around to look at them and to start to understand what might make sense as being buildable. One of the things that I've conveyed to the mayor over the years is that's how we could participate in building affordable housing. is providing the land for it. So that is something that has happened. I know some of those developers continue to reach out to Aditi from time to time. And actually, Danny LeBlanc is pretty serious, I think, about one of the, it's not actually even a city-owned parcel, but the two that he's been interested in most recently are privately owned, that he is coming. He used to be with the Somerville Community Corporation, so he is a very experienced nonprofit developer. Working mostly on Maldon right now, not the city, but just not government, but that area. So he's looking at a project in Medford. But then he might come to this board and say, can you help with it? He's been talking to us about the zoning piece of it. So the Medford Square RFP This went out to bid these parcels and I will say that the blue one is right below City Hall there. We did say that if the developer has a good treatment of the parking lot behind City Hall. And can replicate City Hall staff parking on these parcels that we are open to it expanding closer to City Hall. One of the proposals we have actually does use that and puts a plaza between that building and City Hall and has just a busway through it, which I kind of. I really liked that. We suggested that the paint might be best served as a parking garage that serves the theater, the city hall, and that these residential buildings might have parking with them, but that maybe more of the parking is over here on the side against the highway to allow greater density on the sites that are nicer and closer to the river. One of the big pushbacks that we have had is that you can almost see the word senior center in the bottom right there. Seniors are very concerned right now. They all park in that big yellow lot. I'm told that they use 40 spots a day. The senior center director has been tracking them and asking people to sign in and say if they've driven a car and where they park, so she can give us proof that they're using that. They have 15 dedicated spots, but she shows us that they're using 40 a day because don't they have parking behind the senior center? They have almost none. Almost all of that parking belongs to that high rise. And then they have a couple of higher handicap spots. Okay. There might be a total of 5.
[Roberta Cameron]: In your center spot, they're using the parking lot across with a with a pop-up park. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. Are the housing authority tenants actually using all the parking that the housing authority has?
[Alicia Hunt]: So the housing authority does not. They are required to have it for their number of units by our zoning. And so you know, that also plays into their funding through the federal government that they're compliant with zoning. So it gets they're actually doing a major renovation. They're adding 20 units. So we've talked to them about, we'd love to see an agreement where the senior center can use some of that parking. And they basically said they cannot do that until their project is done because of their federal financing and stuff. Plus, during their construction, they're actually occupying a lot of their parking with construction vehicles. That is a fascinating project, but that aside, so the senior center. And the pushback we get is that seniors want to be able to park very close to walk a distance. They want to be on an open lot. They don't want to park in a in a. parking garage, that makes them very nervous. So that's a lot of the difficulty. On the other hand, we look at this large lot and say, how do we not develop more commercial or we want to do some ground floor commercial and residential because people want to park and go to the senior center. Like it just doesn't, there's a dissonance there that's pretty difficult to overcome.
[Roberta Cameron]: But it makes sense to just, I'm sorry, it's a generational thing to be like, I just, I think the problem goes Yeah, I was going to say, would it make sense to just hold on to that yellow line for until at least until the House and Authority project is completed so that then that changes our thinking about what's possible?
[Alicia Hunt]: So I will say that doing one of these projects takes a very long time. So we put it out to bid. We got proposals back at the end of December. We have a team reviewing the proposals, and then we're going to interview the companies. with a plan to make an award. We expect that it'll take, from right now, two months before we have a decision on who is getting it. And then it'll take probably, I was saying this to a different group that included our land use lawyer, and she kept nodding at everything I said, and I was like, sure, my timing sounds good, and she's like, yeah, so I'm gonna repeat myself. another four months on the order of to negotiate an actual contract to the point where you have something signed. And then they do a design that they have to go through site plan review. And we have to change the zoning to make it doable, because the zoning is ridiculous. But that's already, we think in the overall, we had Medford Square on the list, that by March, we should have a feel for what we want to hear. And so we'll be changing the zoning anyhow, regardless of who will allow it.
[Roberta Cameron]: So how many months for the planning?
[Alicia Hunt]: Do we think that the site... Well, yeah, between the amount of time... When I've watched these guys from other developers have their zoning, how long it takes them to come to site plan review, to work through the site plan review process takes... It could take three or four months. But them getting to site plan review may take them four to six months to get there in the first place. So we're talking more than a year from now before they've been through site plan review. Then they start construction documents. That could take them a year. There's also what's called Chapter 91 along the river. There are some fingers of Chapter 91. We believe they're going to have to go through NEPA permitting. We think that's another year to 18 months. We think it might be 3 years before there are shovels in the ground on this project.
[Roberta Cameron]: But if we're, I mean, how long before the housing project is completed?
[Alicia Hunt]: I think they're 6, 9 months. It might be a little longer than that because they are renovating while the building is occupied 2 floors at a time.
[Roberta Cameron]: So, I mean, because I just wonder, like, To put a forever building on this site that is smaller than what we could build because of a project that overlapped by a few months.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm not sure that it was. I just said that we're getting the pushback. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that we have the right city council right now and the right mayor to move forward with a good project on this site. Um, and I will say that I've, I've looked at some different ideas for this and there's 1 idea where you have a hard building the whole way around on that curve. And you can look at it and you know, I'm not sure I like that. And you look at an idea that is a good size building, but has some open space along the river and stuff. And you're like, oh, is that open spaces that service parking or is that Plaza like. Oh, let's fill in the blanklets. That could evolve over the next 3 years, right? Exactly how that space is used. So I think there are a couple of different ideas. One of the proposals came in with the parking garage. One came in with 3 buildings. I think that it's all negotiable right now.
[Roberta Cameron]: So question about the senior center, are they open to being tenants at any of the newly developed buildings?
[Alicia Hunt]: That's not something that we really put forward, but it is an intriguing idea. It's like, what if you actually built a new senior center in the building and then potentially use their space for parking? Although they have the lovely Peace Garden right there now. Yeah. And that would be difficult.
[Roberta Cameron]: I mean, another question is whether any of the proposals take into consideration the need for more office space for City Hall.
[Alicia Hunt]: Or any kind of municipal space. We've sort of pushed for that a little bit. And I can't tell you off the top of my head. I will tell you, I looked at them very thoroughly the day before I left for vacation. And I got back on Monday and I have not looked at them since then. Or any civic space. The other thing that we asked for were more affordable housing than inclusionary zoning. We asked for civic space. We asked for parking. We asked for creative solutions to parking. Because we do have the theater and we want people to be able to come and use the theater. Theater, other than Wednesday nights, actually overlaps very well with City Hall, but they need a lot more parking than City Hall does. So we asked them to be creative with that. And so we're sort of starting, and part of this is we then need to interview them and kind of dig into what are they actually, I might, is it we're gonna end up with a version that is not quite either proposal, but kind of a mush of the two. One had, I think that I saw 1 of the slides and something about 150 housing units. They both had significantly more housing units than that. That was a floor that we put in. I think 1 had at least 250 or 300 and the other had 500 units. And we asked for more studio one-bedroom units, smaller units, like this says, looking for graduate students and seniors in a down size, and they were both responsive to that as well. We kind of, when we did a walkthrough, said, you know, we're not really looking for luxury housing. On the other hand, we don't want 100% affordable here. Because we need tenants who are going to support all these businesses, the restaurants, the cafes, a grocery store. And so we need some of the people that have the disposable income to be able to support these things. So that was one of the, we were looking for in the blend. And we very much asked for ground floor commercial. If you ever stand at the hotel at night and you look towards Medford Square, you kind of go, that's safe. Do I want to walk down there? It's so dark. But then you walk a block and a half, you walk two blocks and you're like, oh, actually, I'm really glad I'm here. This is lovely. And there are businesses and restaurants. And so it seemed to us that having some businesses lining that so that people would be drawn from the hotel, which is usually quite full, into Medford Square would actually be a really nice thing to be doing and would really help the whole area. What about the circulation? We said to them that the circulation is completely on the table. We've been working with the DPW commissioner who's completely open to real mining roads. To changing the traffic flow on the directional ways. Yes, so that we're very open to that. 1 of the proposals I think really took that to heart. And so that's something that we need to work through is exactly how would that work. Right now, so I'm actually talking with the consultant tomorrow, and we're talking sort of strategy and how to do this. We've been asked to share the proposal, and I've said not until I've talked to the consultant, but my instinct is to not share them with the public until we get to interview both companies so that neither of them has the opposing, the other group's proposal. And then after we've interviewed them would be the point where we would share it all with the public. That makes sense. There's been a push. People really want to see it and want to see the meeting. I have a feeling that hurts our negotiation place if we do that. I'm so sorry. I have to go pick up my daughter. City Hall is open until 730 on Wednesday and I don't actually have another meeting tonight.
[Roberta Cameron]: Very interesting. I enjoyed it. Thank you. All right, should I turn it back to you guys? Are there any other questions?
[Danielle Evans]: I have a question. Did you guys talk about, when you were talking about the zoning changes, you mentioned when the discussion will be about single-family zoning districts.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, we talked about the timing, and I think you actually missed the Monday meeting where She didn't mean North Medford? No, I was there. So we talked about that and that's coming January and February.
[Danielle Evans]: But that would be good for any input from this body about what do you think would make sense? Do we have a date for that?
[Alicia Hunt]: So we do have dates for the meetings. We should put them on the zoning website. Is the January 15th one staying January 15th? So we actually have a community development board on January 15th, and we're going to do a public hearing on Salem Street on the 22nd. Are we still on track to do that? Yeah, we have to apply. I wrote it myself, so hopefully it's good enough. It's fine. So the public hearing on Salem Street is going to be January 22nd at this community development board. And Greensboro. And Greensboro. And so if you want, like, the DC could send those to you, but if they're not on that website, we should get those in the next, let's say, next day or so. January 15th is a public, is the city council zoning meeting. But I don't think Danielle and I can be at that one. January 29th is the other one on the neighborhoods and the single family. And then February 12th and 26th is when we're going to do multifamily at the City Council. January 29th. And then February 12th and February 26th. I think just to be transparent, we are meeting with the City Council Vice President and President and the consultants offline, like weekly, and emailing with them so that by the time we're going to the public meetings, we've hashed out a lot of stuff on this. We're taking public input. We want to hear what people have to say. But we are, like, you can't do this kind of dramatic zoning in like two meetings. We're having, you know, additional meetings
[Roberta Cameron]: Is the 115 City Council zoning meeting, that's the same night as the Community Development Board meeting? Yes, it is.
[Danielle Evans]: It's just a conflict. We don't know how to resolve. We just don't have enough. That's one of our standing meeting dates.
[Unidentified]: Yeah.
[Danielle Evans]: They departed from their meeting dates, and I'm stuck to mine because when I departed last year, I caused conflicts.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yes, I will say that that is the Community Development Board meeting where we are hearing We are hoping it will be the final hearing on the tough storm and a 21 St. Clair, which is a shelter for MV. DV, domestic violence. Oh, my God. Yes. So domestic violence shelter. And so both of those have been very, very controversial. So if you're aware of the tough storm project, so that we're hoping will free up a lot of housing in Medford for families and Somerville by taking students out of apartments and putting them in a dorm. But it is very big and the neighborhood doesn't like it.
[Danielle Evans]: It's really not anything we can do. We don't have any leverages of Dover Amendment protected use. Yeah, conforms with height is actually lower than what's allowed. It's all kinds of little weird things in our zoning that allows that.
[Alicia Hunt]: So is it a for-profit student or developer? That's the interesting thing is it is, but it's on Tufts property and Tufts will be retaking the complete ownership of the building after it's built. So I'm not really understanding. Yeah, I was like, they're still going to have them manage it, but it's on, because we asked our lawyer about it. She said it is on Tufts property and they are going to retake complete ownership afterwards and Tufts students are going to live there. And it's like, it's not even graduate, it's juniors and seniors. They're like, this is a Tufts project, even if there's a for-profit developer involved.
[Danielle Evans]: It seems to be like a trend I've seen. It should absolutely be housing their undergraduate students. Yeah, it's nuts that you could have like 19 year olds living in the neighborhoods.
[Alicia Hunt]: Trust me, it's the parents of not 12 year olds, but 20 year olds who have an apartment.
[Maria D'Orsi]: Yes, and they're following better means. Yes. I'm pleasantly surprised by the tough students. They're very, very low key. Do you live in that neighborhood? I do. I live on Woodbine, right behind Elliot Pearson School. Okay.
[Danielle Evans]: My neighbors want to help me. I'm so upset. Danielle lived in- I mean, I break them in every year. Like the noise ordinance? Yep. Calling. Every year, every August, they had to learn.
[Penelope Taylor]: If I was curious to know the ratio of a lot to the building on it, is the easiest way to visually look at the assessor's maps or crunch numbers through the assessor's pages? So like what's the coverage ratio? Full disclosure of ADUs in mind, so I just like to look around and kind of be like, what are some, like, especially share ADU information with certain lots or owners, but.
[Danielle Evans]: So the ADU regulations should be promulgated by February when this goes into effect. I still think they're taking public comment on them. I'm not certain if they are. Well, there was a comment period and there was a forum and there was a comment period and then they were going to either make changes not similar to the META guidelines, which I guess now are going to be regulations per. There was a legal case today.
[Alicia Hunt]: I actually got the KP law memo on that that I skimmed It came in at 515. I don't know of anything. GIS. Yeah. Yeah. Just look at maps.
[Roberta Cameron]: Beyond the assessor's database.
[Penelope Taylor]: I guess I just think in my neighborhood, there's a lot of houses on really big blocks, and I'm like, oh, I want to let all of them know about ADS. Like, that's one of my, I just look around, and I'm like, this seems like prime They should just know about it. So anyway, we don't have the setbacks. We don't know where the setbacks will be at.
[Alicia Hunt]: I'm forwarding what we got. So KP Law will sometimes write an e-update, a memo. I've asked in the past if we can share these, and they say yes, they put these out for public consumption. So I'm forwarding it to you, and then you can share it with the board if you want. It's about the MBTA decision. that came out yesterday, today? Today. Today. Today. Today. Okay, then they came with their update pretty darn fast there. Yeah, I got it at 5.15. Oh, Nina got it at 5. That's not bad.
[Roberta Cameron]: Is there anything else? Anybody else have any questions? No. Then I would like to ask for a motion for adjournment. So moved. We don't need to do roll call. We're here, right? Yeah. I'll vote to adjourn. Thank you, adjourn. I do. I do. Thank you.
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