[SPEAKER_23]: Do you want to play the real way where we don't show each other?
[Kevin Harrington]: Check mic one, two, there we go. So it's still check mic one, two, check mic, check mic. Mic one, two, there it is. I'll bring it down a little bit in the booth.
[Zac Bears]: Special joint session, Medford City Council and Community Development Board, January 21st, 2026 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll for the City Council.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan.
[Kaitlin Robinson]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro.
[Kaitlin Robinson]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Leming. Present. Councilor Malauulu. Present. Councilor Scarpelli. Present. Councilor Tseng.
[Jeremy Martin]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Present. Seven present, none absent. Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Yes, I'm calling the roll for the Medford Community Development Board. John Anderson.
[Unidentified]: Present.
[Doug Carr]: Scott Began. Sean Began, present. Page Buldini. Present. Dina Calogero. Present. And Ari Hoffman-Fleischer. Sorry, I'm- Present. And Doug Carr, present. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: I called Doug Dave once when we were doing a historic reenactment, and I've never let myself forget about it, so. All right, if we could all please rise to salute the flag. All right, motions, orders, and resolutions. 26-022 offered by definitely not Kit Collins, Councilor Matt Leming, the resolution to adopt our joint session rules, and I'll recognize Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. These are just some joint session rules that I wrote up and discussed in a working group meeting. It's based very closely on the joint session rules that the Medford City Council and School Committee hold once a year. I try to do additional research on other bases for these, so these joint meetings have been done by other municipalities in the past. Salem broadcasts all of their joint sessions with their planning board, as well as, I believe, Peabody. And one other city that I'm not recalling have broadcast their own versions of this that I found on YouTube. And I believe the rules of the... joint session that are written here reflect basically what I saw when I viewed those meetings. So the long and short of it is that the bodies that are present vote city council and then school committee and if both bodies vote in the affirmative on any particular motion, then the motion passes. But we do need to approve these just so that we have some agreement on what this joint session will look like moving forward.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. Is that a motion to approve?
[Matt Leming]: That is a motion for the City Council to approve, and we'll also have to see a motion from the CDB after.
[Zac Bears]: Sure, yes, on the motion of Councilor Leming, seconded by Councilor Millane to approve. Is there any further discussion by members of the Council on the joint session rules? Seeing none, I will turn it over to Chair Carr and then we'll take a vote after the City Board has deliberated.
[Doug Carr]: Okay, so we're gonna be adopting the same rules, correct? Yes. Okay, so I need a motion to adopt the rules that you all received in your packets to align with the city council. Motion to adopt. Second. Second, I'll call the roll. John Anderson? Yes. John Began? Yes. Dina Calgaro? Yes. Ari Goffman-Fishman? Yes. And Page Buldini? Yes. Myself, yes. The motion passes six to nothing.
[Zac Bears]: Since we haven't adopted them yet, I've already broken the rules once. We should have voted before you guys did. But we'll have that for us on the motion of Councilor Leming, seconded by Councilor Malayne to adopt the joint session rules. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Kalyan.
[Liz Mullane]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro. Yes. Councilor Leming. Yes. Councilor Malayne. Councilor Scarpelli. Yes. Councilor Tseng. Yes. President Peters.
[Zac Bears]: Yes. 70 affirmative, none of the negative. The motion passes and the joint session rules are approved. Thank you all. All right. Now for the fun stuff. Our motions, orders, or actually our hearings. We have hearings, paper 26023 offered by Councilor Leming, public hearing proposed amendments to the Medford Zoning Ordinance, Chapter 94, Medford Square. Generally how we do public hearings on the council and it's, you know, I think maybe a little bit different on the Community Development Board is we generally hear a presentation from the proponent or in this case likely from Innes Associates. We have discussion and then we open the public hearing to hear from members of the public. I know you guys do it a little differently so I'm going to turn it over to Doug to do what you do for public hearings for the Community Development Board.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Chair Bears. Our process on the CD board, and I'm gonna need some, first of all, I just wanna acknowledge that we have members of the planning staff here for, who are present, who can answer questions for the council or for the community development board. But let me go to the text which is our normal boilerplate for opening a public hearing in for the city board if you just give me one second. No.
[Zac Bears]: Is there any way that I can grab it, or do you want to read it from here?
[Doug Carr]: Yeah. Is this it? I think so. Okay, great. Is this on?
[Unidentified]: Yeah.
[Doug Carr]: At least you said we don't have to, but I think at least let's stop here. Okay, so the Medford Community Development Board
[Alicia Hunt]: from here to there.
[Doug Carr]: Gotcha. Thank you, Aisha. The Medford Community Development Board, the CDB, and the Medford City Council shall conduct a joint public hearing on January 21st, 2020 after 6.30 p.m. in the Medford City Council Chamber on the second floor of Medford City Hall, 85 George B. Hassett Drive, Medford Mass, and via Zoom via remote videoconferencing relative to the following proposed amendment to the City of Medford zoning ordinance and zoning map. Number one, amend section 94-2.1, division into districts in section 94-9.0, special district regulations to add to the Medford Square District, the MSD. Number two, amend section 94-3.2, table of use regulations, table A, by incorporating the MSD zoning district into the existing table and to designate the uses permitted therein. Number three, amend section 94-4.1 table of dimensional requirements, which is table B, by incorporating the MST zoning district into the existing table and to state the dimensional requirements therein. Number four, amend section 94-12 definitions to amend and add various definitions. And number five, amending the zoning map to change the zoning district designations of various properties to the MSD zoning district as shown in the map entitled Medford Square Zoning prepared by Innes Associates and dated March 2025. That's it. Great. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chair Carr. All right. Well, we are here. I just want to welcome everyone back to our first zoning meeting of 2026 of this new council term. Welcome our CD board members as well. You know, I think just some grounding that is important is how we arrived here. A little over four years ago, this city began work on its first citywide comprehensive plan. And that planning process lasted for over a year and resulted in January 2023 with the publication of the citywide comprehensive plan. That comprehensive plan, and I'll go a little bit more into this later, but one piece of implementing that plan, which is a 30-year vision for what we want our community to look like, involved making amendments to the city zoning ordinance. In 2024, the council was able to get funding to begin a zoning updates project. We issued an RFP at the end of 2023 actually, made a selection of a consultant team which consisted of Innes Associates at the time as well as some partners including the Bobrowski and Jonathan Silverstein representing them, and they had worked with us on the recodification of our zoning ordinance from 2020 to 2022, which basically took the 50-year-old zoning and put it into a better format from which we could start to have conversations about what we want the city's zoning to look like. This is year three of that zoning updates project. In 2024 and 2025, the city council and the community development board and our planning staff and our planning consultant team held hundreds of hours of discussions, public meetings, community forums and receive feedback and engagement. In the first months of that process in 2024, we developed a citywide framework for rezoning. And essentially, that citywide framework included 10, about 10 proposed zoning amendments. Through 2024 and 2025, that resulted in the passage of three zoning amendments, the Mystic Avenue Corridor District, Salem Street Neighborhood Corridor District, and the Green Score Zoning Ordinance, as well as the development of several other of those 10 areas, including the one that is on the agenda tonight for Medford Square. Last spring and summer, I think as everybody well knows, it was the talk of the town and in some ways continues to be. There became a serious disagreement, I would say, between the city council and the mayor with our CD board and others kind of caught in the middle around the scope of the proposed residential zoning, as well as the CDB's proposed amendments to the council's proposed residential zoning. And that really derailed the process of our zoning updates project. In July, that project was paused by the mayor, and it was only in December that the mayor and the council reached an agreement to get that process back on track. I want to talk a little bit about that very quickly before we get into the process. the rest of the discussion for tonight. So December 3rd, after the city council meeting on December 2nd, the city made a statement, put out a release around the mayor and the city council agreeing on a plan to restart the city's zoning updates project. It states here, the city will sign an extension and provide additional resources to advance key zoning priorities in Medford Square, Tufts and Boston Avenue between now, this is December and May, 2026. and then the City will solicit new proposals starting in February and March for work on zoning updates between May 2026 and June 2028. The Mayor, in collaboration with the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability, will appropriate funding to sign a contract extension with Innes Associates, you changed your name, Innis Land Strategies Group, Great. To perform work in the following areas from December 2025 to May 2026. So that's what I'm calling phase one. Phase one of year three of part two of this grand adventure. But I just think it's important to kind of focus that this agreement has two phases. December 2025 to May 2026, where we are now, we've extended our contract with INIS, our planning consultant team, to work on essentially two major areas with two supplements. So the full Medford Square zoning update, as it says here, and the Tufts Institutional Zone and Boston Avenue, as well as cleanup areas of zoning in accordance with needs of the building commissioner and our planning department, and communications and community engagement support. So that's phase one, that's where we are now. And just so folks know, since this has been such a big conversation, it also says that we would hold a joint public hearing in January. You are here to discuss the rezoning proposal for Medford Square and West Medford Square that's currently sitting in the Community Development Board. In December, we split those two proposals. And so we're just here tonight talking about Medford Square Following this, a request for proposal, so that's phase one. But after that, phase two, a request for proposals for a new contract will be released to bidders in February or March, and a proposal will be selected in April to begin work in May through June 2028. And that includes basically the bulk of what was left from the zoning framework from the first two years of this project. I won't go into everything, but that includes the West Medford Square piece that was split off, Wellington and Mystic Valley Parkway, Main Street and Broadway, parking, the residential, and some other items like our affordable housing overlay, updates to inclusionary zoning, transportation demand management, and it very specifically states parking will take place at the same time as residential zoning. And then other agreements that that RFP and additional funds will include really where the process fell apart. So more funds for public relations and community engagement, including a professionally designed standalone zoning website, support for neighborhood meetings, and better outreach into the community ahead of those zoning meetings via all of the tools available to us, mailers, text messages, robocalls, and social media. That's a lot, but what we're doing here in phase one is we're talking about Medford Square, Tufts Institutional Zone and Boston Avenue, some cleanup issues, and Ennis will be supporting our team on the communications and community engagement, which will include I think four neighborhood meetings, and right now the thinking is two on each of the two main proposals, so Medford Square and the Tufts Institutional in Boston Avenue. And then we'll come back, I think really with the resources we need, something we've been talking about and something I talked about last summer. after the project had, well, around when the project got put on hold, was we have been given a huge charge with this project, which is to update our city zoning for the first time in decades, to align our city zoning with its first comprehensive plan in memory, certainly in the last 50 years. And, That is essential. We need to do it. Our city needs it. People have been demanding it. We've had so many plans that have been put on a shelf and never activated for places like Medford Square and for our whole community. And I think the one thing that maybe everyone agrees on, even if they don't necessarily agree on the destination, is the potential that our community has. And with that, I think we, We took that charge very seriously and we tried to do a very big job without getting the resources that we needed to do everything that we wanted to do. The RFP we put out in 2023 had pretty significant limits due to the limited funding that was appropriated by the mayor's administration to the project. We took the best proposal, we got a great team, but we did not have the level of resources and support to communicate effectively and hear from our residents about how they want to see our comprehensive plan put into action through zoning. And I think, you know, certainly myself and I think the council and its discussions really has reflected on that over the last six months. And that was part of what informed this agreement with the mayor. We were insistent that the level of resources that's needed to effectively accomplish this job needed to be appropriated and provided by the mayor in order for us to move forward. I think the agreement that we reached in December reflects that, and I'm excited to work with everyone here to do that. So just really quickly before I go into a little bit more of how the meeting's going to go, I just want to really ground us very quickly in some of the key values that we're talking about from our comprehensive plan. The first one is open and engaged communication. I think we were open and engaged, but I don't think we had enough resources to do enough communication. welcoming and supportive neighborhoods, vibrant places, access for all, climate resilience. Those are some big areas. frameworks for us to talk about our city's plan, but a lot of that boils down to a few things. Growth, how do we enable growth in our city so that we can build more vibrant squares, so that we can grow in all of the places that we know growth is possible. Housing, how can we invite more neighbors to welcome more neighbors to live in our community alongside us? How can we do both of those things in a way that helps transform our squares into even more thriving places that people want to go to with even more wonderful businesses that people want to be part of? and make those places walkable so that people feel safe and excited to spend their days and evenings in the beautiful commercial areas that we have in our city. historic preservation, how do we do all of that and make sure that our city's amazing history over the last 400 years stays as a key part of our story. And then, you know, two other things. How do we expand our green space, our open space? How do we make that more accessible? How do we activate our beautiful river? And then the last thing is just like a clear and consistent process, both so that we have accountability for our community's needs, and that when people wanna build things here, they know how things are going to work. We need to make sure that it's very clear when someone wants to build something here, how that's gonna go, and make sure that the things that people are building here are aligned with the vision and values of our community. I think something that we talked about a lot over the last two years was what is zoning and what zoning isn't. Zoning is about executing our comprehensive plan. It's about putting into law what we want to see our city look like in 25, 30, 50 years. And it is, quite frankly, it's about telling people what they can and cannot do with their private property. And I think that that is... a sticky wicket in a lot of directions. And I know there's a lot of people in this community who never expected a Democratic Socialist like me to be so supportive of letting people do more with their private property. But that is... You know, that's a really tough thing. Where does the private and the public conflict when our public needs and what people want to do with their private land, when those needs and values are not aligned? Zoning is essentially the agreement that we all come to about what people can and can't do. You know, and I think the other thing is zoning is not a cure-all. We will not solve all of our community's problems with the best zoning ordinance. We could craft the best zoning ordinance in the history of zoning ordinances, and it won't address how big our fire department needs to be, you know, how we manage traffic, how we help people get from place to place, and how we, you know, it's also not a cure-all for the housing crisis, right? It doesn't solve all of those problems, but all of those problems interface with it. But that all stems from what is our vision for our city for the next, what do we want Medford to look like in 30 years? What do we want the next generation of people to live here? What kind of community do we want them to live in? And if we can create zoning that represents that vision, then from that we will find answers to those other questions that need answers, that zoning will never be the answer for. With that, I do wanna just talk a little bit about how things are gonna go tonight. So I just kind of did a quick introduction, talked about the process agreed to by the mayor and the council in December around this next part of our zoning updates project. Next, we will hear from our Innis Land Strategies Group folks who will talk a little bit about the process to this point and the scope of their role during this first phase, talking about Medford Square and our Tufts Institutional Zone in Boston Ave. We will pause at that point for questions from the Council and Community Development Board about the scope of this phase of work and how Innis Land Strategies Group will be part of it. At that point, we will hear a presentation from Innis on the Medford Square zoning before us tonight. The CD board chair, Doug Carr, has some remarks and introductory that he'll make after that presentation. then we will have City Council and Community Development Board talking about the specific presentation in the Medford Square proposal, and then we will have our public comment. So those are a lot of things, and it sounds like it'll take a long time, but I'm hoping we can move through that with diligence and get all the information we need on the table. So with that, I'm happy to invite Emily and her team up to present on what this phase of the project looks like where we are once again working with them and very lucky to be working with them once again.
[Emily Innes]: President, I'm just going to plug in first and then share my screen.
[Zac Bears]: In 18 months, we're going to make this all easier because we have to expand this whole chamber for four more Councilors who really want to talk.
[Emily Innes]: Just making sure it's coming up. Perfect. All right. Can you all hear me? Excellent. Good evening. For the record, Emily Keyes Ennis, president of the Ennis Land Strategies Group. I turned it off. It's always fun. Not me. You're welcome. Again, for the record, Emily Keyes, NS President of NS Land Strategies Group. I am delighted to be here again, along with my team, Paola Ramos-Martinez, our Chief Resilience Officer, is with me tonight. And we, of course, have the same team and a few more since we last met. A few things have changed, and you mentioned one already, Mr. President. We have changed our name to NS Land Strategies Group. So I wanted to go through first what our role is going to be, and let me just go to the next page here. We'll talk about the project scope. I will then stop, as you suggested, and take questions from the Councilors and the members of the Community Development Board on what that scope is, and then we'll talk a little bit about the background to Medford Square. So as you said earlier, we have two phases, January to March, March really to May rather than June. Phase one is Medford Square. We have a few cleanup items that were requested by city staff on some of the earlier portions of the zoning that passed last year. We do have two community meetings and we are delighted to have those as well as four meetings with city officials. So some combination of city council possibly back to planning and permitting committee and certainly community development board meetings. And then the same again for the Tufts institutional zoning and Boston Avenue.
[Zac Bears]: Emily, if I could just note, these do not reflect the phase one and phase two I was talking about. This is sub-phase one and sub-phase two of phase one.
[Emily Innes]: We did not coordinate our phasing before this meeting. Phase A and Phase B maybe. Certainly one of the meetings that we talked about, so we got our contract last week. We had our first kickoff meeting last week. But one of the things we talked about at that kickoff meeting is we would really love to meet with all of the community development board, but certainly the new members just to go a little bit a lot more in-depth than we can go tonight on what went on last year in terms of what implications that has for where we are now. I think the thing that I really want to stress tonight is Our next steps which begin tonight is our role tonight is to listen. It is to listen to the city council members. It is to listen to the community development board members and most especially most importantly it is to listen to the community. The people who are behind me in person now. The people who are online. We know a lot has changed since we last talked with you all, and we want to make sure that we hear as much as we can tonight. It is certainly not the only opportunity, but it is the first opportunity. After that, as we did last time, we will be part of a city working group to deal with logistics, and one of those logistics is going to be to schedule the community meetings. Discuss the format of the content of the materials for those and then confirm an overall meeting schedule with the Community Development Board and City Council to take us first through Medford Square and then through the Tufts Institutional and Boston Avenue zoning. So those are the key next steps that were going to happen because that will determine the pace and pattern of that. Our role as consultants is to listen, is to offer information. We'll be going through some of the information we've offered in the past tonight. As members of the public bring forward questions, as members of the city officials bring forward questions, to do the research and answer those, to provide the implications of choices and possible decisions to say if you choose to do this, Here are the pros and cons. But ultimately, that decision making is up to the people of the city who are involved in the process. We are information providers. We are the people who, as I said, give the pros and cons and the implications. But you all ultimately are decision makers and your recommendations to the city council. and city council in terms of their votes. A lot of what we will give you is the public input that we hear. So we're delighted to be here. Again, quick overview of the schedule. Happy to answer any questions as to process before we move on to Medford Square itself.
[Zac Bears]: Great, all right. Do we have questions from members of the council for Innis right at this point on the scope of phase one, part A and part B? All right, seeing none. Oh, Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Sorry, it wasn't a question, it was more of a comment just to clarify one thing on the slides. And this is just so that we have transparency. When they say the city's working group, right there, just so that folks in the public are aware of that, that's an internal group consisting of In his land group, members of the Office of Planning Development and Sustainability, as well as a sub quorum of both the Community Development Board and the City Council. as well as the mayor and the building commissioner, director of communications, some other executive staff. The purpose of that is to plan the content of these meetings and just have some background for discussion. I am making sure that the other members of the council and community development board aware of what's discussed in those meetings, although we do have open meeting law to consider. So, you know, I'm gonna be planning on taking notes and having the respective clerks send out the discussions that take place in those. So that's just so the public is aware of what that means. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Do we have any more questions from members of the City Council at this time for Emily Ennis? Seeing none in the chamber and no hands on Zoom, I will turn it over to Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Okay, I would ask the same from the Community Development Board. Does anyone have any specific questions about the scope of work going forward?
[Zac Bears]: Yes. You can request on the thing and then we can see which mic you have. If you push the little person, yep, and then we can enable you here.
[Doug Carr]: Go ahead, Ari Fishman.
[Ari Fishman]: Thank you very much. My first time sitting here. This is a question about process more broadly rather than the specifics but going off of our experience last year. May I request and we had discussed this during the last kind of big process meeting when we talked about timing. I think that a good principle that can concretely incorporate these desires for community feedback is that every decision should have at least two rounds of iteration for public comment. I think one of the frustrations or difficulties was trying to get through things kind of in a very short period of time. So everything we should get an opportunity to see, get public feedback, incorporate that feedback, go to the public again. And I know that's not necessarily the type of process we're talking about right now, but I'd love to commit to that.
[Emily Innes]: Two things to add to that. One, excuse me, couldn't agree more in terms of figuring out a way of getting information to the public, getting their feedback, and then bringing it back again. I think that goes into the overall work schedule that we're talking about and also the fact of how do we time those community meetings. The other thing that I think we all saw happen last year was the kind of piling on of topics simultaneously. And one of the advantages of phase A and phase B is that phase A, Medford Square, needs to be complete before phase B comes forward. It doesn't mean that we're not working on the research and the information and all of that in the background, getting that ready to come forward. But it does mean that the city board that the city council should not have two topics in front of them simultaneously. And we think that will help not only all of you in this room, but everybody trying to comment and not having to get confused about which zoning they're commenting on.
[Doug Carr]: Any other questions from the community development board members? Okay, seeing none, I would like to just reiterate that there's been a lot of turnover on the community development board over the last 12 months. Obviously, I'm pretty new to this process, so we would ask for patience as we delve into these issues. And as an educational component here, that's really important, not just for the public, but for this board as well. to really understand for those of us who weren't in the weeds and in the battles for last year to try to come to a more clean process and one that is clear, constructive, and I think at the end produces a great result. So I'm all set. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chair Carp. Ari, to your point, that is really something we're trying to avoid this time, is the pile-up. $200,000 in 18 months was not enough money and time to do this project. And so we have more money and more time to do it now. All right, I think that's it for this phase. So we can go next to the next slide, I think, and we can start talking about this Medford Square proposal, the background, and maybe some of the initial adjustments to where we were when we had this before our boards eight months ago.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you, Mr. President. So you're about to see a lot of slides. I am not going to go into depth into all the slides tonight. What I want to do is call out the buckets of information we worked with last time. The primary bucket throughout the process was community comments, but let's start a little bit with where President Bears's left off, which was specific to Medford Square, there are three plans that we need to think about. the 2023 Comprehensive Plan, the 2022 Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. Both of those have specific requirements for Medford Square and also for the city as a whole. And then way back in 2005, there was a Medford Square Plan. Some of those recommendations have never been addressed and had quite a few zoning recommendations that didn't happen. And one of the things that we heard, it was instructive going back through the Comprehensive Plan, and seeing a quote being called out, if you're familiar with the format, you see little quotes and a quote called out saying, we need to implement the 2005 plan. So I wanted to say, you know, give a little bit of history into the planning part that went into it. So Medford Square was obviously identified as a square in the plan. We talked about corridors, centers, squares, gateways. but also a civic and institutional anchor, primarily a civic. You've got City Hall, you have the library, you have the senior center, a couple of other city-owned properties as well as city active properties. It's a transformational focus area and that meant that it was an area where things might change to meet some of the other goals of the comprehensive plan. And what I've done here, and I'm sorry because I keep hitting the down arrow, but apparently that's not the down arrow anymore, thanks to the wisdom of Adobe PDFs. So I'm not going to go into every single zoning strategy for Medford Square, but there were quite a few. And they targeted the overall goal categories that the President Bears mentioned earlier. So welcoming and supportive neighborhoods, zoning strategies for that, creating new opportunities for amenities in Medford's business districts, making development regulations consistent with the plan's vision for land use, creating commercial centers that meet residents' shopping needs, But there are also non-zoning strategies that affect Medford Square, and it's really important to remember, I think Councilor Bears talked about it earlier, but zoning doesn't solve everything. Zoning gives permissions for activities, it gives restrictions on activities, those activities being land uses, which could be commercial, residential, a mixture of both, industrial. It gives those permissions for what can happen, how much can happen, where the restrictions are on those in terms of dimensional standards or development standards, but it doesn't solve everything. And there are two very tricky things that zoning can't perfectly solve that have been conversations in this community during this process, both of the comprehensive plan and last year's zoning process. One is affordable housing. Zoning can be an imperfect tool for affordable housing. And the other is historic preservation. I would add natural preservation, but because we've been mostly working with already developed areas, there has been less of a conversation up to this point. But historic preservation, historic rehabilitation, zoning can play a role, but it's not the only role. And you see that when we look at some of the non-zoning strategies for Medford Square. again, and welcoming and supportive neighborhood that calls out some of those non-zoning strategies for historic preservation. Placemaking is another thing, for example, that you would see in the comprehensive plan, creating cultural districts, for example, that zoning can help with, but not fully address. Again with the Adobe. So the other thing that we see is as we get into vibrant places, there are some non-zoning strategies in vibrant places that deal with arts, culture, programming of Medford's River. that affect Medford Square but don't necessarily affect the zoning. And this is something that we need to keep in mind as we're thinking about the zoning for Medford Square, what can and should zoning do in terms of permissions and restrictions and what other policies and strategies will be required. Access for all right size parking across all commercial centers. There was a vision for a public garage and future development and sustainability features to those to a public garage. That's a strategy that can help with economic development and housing square but is not a zoning strategy. So again thinking about how these things work together. There are also the additional zoning priorities and I already mentioned this that that the plan strongly recommended in its implementation section focusing on areas that have been studied already and Medford Square was a specific example and goes back to that 2005 plan. Now the Climate Action Adaptation Plan in 2022 had use and development standards that would be appropriate for Medford Square, zoning standards, new buildings and redevelopments that would make Medford more affordable, resilient, and low carbon. and a couple of other things that really fit more into development standards rather than use some dimensional standards, and that's something we'll be continuing to talk about. And then finally, going back all the way in history to 2005, that Medford Square Master Plan did have selected zoning recommendations. I've pulled out building height and massing, but it also had recommendations for parking and development standards. And I'm just showing this as an example of some of the things that were in there. It had some setback requirements as well as building in height and that's something else that we have and will continue to look at. So that's the planning context. We also had the what is the existing zoning. And it is primarily either commercial one or apartment two with a little smidge of general residential in the boundary that you see now. I'll explain a little bit more about this boundary later. I picked out one dimensional standard because it's a dimensional standard that a lot of people focused on in the conversations and that is height. So your existing zoning in these areas, the dimensional standards are actually by use rather than by district. And that's one of the things that we've been working on talking about changing. We certainly have in some of the others. And that's because when you have dimensional standards by use, you get a very inconsistent area. And so in this case, commercial one, which is the pink up there, residential buildings are six stories by right, so multifamily. Commercial buildings are four stories by right. A hotel is 15 stories by right. And then other permitted structures are four stories by right. And this is your existing zoning. Apartment two, similar in some ways. Residential buildings are six stories by right. Commercial users are not allowed in apartment two, although we know in many cities what's allowed by zoning isn't necessarily what's on the ground. Medford is one of them. And other permitted structures is 15 stories by right. And so understanding that this is in your current zoning and this may not be the result that you want has been part of those discussions. We also. I promise I'll get the hang of this. We also looked, and so that's just a summary of the heights here. We also looked at what was going on in terms of other dimensions, not just height. And I'm just going to quickly flip through these maps. We had presented the citywide maps to the city council in a workshop back in June 2024. And then we had redone these maps later in the process just to be for Medford Square. We had also done a non-conforming analysis, but those were online maps rather than static maps, so I don't have them in this presentation today. That map is currently offline as we reconfigure this process. We anticipate it will go back online again during the process. So we looked at the study area, we looked at the existing land uses, which don't always match up to what zoning says they should be, because you have what are called non-conforming uses. We looked at the variety of lot sizes here, and one of the things that we look at is, as with height, is the lot size, does it match the zoning, or like many, many communities in New England, The lot sizes are non-conforming, and that's what would be on that map, on the online map. We looked at frontage, which is the amount of land at the principal street. We looked at front setback, which is how far the building is set back from the street. Building height, and we'll look at that again as a comparison. Building coverage, which is how much of the lot, the footprint of the building covers. And impervious surface, which is how much of the lot, including building, parking, driveways, patios that water cannot infiltrate into. And that's particularly important when you're looking at an area near a river and possibly in flood zones. We did also look at flood zones, but I don't have that here. And then finally, as I give you this massive flip through, I gotta have that. We looked at the historic assets. Now we had the wider MACRIS inventory for the entire city. We've clipped that down to the Medford Square area, and so you can see, as we'll give this to the city obviously to post on the zoning website, but you can see that most of Medford Square, that blue, has been inventoried. The buildings in purple are on the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately, just being on the National Register does not provide protection for historic buildings. We also have a little bit of the local historic district, which is that pink, clipped into our area. We're having a look at that building today. We have one building that has a preservation restriction on it. That would be a deed restriction, and we're in the process of pulling the deed to look at that. And then there's another building that has a preservation restriction on it and indicated with that star. So understanding the history of the building. That's Grace Church, right? That's Grace Church is the one that has the preservation restriction. So understanding what else is on the ground in terms of uses in history is really important. I remembered that time. And then just further studies that we can do and talk about. Again, I picked height because it's a good one to look at. It's an aerial view of the area with some of the city buildings called out in white. Then the existing, on the top right-hand side, the existing building height of the buildings in the district now as we're looking at them. So you go from a couple of one story buildings all the way up to a building that's in the 9 to 14 story range. We group them to make it easier to see. Down on the bottom left you see the existing zoning, the allowed height that I called out earlier, but makes it kind of easier to see them side by side. And then the zoning that we ended up at the end of last year, with the allowed height in that proposed after it had gone through several versions of planning and permitting, CD board, and public input. This is the starting point.
[Zac Bears]: Emily, could you just, it's a little bit hard to read, on the proposed, could you just talk a little bit about what those heights are?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, actually, or I could go onto the map, which I was going to go onto the large scale map for that very reason. There is an advantage of being able to see them side by side, but I know you have to get your magnifying glasses out. I will also read it out here. So this was the map as of.
[Zac Bears]: Just how it's showing up for us, it's a little small. Could you maybe zoom in a little bit?
[Emily Innes]: Let me see if it will behave itself. Yes, excellent. All right, let's pull this over. Yes, great. Yeah, and I can zoom in even more once I do the overview. Thank you. Okay, here we go. So this is where we ended up, I believe the end of April last year. I'm sorry, it doesn't want to let me slide down. The end of April last year, these were the boundaries. You see the background, that was the then proposed urban residential and neighborhood residential districts. You'll see in the map, we have taken those out because those are no longer on the table. We also are going to recommend a boundary modification immediately because those neighborhood districts are no longer on the table. We are just talking about Medford Square mixed use districts. So mixed-use one, which is this light blue, you can see it to the south of High Street along the river there, that is proposed as four stories by right, and one using the incentive zoning. Casting the mind back for those people who were involved last year, the incentive zoning meant that you had to provide a public benefit at a certain level in order to receive that bonus height. So you could have five stories there if somebody met those requirements for the public benefit. Mixed-use 2A, so part of the conversation last year was splitting up the mixed-use 2 into a 2A and a 2B. That allowed us to be a little bit more targeted in the conversations around height. And the proposed at this time, the information that came together was a five stories by right for 2A with two incentive zoning. and the seven stories by right for mixed-use 2B with a two-story incentive zoning. So the 2A is a darker blue and the 2B is a lighter purple. Then over here as you get close to 93, No, it doesn't want to do that. The slider is right next to the down arrow and it just does not like that at all. So that bright purple is the mixed use three and that gets us up to eight stories by right with a four story incentive zone. So that is where we left off in terms of last year. I do just want to show that and I'm going to zoom back in again. I do just want to show that we have recommended. So there was a piece up here bounded by Toro Rove and Governors Avenue that was in the proposal. It was zoned as one of the residential districts that are no longer part of this discussion. We've removed that from the boundary and then there is a piece over near Ashland Street between Forrest and Ashland that we have also removed from this boundary because it was part of that residential zone discussion. You'll see the colors here except for the Mystic Avenue. zoning which of course was passed last year. The colors for the residential zones have all reverted back to their current colors just so there's no confusion about what we're talking about. Obviously this recommendation has to go in terms of the boundary change has to go through a city board recommendation to city council but just to let you know that that is an immediate outcome of this change in scope. And so with that, I just want to reiterate, obviously, we're here to listen to comments and questions, first from yourselves, and then I'm going to walk back over there, and we'd love to listen to what the public has to say. Obviously, Mr. President, in accordance with how the two of you are running this meeting, our next steps are working with the working group for logistics, schedule the meetings with the community, schedule the meetings with the Community Development Board and the City Council. And thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Emily. Really quickly, could you leave the, maybe the proposal slide up? Yep. If that's all right with you when you make your remarks.
[Emily Innes]: Absolutely. This one, the recommended or the one for your agenda?
[Zac Bears]: I think light pole, it seems people are fine with this being, you know, an amendment from the original one. If you could do a light zoom.
[Emily Innes]: Yep.
[Zac Bears]: If possible.
[Emily Innes]: I will see what I can do to zoom into the space itself.
[Zac Bears]: And after we hear from Doug, I do want to talk a little bit and maybe ask a question about what you brought up around this. This is great. Maybe with the legend in it, I know that kind of takes it back a little bit.
[Emily Innes]: I do not know if that will. I will cut off. Hang on. That's OK.
[Zac Bears]: I think that's OK. This is the bulk of the square.
[Emily Innes]: OK. Is that OK? Good enough? All right.
[Zac Bears]: Great. All right. Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you. Thank you, Emily, appreciate it. And I do think that every one of those suggested changes of the boundaries is an improvement. So I really appreciate that. I just want to pack up and just give people a little bit of background. I'm new to this board. Not everyone probably knows me, even though I've been in Medford a long time. I am currently serving on the Medford Historic Commission for the last 15 years. the Medford Brooks Estate Land Trust for the last 30, and the Community Preservation Committee for the last nine. So I have long, deep roots in the city, certainly regarding its architecture and history. But I'm also an architect, and I work for Cube 3, a company that's designed to build six large apartment buildings in Medford for the last 20 years, which has added about 1,600 apartments over that time and over 230 affordable units. So I am pro-development. I love history, but I really believe that we need to build and Medford Square is a prime candidate for it. As was alluded to earlier, there have been many plans for Medford Square. My colleague on the city board, John Anderson, and I served on the Medford Square Revitalization Committee under Mayor McGlynn 20 years ago, an effort that went absolutely nowhere because we did not have a real planning department at the time, which we now do, and we also have a much better vision. The comprehensive plan is an excellent vision And I know the city council is completely different than it was at that time as well. So I think we're heading in the right direction. We have the vision that we need. And I support the redevelopment of Medford Square and the zoning. It's really a once in a lifetime opportunity to set up Medford Square for the next 30 years. But as the comprehensive plan talked about, it's really looking to move forward very quickly in the next 10 years to get a lot of activity and a lot of changes made. But we have to do it right, and parts of this proposal I think are excellent. Certainly the eastern half of Medford Square, the light purple on the far right along Route 93, I completely agree with a lot of that. And I think what's proposed there will greatly improve not only Salem Street and Riverside Ave, but unlock the potential of the sea of parking lots behind this building that go all the way down to the Domestic River. which need to be redeveloped and are going to be redeveloped. This is a huge success for the city, and I want to support that. I do have some reservations about the boundaries beyond what was proposed. I think this is an improvement because we've taken a lot of sensitive residential areas off the table. To me, that is great. But there are still, I think, some odd things, some things that are in the boundary and some things that are not in the boundary that I feel should be. Like the UU Church is not in this boundary and neither is the Medford Public Library in this boundary. But the buildings, you know, basically along Winthrop Street are kind of lumped in with Medford Square. I think reasonable people can disagree about that. But I think that's where we need to look at this boundary together and look at every single property that's in it and out of it and make an assessment of that over the next couple of meetings. I also think that We really need to, even though zoning is not the only tool, it is a tool that can help prevent historic buildings and buildings that are significant but not on the National Register of Historic Places from being risked to be demolished. There are buildings, as was noted earlier, that go back three centuries in Medford Square. And we need to find a way, a zoning way, in addition to potentially a historic district, in addition to other tools to protect these buildings and make sure that we don't lose something that's critical to the values of the square, to the history of the square. I've been talking about There's talk about a historic district, but there's also talk about single building historic districts that would make it a lot easier to pick off these buildings one by one and make sure that they're protected, but also allow them to be expanded and reused over time. The idea of a institutional zoning area in Medford Square that would cover all churches and religious buildings and all Medford-owned properties, I think as a great tool that will allow them to be reused and adapted over time, but provide additional protections beyond this map. So I think there's some great opportunities there to protect the character defining buildings in Medford Square as much as possible. And I really appreciate the opportunity to meet it together as a group. And I'm looking forward to the dialogue with the city board and the city council going forward over the next weeks and months. And we promise to act as quickly as we can. So those are my initial comments. I don't know if you want me to call on the CD board now one by one? Council first? Okay. Go ahead, Councilman.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Chair Carr. Yeah, if there are comments and questions by members of the Council at this time on the proposal, the presentation by Innes Associates, and then I'll turn it back over to Chair Carr to get questions or comments from the CD board. I see Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Yes. Thank you, Chair. Chair Carr's comments are very well taken. I will say that I've been looking into and trying to investigate the possibility of poking the Historic District Commission to add either some historic districts around Medford Square or even to individual buildings, since that is a process that we've seen in the past for protecting some of Medford's historic buildings. It is a lengthy process. They recently got done with establishing the South Street Historic District. But I'm planning on reaching out to them to check in on some of their future plans to add in to some of these areas, some of the buildings that may not be quite as protected, perhaps adding a district for them. A couple of the historic buildings are owned, are on land that's owned by the city, so it would need to be, they would need to be sold off by the city, which would require a vote the City Council to do so. So there is some different forms of protection for those. But in terms of I would be interested in knowing if there are any particular historic buildings that are on private property could be could be potentially acquired by by developers, so that is something that we could talk about in the future. I don't know if you've done any research on that or have any input on specifics.
[Emily Innes]: Through you, Mr. President, there are a couple of different ways of thinking about this. Certainly, considering the dimensional standards of the buildings as they are now and how those relate to the existing zoning, would they be better protected? So for example, if the current mixed use 2B or 2A is too much for some of those historic buildings. Maybe it goes down to 1B. It is important to understand the heightened dimensional restrictions in the current zoning may actually be too flexible if you're worried about historic preservation. So the rezoning may be an opportunity to look at that. Maybe there's some form of the institutional as Chair Carr has suggested. There's also both the development standards and also the incentive zoning as possibilities. For example, I worked in a community where they had some amazing historic buildings. It was down in Connecticut. And one of their strategies was to reduce or waive certain requirements if the historic building was preserved, so that a developer could come and do something bigger, but as part of that they had to preserve a historic building. So in part of the conversations, some of those options may be ones that the community wants to discuss. And we'd be certainly happy to do some of the research, both on projects that we've worked on and tools that other communities have used, and present those for consideration.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you. Thank you very much. It is definitely an important part of this process to ensure that our history is protected. That can spur economic development. People tend to like areas that have a number of historic buildings, so these things aren't, you know, economic development, more building is not contradictory there. But the thing that I care about the most is being able to personally is being able to build more housing within the area and come up with incentives to add more affordable housing, which I think would be a pretty big component of revitalizing the square as well. Just the same, I'm sure that others have their own considerations, pet things that they'd like to see in the zoning and so I will stop talking and look forward to hearing from everybody else.
[Zac Bears]: Do we have council members with more questions at this time? If you could raise your hands on Zoom for those who are on Zoom. All right, I'll just be kind of brief and I appreciate you having this up. One of the things that we talked about pretty extensively around the Mystic Avenue Corridor District is that the north end of Mystic Avenue, the mixed use 1A or 1B that's right here, kind of this light blue just south of the overpass. was not always a post-industrial, auto-repair-centric wasteland. It was actually a really vibrant and connected part of Medford Square before Route 16 was built. And I think that was what, you know, it's not in the boundaries of the Medford Square District today, but it is kind of historic Medford Square, really any way you cut it. And so when we were talking about that extensively in fall of 2024, you know, I really felt that one of the important things to try to do with this zoning was figure out what could the zoning look like there on the north end of Mystic Ave to try to reconnect. That part of Medford Square that was cut off by the highway overpass and I think between both the zoning and the vision there and the mass dot plan that's coming in to fix the nightmare intersections that are there right now. I think we really have an opportunity to do that. And I do want to say that part of that was, you know, that was the first pass at creating some of the zone frameworks that then informed this Medford Square plan. So you can kind of see that here with the north end of Mystic Ave. No one can see me, but that, you know, the zone right on the other side of Karatek Bridge from that. And John, I want to get that video at some point of seven-year-old me doing my Karatek Bridge project from the Hervey School. that we start in that lower mixed use end, right in the square, even some of those buildings that aren't necessarily on the National Register, or maybe even those that don't necessarily need that single building historic district, still maintaining that connectiveness. And then the core historic square, staying at relatively low. One of the things that's been amazing to me in this process and others is there have been buildings that are now two or three stories, I can't remember if it's the old Opera House or something, right on the river side of High Street on the left, used to be a four-story building, right? And it was cut down. Trying to keep that in the historic core a little bit more, and then as we move out, and that's one of the reasons for me, you know, as we talked about the reasonableness, when you have the seven, eight, nine story condo buildings on the far west side of the square, or the empty parking lots in some of the buildings, you know, currently condemned, former Ebisuya and CVS building and all the apartments in there, that's where you can expand out a little bit more into those heights. And and I really think given all of the projects that are going on we have such an opportunity here and I appreciated Emily you going through. You know I don't think there was ever and I'm not saying you're saying there was but only there was ever an intent to say let's. rezone Grace Church so they can build a nine-story apartment building on it, right? I think it was just that the, what are the answers around historic preservation that are within zoning and outside of zoning? And if we can make recommendations around single building or pocket historic districts to protect things like the Isaac Hall House and the building on the, behind the members plus credit union on Bradley Road. I think that's a really important thing for us to do so that we have those places that serve as engines, both historical memory engines for development and for the growth that will come up around it. I was at the 150 years of the Library on High Street celebration last year, and they had these old postcards of High Street in maybe 1920 or 1910. And, I mean, it's gorgeous, but one of the things that really struck me is that maybe the signs were different, and there were more grocers and fewer banks, but other than that, you look up High Street towards Winthrop Circle, and it looks basically the same now as it did 100 years ago. And I think in some ways, there's beauty in that, and in some ways, we need to think about how, as a community, we can encourage the kind of growth that we wanna see, because I don't think that the folks, the Thatcher-Magoons and the Samuel Lawrences Benjamin Haynes of the time would say, we expected that High Street would look the same in 2025 as it did in 1925, right? So how do we take these opportunities, really grab onto them, and actually in some ways, like with that connection with the square south of the river, bring back some of the more walkable, thriving residential neighborhoods that used to be that river to where it used to be before the car and the highway and the route 16 overpass really kind of cut right through the heart of our city. So just my you know I really think I really appreciate this conversation about how growth and change and history can go hand in hand. And in some ways I think we're really celebrating our history by trying to bring back some of the things that we've lost over the last 50 years. I don't know if we have any other questions or comments from the council. I'm not seeing any hands. Liz does. All right, we'll go to Liz, and then we'll turn it over to you guys.
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. I just wanted to say, you know, as someone who wasn't a part of a lot of the conversations previously on the council but attended some of the zoning meetings, I really appreciate how you framed this to kind of see how we got to this point. I certainly think these maps are a lot easier to digest and really are able to showcase to people exactly what we're talking about here and how we got to this point that we are. So I really just wanted to commend the work that you've done to get to this point because I think it's really helpful and hopefully everyone online and everyone that's able to view it too gets a better sense of how this really can impact and change and really make some wonderful progress within Medford. And being able to get this more visible to people as we go through the process and making sure they can see these types of maps and get a better understanding of it, I think will be really helpful as well. So I just really wanted to thank you for kind of level setting us on this and putting us to this point as well.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, Emily.
[Emily Innes]: Just wanted to say thank you for that. And also to respond to the other comments, we are very excited by the opportunity, you know, the City Council and the Community Development Board members are willing, and it sounds like they are, to take this as a starting point and then use meetings with you all, the community meetings, to really do a deeper dive. We also frequently love using postcards in our work, so maybe we'll do a quick trip to Digital Commonwealth, but if anybody has access to those, that'd be great. But we're really looking forward to delving into these issues, so thank you all for bringing them up, and thank you again for your comments.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. And yeah, I think get in touch with Sam Sednick up at the library, the local history room. They've got stuff. They've got a lot of stuff. They've got every plan that we haven't implemented.
[Doug Carr]: Are you sure that all the Councilors have commented? Okay. All right. I'm going to open it up to the Community Development Board for people, any initial questions, comments to Emily and this group. Who would like to speak first here?
[Zac Bears]: Dina.
[Doug Carr]: Dina, why don't you go ahead, Dina.
[Zac Bears]: One second, Dina. We got to unmute you. We got to run the system up here.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay, great. Thanks. I appreciate the redesign of the recommendation to remove those other areas of residential from it, because I was going to comment on that. One of the things I don't see, and I don't know if it's part of the proposal, but I'm going to talk about parking. I am. And it was interesting. My father, who's 86 years old, one of the places that he loves, he loves the senior center. It's a very vibrant place. And I think you mentioned it as an anchor, one of the anchors that we have here in the city. And I showed him the map. It's public information. And I said, Dad, where is that senior center? And he pointed it out. And I said, And he says, is there going to be a building there? And I said, well, it is zoned for that. And he said, where am I going to park? So what I did is a little research. And I called Pam Kelly, who's the senior advisor at the senior center. And it is quite a vibrant place. On a typical Tuesday and a Thursday, there were over 250 people. that go there. They have core balance classes, they have lunches, they have blood pressure checks. My father loves it. My mother loved it. My mother passed away this year, but she loved it too. She went and attended the shine programs there. And right now, I asked her, I said, well, how many are Method residents? And do you know what? They track them when they come in, if you're a Method resident or not. Eighty percent of our seniors use that site. Now, in other cities and towns, they converted old schools in the senior center, but that ship has sailed, right? So now we have this vibrant place. So we need to discuss parking for the seniors, because right now there's only five spaces in the front, and there's only about 18 spaces around the fence. Now seniors can purchase a $25 ticket to park in the middle, but they still have to walk across the street to go to this wonderful place, the treasure that we have in Medford. So I want to talk about parking and the provisions that are needed, not only for that section, but for some of the mixed use as well because it includes residential units as well. So I think we need to touch parking. The other thing I want to discuss is the setback allowances from each of those very high areas into the residential. We want to make sure that there's proper shading studies done to not interfere with somebody who has a nice porch, right, on the back. And so, yes, certainly parking. And the other thing I wanted to mention I remember when they put that ring road in. Maybe we should discuss changing in the parking direction, too, of the city to bring back some of the vibrant life that was once there. I remember going to Medford Square when I was a little girl. Woolworths, Grant's, Gilchrist, movie theater. It was a beautiful place. We used to laugh at some of them. because we had such a beautiful square to go to. And once that ring road went in, the businesses left. So how do we get businesses back? How do we change the traffic parking? And how do we make sure and maintain the vibrant spot for our senior citizens? Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Do you have any comments? I'm sure you do.
[John Anderson]: I wonder if the idea of more historic districts certainly has promise. I wonder if there are other things we could look at too as well. Going back to the thing Doug mentioned, we proposed a design review process some 20 years ago. which got nowhere. We did a big presentation to the city council and afterwards, one of the leading citizens of the community approached me and I thought, this is great, maybe he's gonna support this. And he had only one question for me. He said, John, how long have you lived in Medford? Anyway, so design review would be one possibility. Another thing would be to use the existing site plan review process and apply that to historic... Well, it pretty much applies to just about anything you would be doing in the square right now, wouldn't it? We would just have to make sure that site plan review explicitly covered historic preservation. It currently covers... It's sort of vague terminology that it has to blend with the community, blend with the neighborhood, but that could be made a little more explicit. Those are two possibilities that I think we should take a look at. I also want to comment on parking. A lot of the parking requirements depend on what kind of businesses you're going to have there. Not that anyone is proposing a big box store, but a big box store has vastly different parking requirements than small, an equally number of square feet devoted to small shops, coffee houses, that sort of thing. Is there any way that we should, should we be thinking about in the zoning, specifying what kinds of businesses we want to allow in these sites. Specifying businesses, design review, site plan review.
[Emily Innes]: To both the chairs it would be easier to answer these in clumps otherwise I'm going to forget what they said. Okay great. Excellent. I am going to work my way backwards if you don't mind. So there is a table of uses in your current zoning and you can see the parking recommendation next to the specific uses. In the proposed zoning for this, there's also a list of uses. I focused on the pictures rather than get into the text tonight because we're restarting this process, but there is a current draft that has uses. I will be excited to hear as part of this process if those are still the right uses, if there are some that should be removed, some that are missing. I think that's really important. We did not touch the parking standards as part of any of this process. So the parking standards that you see in the table of uses apply to those uses throughout the city. Now there are ways of thinking about a mixed-use building and how to address parking for a mixed-use building. I am 100% positive that that topic is going to come up several times through this process. So I just want to acknowledge that we've heard you tonight and it is part of a larger discussion. Design review, it becomes an interesting point. So yes, most of these would be subject to site plan review. Some of them, in fact, might also be subject to a special permit. So, again, very quickly, when we think of the levels of approval, there is by right that requires only a building permit. There is site plan review that is building permit plus the site plan review. Site plan review is case law. It is not currently enabled by state legislation, but case law is determined that site plan review is allowed for a certain specific criteria, and what we usually do is in the development standards, we build them on the site plan review case law, so that site plan review can be done according to that. Some design components can come into that site plan review process, and we're certainly happy to talk about those. And then special permit, of course, is the highest level. It requires a public hearing. There has to be some sort of kind of higher standard or higher public benefit coming out of a special permit just to sort of hit the high levels of those. So we're certainly happy to look into those. In terms of the senior center I love the entry to the senior center. It's such a peaceful way to get in. You may the people in this room may know that the parking lots across from the senior center are city owned parking lots. There's a whole process around that that is We'll be touched by the zoning in terms of zoning for something, but because those city parking lots are city owned, it means that the city has an additional level of control over what could happen to them. Certainly, parking for the senior center could be part of that discussion. I will put on a different hat for a second and say that we, our firm, did assist the city in preparing the RFP for those. Last year I believe all that information is probably on the city website. But that particular process falls outside the zoning.
[Zac Bears]: The other thing that unfortunately falls outside just to add that the senior center parking is being discussed as part of the transom bid for the city lots. I don't wanna give a number, but parking is a big piece of that conversation and how to make sure that when parking is constructed, the senior center has access to that parking and seniors will be able to get from that parking to the senior center is a core piece of that. And Alicia could talk more about that. Most of that, as Emily said, is outside of the zoning, other than making sure that the zoning lets those buildings, buildings of that size be built there.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you, Mr. President. I was hoping that you would take that one on. The other thing is, unfortunately, traffic patterns. I completely hear you on the traffic patterns, but this process can't address those. Typically, what we do in a process like this is when we hear things, whether from yourselves or the public, that don't have anything to do with the current scope, we do note them. We don't let that information be lost so that we can pass that on and say, okay, the community meetings or at the community development board hearing, we heard these things. We can't address them under our current scope. But you all should know that these things would be brought up, and I would put that in that category. That that's something that is not part of what we do, but it is nevertheless important information and an important concern. I think I touched on everything in those two blocks. Oh, the setbacks, oh yes, thank you. I didn't show it today because I already had a lot of slides, but we did actually do what are called section cuts to the buildings, so we're looking at the buildings in elevation, and we did shadow studies in selected parts, and in fact, if it allows me to do this. You can see these red lines. You might not be able to see them so I'll just go over with my mouse on some of the red lines for the proposed zoning from last year. Those were the site and section cuts that we showed so we could do shadow studies. I am certain that we will be bringing those back again for discussion during this process. Yeah, absolutely.
[Zac Bears]: And you guys are going to meet and run the CD work through all the, there's so many materials.
[Doug Carr]: Absolutely. Yes, we are looking forward to that. I was wondering what those dash lines were for a little bit.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, yeah, those are the, yeah.
[Doug Carr]: Page Buldini, do you have some questions? What are we doing?
[Zac Bears]: and then enable, yeah.
[Doug Carr]: Go ahead, Paige.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you so much. It's so exciting to see everything that you've done, and especially starting this up. And thank you to the city councilors, to the board, and everybody who's here and watching. A few things that my colleagues have already talked about, but I think it would be interesting to know. May I just ask, just for protocol, the discussions that were had with that subgroup, is that something that we can discuss? because I think some of it's important is that I don't know the protocol.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry, which subgroup?
[Page Buldini]: The one that was discussing amongst the city councilors.
[Zac Bears]: Oh, the planning group, yeah. Yeah, I mean, definitely it's going to be talked about. Yeah. Yeah.
[Page Buldini]: Okay, perfect. So one thing that I think and my fellow board member Began had mentioned is this is incredible and it's awesome how we have already the zones, but is it possible to create districts within each area in the square? I know that it's already created because even look even looking at the RFP that Transom has and learning about when we saw that map change in the amendments for all of the parcels around City Hall, I think it'd be really helpful looking at the historic opportunity too, if we could create even those districts, that would be helpful. And then I think that could also help out when we discuss parking, I think into also, agree with the Councilor Leming, I think affordable housing is very important. And the opportunity to have people living in Medford Square is very important. But as a business owner and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, I just wanna make sure that we also respect the businesses that have set their roots down. And I wanna make sure if we do have housing above as we want and we're gonna incentivize it, which is great. We're also mindful of what that looks like for the commercial base. We saw this on Salem Street most recently with the new zoning, that it was a full commercial lot. Granted, it's different zoning, but the commercial space went from three units to 575 square feet with units above for housing. And with the incentivized housing for affordability, which is great, it did then not allow any commercial parking. So and then looking at Salem Street and looking at how different the density there is, I think it's important to just be mindful of that. So I guess that's a lot of questions. And then one last thing, I do appreciate, Councilor Lumming, what you said about the almost historic tourism thought. I think any way that we can bring people into Medford, The 250th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Lexington infused some of those communities. So to think if we could create a historic district overlay or something that we can then use that to bring other people into Medford to live and to spend money and to patronize our businesses would be really great. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. All great thoughts, really looking forward to the meeting where we kind of get into this in depth. And the working group is primarily to set up these meetings and understand what content is going to which board when, so we make sure that's coordinated. But I believe Councilor Leming said he was going to record them so that they would be fully available. I think I heard that correctly. Yes, in terms, so the way this is set up, you already have obviously some sub-districts going in there. There's no reason during the process, again, your role will be to give recommendations back to the city council so those can change. I think that's part of what we're learning tonight is that there's a flexibility around that and we're certainly excited about those discussions. Historic districts, like the local historic district, are different from zoning. So doing a historic district which involves a whole series of steps in terms of inventorying and making sure that you've got the right qualifications is not something we do and not something we're scoped to do. But I think in the zoning portions I mentioned earlier that there are ways that we can look at how the zoning can help preserve or support the rehabilitation of or the reuse of the buildings. We're excited to do that. During this process, you may actually gain as a community the information you need to look at local historic districts. local historic districts have a little bit more teeth than National Register historic districts. It's a valuable conversation. It's something that was mentioned in the comp plan. In terms of businesses, it's interesting because Medford Square doesn't currently allow mixed-use zoning. One of the things that we're finding as a best practice is this idea of putting housing above commercial to provide, you know, instant customers, right, to the commercial below. But as you say, there has to be a balance. And I think, again, that's not how we do that balance. Whether or not what you see here is the right balance or we need to mix it up, I think that's part of the continuing conversations that we're going to have with us. So I'm excited for it. But I'm really glad you brought that up as something that we need to make sure during the conversations we're continuing to pay attention to. So thank you.
[Ari Fishman]: Thank you. And thank you. So thank you to in this. I was about to say innocent associates in this land strategy is the new for all your hard work on this. And. your continuing work. I am excited to pursue this methodically, and I think we do need to go slower, but I also do want to imbue it with a sense of urgency. I think one of the things that Emily pointed out that always weighs heavily on my mind through the several years I've been on this committee is this current zoning is wildly misaligned, both with what we are doing and what we want to be doing, and it allows for situations where the city has committed legally to allowing things that perhaps we would not intentionally allow. And one example is I think there was a lot of public frustration with, say, a 15-story dorm that is entirely legally allowed under current zoning. So I do think we have a sense of urgency as we approach this methodically, systematically, and intentionally. And I'm excited to do this with this group. I'm curious about what the shared vision is for the goals of this meeting. We're kind of going between these very high level goals, which is what I was imagining, down to the, you know, parameters for individual buildings. which in my mind is something that we should be pursuing later in this process, but I kind of would love to know what our goal is for while we have all these minds in one room able to speak to each other and hear the same information. If I may, I have kind of a couple of thoughts to add to that. I'm approaching this with a vision of an activated walkable, vibrant Medford Square, a place that balances the historic nature and our future and evolving needs that has mixed use, that has climate resiliency and both honors the river and is ready for when climate causes changes, that has trees that lower the temperature as well as providing beauty, and creates a sense of community, everything from the senior center to the library to the walks I'm taking with my infant. And that's going to come through the many parts of this. We're not just looking at the heights, we're looking at those table of use regulations, the dimensional requirements, all these aspects. And in my mind, that's not what we're doing today, but I'm really excited to do it later. One thing that I don't fully understand where we are right now is obviously parking is a major issue. We currently have a parking garage that we're not able to use. It's private property. It belongs to Atrius. And I know that Alicia has mentioned discussions, and I'm curious where those are. And the transom proposal has also mentioned a parking garage. Is this a second parking garage, or is this combining them? So that's a question I have that I think really can change what we're imagining here. I hate the current traffic patterns. There's nothing we can do about that, but I'll put that on record. We're getting so many people cutting through and that really limits how walkable and vibrant it can be. And I am really excited to have more people live in Medford Square. This is my neighborhood. This is where I live with my family. And I'm really excited to have more housing above these commercial properties to have them more in the neighborhood and help our neighbors stay here and to welcome new ones as well. Thank you. Oh, sorry. That was such a good ending, and I realized I forgot one of my notes, which is I know there's been occasional whispers about a possible T extension, and I don't know what we can do with that. I know we can't incorporate that into our zoning, but as we're visioning this, I think methods of transportation do drive a lot of this urban planning, and I just, have that in the back of my mind and if anyone knows more about it than I do, I would love to hear how that may or may not impact anything.
[Emily Innes]: Mr. President, Chair Carr, I think actually most of those questions are maybe directed towards the group, although I registered the parking and I mentioned to say, I forgot to say I also registered the affordable housing. We do have that in the incentive zoning, but there may be reasons to relook at that and see does that need to be changed. So, but I'm going to turn it back to you.
[Zac Bears]: I think really quickly on the T, the thing that seems near term is high frequency bus transit. I have many times drawn a map of where you pull the green line off or where you bring the Medford branch back through down by Magoon. But, you know, I think really and something that the transom project and also the both proposals, we did get a proposal, another proposal, both talked about bus hub being part of that project. I think like this is a really good example of, to me, and I think Emily's been really trying to talk about this as well, what is zoning and what isn't, and what can zoning do and what doesn't zoning do? And zoning parking requirements for specific projects, on site parking requirements for a specific project, doesn't fix parking in the square. And a lot of our favorite buildings and businesses have no on site parking because we treat parking differently. We have parking hubs, parking garages. I personally am... And I understand why it's happening. We have that Atrius garage, right? But nobody can use it. And the answer is because Atrius doesn't wanna play ball, let's build a second parking garage. And I think those are just really tough situations. But I really think that, just on that parking question, we know that Medford Square, the parking is distributed inefficiently, but also I think, and I'm pretty sure we did some numerical research on this, most of the time, parking is underutilized. We have a lot of empty parking spaces in the square, and it's like parking isn't in the right places for what people wanna do. And if we could figure out a way to redevelop while maintaining the things we love about it, the parking lot behind Isaac Hall House and Colleen's and what was a lovely restaurant that is now a bank. And then figure out a shared parking arrangement where at night it's residential, but in the day it's for the businesses. And that all is... There's ways that, to me, Setting up an ambitious zoning for the square at large as a way to invite people in who want to think big about projects and are willing to engage in the conversations like the ones. But we can't write the zoning to make that happen because we can't write zoning that will make parking better in Medford Square. So it's like I think we put the cart before the horse a little bit on those parking questions. On the T, the bus thing is the main one. I don't know if, Doug, there were other pieces of what Ari was talking about that you wanted to go at.
[Emily Innes]: I think it was, if I may interrupt, I think it was also the shared goals among the two groups. Oh, well, we agree on that. So where you're ending up.
[Zac Bears]: Why are we here? Yeah. I mean, I think for the council, I don't want to speak for the whole council. If other councillors want to jump in, actually, I may be seeking Councilor Leming. You know, we left the zoning project in the spring and summer understanding that residential went south real fast, and that we need a lot more time on that. But I think there was a general feeling that this proposal was pretty well on its way. And personally, just as one Councilor, the timeline that was outlined of, you know, we were having this setup meeting, we're getting a lot of feedback. I think to what you said, Ari, right, like, come back with an amended proposal, take more feedback, and then come back with a last thing. That a meeting, a joint meeting like this in February, a joint meeting in March, and I'll come to you, Alicia, was to try to move through the Medford Square stuff was really, that was where I was at. I'm gonna go to Councilor Leming really quick, because he's the chair planning and permitting, then I'll go to Director Hunt. That's Matt, yeah.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, so one point that I did wanna make is that the transom proposal would contain additional parking very near the senior center. It's just that those lots do need to be rezoned before that can start. If this proposal does go on or proves to take a lot of time, then we could have discussions about separating that to allow the transom deal to move forward. But we'll be sorting that out and we'll be having a discussion about that in the working group meetings. It could be that it's not worth it, we just want to have the whole package. In terms of severing different parts of this, so I believe under Mass General Law, and again, this is something that we could discuss more internally with the city's legal council, this does have to be passed as one package. Now previously in a meeting last year, this was joined with Medford Square and West Medford Square were joined in one proposal. And procedurally what happened was in a December meeting, city council withdrew that proposal from the CDB, got rid of it, and then submitted two new proposals, including this one, which were effectively the same thing, to the, to the CD board. So this is, the content of this is all the same as what was, as what was put forward last year, but procedurally it's a it is a it's a, it's a new proposal. I also completely agree with CDB member Fishman's call for some urgency on this. Every time there's a store or a business that opens up in Medford Square that people don't like, most recent example of that, people want the city to step in and they say, what are you going to do about it? What's going on here? Can you prevent that from happening? And the answer is no. We could have prevented it from happening with more adequate planning, but I think the fact that on the CD board we have members talking about how they were on Medford Square planning committees 20 years ago does say something about the fact that there is a lot of backdrop to this process and a lot of a lot of previous plans that really just haven't been implemented. So the plans that we are making right now are all based on a very extensive history, other failed efforts to revitalize and make the square the place where we all want to be. And so I do agree that more of these joint sessions will be helpful, ones where we get more into specifics. community meetings which will be scheduled within the working group as well. Those will be announced later. But this particular proposal can't be dragging on for months and months and months. So it can't be December and we're still talking about it. So I very much appreciate the comments that I heard tonight. very well received. I look forward to continuing this process and I also look forward to the moment that I stop talking and hear from the public. So, thank you so much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. Director Hunt.
[Alicia Hunt]: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I kind of actually wanted to a little bit bring this back to the process. I don't know if my sound sounds a little weird to me. Is it okay? bring it back to the process and make some examples for recommendations. So for example, we heard here about the desire for more parking, parking lots, parking garage in the square. In the use table as proposed for Medford Square right now, parking garage as an accessory to- Can you adjust the audio level on that manual?
[Zac Bears]: This is what I was worried about. It's not you. Can you change the volume on there?
[Alicia Hunt]: Maybe.
[Zac Bears]: You're right under the speaker too, it's like a really bad location for a microphone. That would be great, yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Asked for. Thank you, Paige. Sorry about the noise. So to give you the example of how we're going to bring this back concretely, in the zoning before you, in the use table, number five is parking area or garage accessory to principal use within 500 feet of a conforming principal use. But it's a no in all four zones. I've just heard all of you say or the CD board say they'd like to have that. So the process is that the CD board would make the recommendation that they would like to see that change to a yes. They make that recommendation to the city council. City council may or may not accept that recommendation as they adopt the zoning, the broadness that in general the zoning will get adopted. Our hope by having these joint meetings is that instead of the city council just seeing a bullet saying change this from an N to a Y, they've now heard the thoughts in the discussion and then they're more likely to say, oh, we understand that. Or in the course of an evening like this, you might say to them, let's dig into that a little bit more because I don't think so, I disagree, so let's understand it a little bit better. So I'll just flag for you that that five and six the municipal parking area is also listed as a no in most of it. But what's not here at all as an item is a privately owned parking area or garage that is not accessory to a principal use. So as its own principal use. So another recommendation the board it sounds like wants to make is to add that as another use. and then put that in as a type. And I'll just, because you mentioned banks, I noticed that banks are a yes all the way across. You might want to put them in as a special permit because, for example, you don't actually want no banks in the end because some have left and no others are able to move in, but you may want to actually say we want banks by special permit so it's a higher level of review when you do that. So I would actually encourage all the members of the boards and the public to read through the full use table and then come up with recommendations so that, assuming that you don't close the public hearing tonight, you might actually just send a list. And I would offer that if you have very specific edits like that, You send them all to me and Danielle. We can compile them with Emily and then we can say here are all the ones we've heard back so that you don't each all have to individually say it in a meeting but we can say here's what we've heard from the board so you can all review it at once. And if we have that early enough we could put it back out to the public so at the next meeting they could also reflect on those those thoughts as well. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Thanks, Alicia. Yeah, I think, to Ari, to your question of what are we, where are we going from here, I think there is, generally, like, how are we going to get to a consensus point around the length of this process? I mean, we have the agreement between the mayor and the council, right, which says, essentially, this phase is going through May. and we want to get Medford Square and the Tufts Institutional and Boston Avenue zones done by May. And that's where the mayor and the council landed. So within that, how can we facilitate some of the priorities like having two iterations on each proposal where we can get some feedback in on them and then have a second iteration and then that can move to a final vote. I think fitting those kinds of priorities feedback and engagement making sure there's the community meetings like one in February one in March around Medford Square within that overall framework is important and and I think right like for me something and you were here, Ari, and maybe some of us weren't. Like, if we start chopping and splitting and cutting and layering, we're talking about the eastern third of Medford Square and the western third, but the middle third's in two weeks, and that's how we get into process nightmare land. And, you know, for me, how, like for the transom project, for example, right? Like it is part of anchoring this area of our city. How do we talk about this area of our city? And we can talk about the pieces within it, but I think when we start going down the road of chopping and splitting things up, we're gonna end up in a situation where It's really easy for people to get confused about what we're talking about. And also just we have a pretty concrete timeline on this phase of the project based on the contract extension and the funds that are available. So I think getting the information out there tonight, at some point we want to hear from the public, which I think is important. And then we'll come back here I think in five or six weeks and you guys will have had some intervening meetings. We may have had one. And we'll be able to come back together, and ideas like what have been put forward can be incorporated into that round. Doug, go ahead.
[Doug Carr]: Yeah, just a quick comment. I think what would also help the process, and I think, Emily, you did this tonight, is you brought back a new map that had already pre-addressed some issues, because you knew they were out there. I suspect that the way forward here is to have a new map at each meeting, essentially. for the combined meeting because you're going to hear that feedback and give it. I think if you see consensus, the maps should evolve with the comments and if there's true consensus here. But I do want to recognize Sean Bacon next. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Zac Bears]: And then we're going to come back. I think we have some councilors after.
[Sean Beagan]: Go ahead, Sean. Thank you. Thank you, Emily. So I just want to step back for a second and just ask you about the current zoning regulations in Medford. Most of the square is C1, I believe, a vast majority of it. And we know under C1 that you could actually build residential up to six stories. So, which is very much in keeping, I think, expanding residential in the square is much in keeping with the goals of the current plan. And we know that there's no six-story apartment buildings in Medford Square. And that's because of the dimensional requirements essentially that are currently in place. So would you agree with me that one of the primary focuses in needing this new zoning is because the dimensional requirements as they currently are make it almost virtually impossible to make any changes to the buildings in Medford Square, especially in kind of the heart of Medford Square from Salem Street, maybe at City Hall, Salem Street, running through CVS, where the buildings are, they're touching one another. They take up 100% of their lot. There's no setbacks. I'm looking at the dimensional table that is proposed. I think we might even have to go more aggressive to actually, if we're talking about buy right, if we're talking about giving owners and builders a buy right avenue to do something and not have to go to the ZBA for the, you know, they hit three of the requirements but, you know, we have 80% building coverage. A lot of the buildings I just mentioned on that avenue, they're 100%, if they're not 100% they're 95% building coverage. So they're not doing anything with this table unless they're tearing down their building and building something new maybe to come within zoning. So I think we might have to get more aggressive. I think the parking, I don't know if you'd agree with me, Emily, but if we pass a Medford district zoning with the current parking limitations or minimums, one and a half spots per residential, aren't we essentially telling people building developers, you've got to wait until we get to parking because you have, we know you have no parking in Medford Square, right? So you're going to have to, you can file your permit, get denied on parking and go to ZBA or Community Development Board and hope you get your waiver or permit because you're essentially going to have to ask for a complete waiver of parking, right? And is that what we're trying, don't we need to address that when we're doing a district rezoning.
[Emily Innes]: All excellent questions. I chose height for today's example because I was hoping that we wouldn't get too much into the weeds before we had our conversation together. But the other dimensional standards are equally important and I think again Medford Square is an example of a classic New England city where many, many, many of these buildings were built before zoning was put into place. And it is true in almost every community that we've worked with that with one rare exception, the buildings that are on the ground, the buildings that are actually built, could not be built today under the zoning. And so, you know, this got so far into the process. I think you're pulling on some of the things that we were also thinking about. Delighted to talk further about them. I think the parking becomes a real balancing act to consider, because when you start to think about the use of land, and we start to think about what that footprint is, right? You have a parcel, and you're putting things on the parcel, and the things that you're putting on the parcel are the ground floor of a structure, and that structure can be commercial, residential, a mix of both. That structure can be a parking garage, but you're using up that space, right? There's only a finite amount of ground floor space to use, then you can go up. So how are you going to go up? Are you going to tuck the parking on the lower levels because you've got a topographical change? And this is true in part of Medford Square, that there's a point at which the topography drops off, and we could understand how to park underneath, and then at street level, you get to see the commercial activity and the housing above. That is a strategy. Is that not going to work? Because there's a part that's flat, and so you have to maybe tuck the parking in the back. Maybe there's two levels of parking you can't see from the street, because it's lined with commercial and residential. Is that an option? But you know what? Some of these parcels are really shallow. And what are they going to do? And actually, some of our height thoughts were due to the fact that we knew they weren't going to be parking on site. So you could tell them that they can go up to 15 stories. But as a practical matter, they can't because they can't park it. So I think all of these are going to be conversations. The balance of how we deal with this are going to be conversations with both of these boards. and with the public over the next couple of months. But I think you're really hitting on a lot, collectively, you're hitting on a lot of the issues that were, so starting to be part of the conversation when we finished that first round with Medford Square, so.
[Doug Carr]: Sean, are you all set?
[Sean Beagan]: I'm all set, thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Planner Evans. You might want to come up here. I think that's just going to pick up all the speaker noise with the microphone in that position. It's just going to be feedback, Kevin.
[Danielle Evans]: Thank you, Daniel Evans, senior planner. I just wanted to add to that that I think one of the ways that zoning could help is to make it easier to park off site. There are provisions for shared parking, but they're really onerous. So I think We're having our sidebar conversation about allowing parking garages to be built. I think there should be some design standards that they're wrapped with some active uses, but otherwise I don't see why we wouldn't want to allow privately owned parking garages, they could probably build it a lot cheaper than we would, and they could lease out, you know, entire floors to apartment buildings or, you know, other various uses. They could have long-term agreements, so there's some form of permanence. You know, maybe there could be some cost sharing. I don't know. The idea that all of the parking needs to be on the actual property is how we're never going to get any top of the shop housing that we desperately need in the square. So I don't know how we approve a rezoned metric square without addressing that. just the concept of parking on site is really what's creating the obstacles. I've had people, property owners ask about adding housing on top of their buildings, but yeah, they're like 100% law coverage, maybe an alley in the back. So it's just, it's a non-starter pretty much. So how can we make it easier for them to do that?
[Zac Bears]: Right. Well, I mean, I think, again, we're on, like, the chicken-egg-cart-horse question, which is, like, one of the ways that we get someone to come in and propose, and I agree, like, the off-site and shared parking, that needs to be a piece of it. Parking minimums, period, need to be a piece of it, right? Like, are we building walkable housing that is not auto-oriented, and you say, You know, if you build this with a zero minimum, you can't get an on-street permit. You can't, you know, like this is not for people who want to park a car on site or do they want to rent one, but like I also worry that I think when you say this is the kind of square we want to see, we want a walkable square with buildings of this size, with mixed uses, like one of the reasons we don't have the residential, like Member Beegan is saying, is yes, it says residential or commercial, but there's not a mixed use in the C2. So you can't have a 5 over 1 under first 6 story residential because there's no mixed use in the current district. So like, and I appreciate you bringing up the dimensional question too, right? And I think it's like aggressive, not aggressive, like we get into all of these words about like, that become value judgments on it. And I think it actually sounds like we all agree on the basic principles here, which is we want existing historic buildings or older buildings to be able to expand and build up. We understand that onsite parking in lots of the parts of the square we love the most is never gonna be an option. We understand that the building coverages are way more than what our zoning is right now. And if we want to get to the square that we would like, we need to figure out a way to allow people to build things either with the understanding that people aren't going to be able to park on the site, figure out a way where there is a parking element so that, you know, people who need parking can get it. But I think, you know, we get a little over-prescriptive with it, right? At a certain point, and again, people don't expect this kind of conversation from someone with my politics, but if someone wants to come in here and invest $250 million in doing a block or a section of the square, I think they probably understand pretty well the parking requirements that they're going to need, and if we give them the flexibility to you know, figure out what an offsite shared parking arrangement might look like, I think that's a much better option than saying, well, you just have to put 100 parking spaces in this thing, even if the thing that they're building might not need 100 parking spaces. And I think that's kind of the trap that we're in right now. But for me, and this is like, I hear what you're saying, Danielle, like, if we rezone it without this, are we really saying to people, you can build anything? Maybe not but if we also if we don't rezone it and we and we I think rezoning it even if we're talking about heights and building types and mixed uses and and incentives. we're signaling to someone that if you want to come here and have this bigger conversation about redeveloping something, we are open to it. And so I think that's where the cart horse piece comes for me. I don't want us to wait to have the perfect thing. I think solving the squares parking with all of the challenges of the private actors involved, like that could be years away. But actually by saying here's the square we want to build, it might invite someone in who can help us solve those challenges, who might be able to say, let's bring Atrius, let's bring, maybe they can get to Hamilton and Atrius in a way that we couldn't on transom. And then we have a third of the square that we can talk about moving streets, right? Then we can talk about reorienting streets. Then we can talk about doing the things that zoning can't do alone. So that's a piece of how I view zoning, is that it's an invitation and a signal to kind of, invite people who want to do big things to come and talk to us about it. Matt, is that you?
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, the other thing I'd like to add about, there are a few different camps here. There's one camp that I feel like in the rezoning process that wants to get everything perfectly right, get the exact correct final product before we can pass it. And then there's sort of another line of thinking, which is we do need to move this process along. just to put my cards on the table, I'm in the second group. Medford has, I think Medford has, I understand, not everybody's in the second group, so I get it, but no, so Medford has a, Medford has had a culture of thinking that our zoning is something that's set in stone and can never, never really be changed. And that's why it hasn't, it hadn't been changed for so long. But other communities, they make changes to their zoning all the time. It's something that happens very frequently. It's part of their regular, their regular council meetings. Smaller adjustments are, a thing that very commonly happens. And in Medford, the fact that we haven't really changed zoning for so long means that right now it's very out of date and necessitates this sort of overhaul. which is an extended way of saying that even if we don't get the perfect product, we can still go back to it and make smaller edits later, and those smaller edits won't be such a huge lift later on down the line. So that was a point that I wanted to make.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. All right. Are we cool to open the public hearing at this point? All right. Thank you, everyone. Maybe we haven't answered Member Goffman's apt questions as in detail as maybe we would have wanted to, but we have some meetings in the next couple of months. We're trying to get to a yes on something that works, or at least the first pass at it. And I think something that Doug just whispered to me is important too, right? I think, and I think it's what Matt was saying, you know, We take a pass at it. We put something out there. We see what the feedback is. And if it's, you know, if we have 90% law coverage and they come back and say, people come back and say, well, we can't do anything without 100, then if we can build an active and collaborative process, those are conversations and iterations we can have every few months or once a year, you know, to amend the foundation of what we put out there. So I appreciated that.
[Doug Carr]: Yeah, I want to echo that sentiment. The CD board has already been thinking about things that we want to recommend. that we've seen our issues with zoning. You know, John mentioned design review, I think design guidelines separate from that. There's obviously a ton of things. The zoning in this city needs to be a living document that evolves and it's going to be a little bit of one step forward and you kind of test things and we're going to always learn lessons from every project that is proposed. Just in the last three months, two months, the city board has approved 500 apartments and two projects within a 10-minute walk of Wellington. I think a huge win for the city. But we grappled with some of these issues as well about, well, how much parking do we want? It's really close to the T. You know, we weren't comfortable with having no parking, but we didn't want 1.5 either because we knew it was reasonable. So I think flexibility is a critical part of this.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Doug. All right. Let's go to public comment. We will take commenters alternating in person and on Zoom. Every person will have three minutes to make their comment. There will be, and I'm just realizing now I probably can't use the timer tool because of how I logged into Zoom, so. I don't think you can. I'm logged in the same way. It's a pain. I'm gonna log out and then log back in. First person's gonna get three minutes timed on Doug's phone. Doug's phone, everyone else should have it in the Zoom window. All right, we'll start at the podium. Name and address for the record, please, and you'll have three minutes.
[Nick Uhlig]: Hi there, Nick Uleg, 62 Taner Street. Thanks, everyone, for the time. I don't want to get too technical. There's been a lot of really interesting ideas and suggestions proposed in this meeting. I really appreciate the added thoroughness that seems to be built into this process starting in the new year, the new council. What I wanted to highlight is something that a couple of people have mentioned already, and that's the sense of urgency. So coming from my perspective as someone who lives close to the square, I see this rezoning as something that can really, you know, catch the momentum of another three projects that are ongoing right now. So one has been mentioned a few times. It's a big one, the transom development, right? So that one has been contracted by the city and it has A couple things that I think are really important to this discussion, one of which is the parking garage, which actually eliminates two parking lots potentially that are city owned, but provides net 187 more parking spaces than we have in the square. So for people who need to drive there, that's great. It also provides something that I think is sorely lacking from the center of Medford, which is a grocery store. That's the idea behind that, which is if you want to talk about an anchor business, There's not much that you could do better than that. In addition to the added housing, which are basically, as people have already said, like baked-in customers for businesses that are in the square, that is a huge opportunity, not to mention the public art, the landscaping changes, everything else that comes along with that. And as Councilor Leming pointed out, this rezoning is really critical to getting that development underway, right? So it maybe has been contracted by the city, but you can't start until this rezoning happens. The other one that was mentioned is the redesign for the intersection of Main and High Street going down across the river. As someone who cycles through there every day to work, that intersection is maybe not the worst I bike through, but it's extraordinarily bad and very dangerous, and the number of times that I've been hit, almost hit, in that intersection, I can't even count. Looking at the Mastop proposals for that, or actually the designs for that intersection is very exciting. And that coupled with a third project that hasn't been mentioned tonight, which is a little bit further in the future, which is a connector for the bike path on the south side of the Mystic River, similar to the Clipper Ship connector. Those two projects, the redesign of that intersection and that bike path, are going to bring so many more people who don't drive into the square. So we really have a few things that are all really rowing in the same direction. And we need to get this rezoning done quickly. As quickly as is reasonable with the process that we have in front of us. And yes, it's nice to get things perfect, but as other people have pointed out, if you can get part of the way there and then revise as you go, surely that's better than not accomplishing anything. People talk about a chicken and an egg, and that's a metaphor that I think is misused, because if you want a chicken, you can get an egg. If you want an egg, you can get a chicken. It doesn't matter which one you get first. So if someone's offering us an egg, I would say we take it.
[Zac Bears]: That's... I forgot to change the response. And the winner is, is the name of that timer as well. Alright, great. We'll go to Zoom next. We'll go to Ekaterini's iPad on Zoom. Name and address for the record, please. You have three minutes. I've asked you to unmute.
[SPEAKER_23]: Hello, my name is Ekaterini, and I live on 11 Ashland Street. I heard a lot of things this evening. I'm still confused about the proposed changes in zoning. I'm just going to make a statement of some of my concerns, if that's okay with everyone.
[Zac Bears]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_23]: As a resident for 45 years, I've seen many versions of Ephraim Square and attempts to revisit and re-envision it. With a home on Ashland Street less than 100 yards from Salem Street, we are both part of, but also separate from the square itself. On one hand, I'm eager to see real and positive changes to the square, but also justifiably concerned about the surrounding community. The streets of Ashland, Oakland, and Forest, along with the cross streets, are a neighborhood near the square, but not in the square, and that distinction matters greatly. The zoning map misses this. It should be seen as a rough draft lacking some context. One that needs to be updated to both honor the history and uphold the character of our neighborhood. For one, I wish to express that zoning for four or five story buildings immediately abutting historic homes on the historic register would dwarf their character and limit access to light. as was intended when the neighborhood first began to be developed 200 years ago. Yes, times change, but if we are meant to uphold the character of homes that built this city from several centuries ago, then it's important not to hastily provision changes that minimize their importance to Medford' cultural fabric and history. I asked her to revisit the boundaries of zoning and actively involve the households which have bought any proposed changes. As it stands, I cannot support the zoning to permit buildings to tower over ours or our neighbors' homes. As a real example, when units were added above the former Elizabeth Grady 34 Salem Street, we voiced our support for additional units and they were needed for the community and the trade-off to losing some light for us and our neighbors was meant to be the addition of green space and trees, a promise made but never kept. This is why a top priority ought to be that the existing green footprint not be subtracted from us but rather added to especially near homes. Please don't misconstrue this as the classic community complaining which is often managed as part of the planning process. It's far from it. We like to be actively engaged and hope that our voices are generally matter rather than just a function as a check in box for a community engagement process. Thank you for the opportunity.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. We will go back to the podium. Name and address for the record, please, and you'll have three minutes.
[Nick Giurleo]: Good evening, Nick Giurleo, 40 Robinson Road. I'll start with just some technical observations and suggestions, and then I'll just give a comment about approach. So starting with the technical, first, with the table of uses, I noticed with the uses for mixed use, I see blank spaces in the column with the parking. So I'm wondering, I'd just like some clarification, if the current proposal is proposing no parking minimum, or that just hasn't been decided yet. Secondly, I was going to make a comment about that residential portion that was included within the boundary. I'm happy to hear that that was removed. I was gonna suggest exactly that, cuz I don't think it fits with kind of the purpose of this district, which is mostly focused on mixed use and commercial. So I was glad to see that. go out. Councilor Leming suggested looking to historic district feasibility for the square. I know that's a little bit outside of the scope of zoning. I do think that's a good idea. I would like zoning that takes into account the historic character. of Medford Square. I know Chair Carr also mentioned history. I think it's important that any new developments try to integrate the history of Medford Square as much as possible and also take into account just that history is a drawer to Medford Square. So I think there's value in looking at that as well. Another thing in the table of uses, there was a neighborhood medical office included. I believe in all the sub-districts that's allowed as of right. I'm thinking to the great controversy that arose with the Salem Street Corridor regarding that definition, which I personally find to be quite vague. So I'd suggest making that discretionary and adding a special permit requirement in all of the sub-districts. I know there's also mention by Chair Carr of the church being in the district as well, or sorry, one of the churches not being in, I believe St. Joe's is in the district, as well as the library being out of it. So I would consider too, you know, the impact that, you know, maybe rising development incentives might have on our religious community in the square, you know, to the extent that this might motivate them to sell and leave, and obviously would detract significantly from Medford's character, which in a large part has been based on its various religious communities. And then my general comment here, kind of on approach, I do understand obviously that the transom project was approved. The bid was accepted. I would just encourage both bodies here not to develop zoning that really is just trying to get that developer's project through easily. You know, in other words, writing the zoning for the developer as opposed to what the community as a whole wants. So I personally don't understand why we accepted the bid before we settled the zoning question, but the fact of the matter is it has been accepted. And I know a goal here is to try to tailor zoning to make that project So I would just encourage both bodies here to just try to think of the broader purpose here. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you for your comment. We will go to Zoom. Jeremy Martin on Zoom. Jeremy, I'm going to ask you to unmute and you can provide your name and address and you'll have three minutes. Thanks, Mr. President.
[Jeremy Martin]: My name is Jeremy Martin, 65 Burgett Avenue. I'd turn on my camera, but that doesn't seem to be allowed. I appreciate the city's leadership for reaching an agreement to restart this process, and also the staff for facilitating this meeting and posting the meeting materials early. As part of the process, I would ask that the baseline for all of the CDB zoning reviews be that the upcoming meeting materials be shared with the public at the same time as the board, especially if the content is going to evolve between meetings, as was suggested earlier this evening, because it really allows the public to come to the meetings more informed and more prepared with useful feedback instead of just complaints. I have reviewed the maps that are drafts now in the draft ordinance and generally support what is proposed. I'd look for some clarification about the building heights, particularly along high street to the West. Are those heights measured from the address side of the building or from the parkway side of the building that does have a drastic difference in the, in the impact of those buildings. A lot of discussion about parking tonight, which is. both necessary and exhausting, but I hope we can consider really reducing those parking ratio minimums so that we can incentivize development and meet the walkability goals that are really paramount to the purpose section of the ordinance. And when residential zoning returns, we need to ensure that we're creating enough density around the square and in nearby neighborhoods to bring foot traffic to support the types of businesses we all want to see. in the square. I noted that one of the incentive waivers included an additional half story for providing streetscape improvements along a public street. Frankly, this type of improvement should be a baseline requirement of any development in the square. I'm not sure the incentive is enough to make sure that it happens, and we should be asking developers to not just think about their building or their immediate site, but all of the impact that they have on the public realm. It's really encouraging to see the possibility of the board establishing design guidelines. I hope that that happens quickly. These guidelines should be forward-looking and not necessarily beholden to a narrow view of what defines Medford's character. We need to build an urban realm that embraces the needs of a modern city and its residents. And I hope that the leaders of the city continue to look beyond just zoning and in concert with these updates, see the opportunities. We could create an incredible park along what is now Clippership Drive instead of a sea of parking and essentially a highway through our square that would encourage developers to develop on both sides of those blocks there. And we can advocate for MassDOT to find ways to create a Salem Street bypass so that we don't have a highway on and off ramp through the middle of our square. It's going to take leadership and drive, unwavering, but we need to stick to the vision and look beyond the status quo to get to the real potential of our city. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Jeremy. All right, we'll go back to the podium. Name and address for the record, please, and you'll have three minutes.
[hLm7uOhMYTQ_SPEAKER_54]: John Prusch, 9 Lambert Street. Why can't Medford Square be better? Why don't they do something with Medford Square? I moved here in 2006, and I've been hearing people say that. Since then, not just new residents, people that grew up here. So I am really glad that we are finally really looking at doing this. And if there is anything, resembling consensus in this city about where we should be rezoning and where we can accept some new development. It's Medford Square. So I'm glad we're moving ahead with that. There is a real desire, I think, for more spaces in this community. where people can build community. We've seen a little bit with places like Deep Cuts springing up. I think we need more of that. People would love it. I live down the street. I would love more reasons to walk down there. I also, I love that we are looking at allowing a little more height. This is the place to do it. And I really think that's gonna, you know, especially at a time when Municipal budgets are tight. They're all coming up against Prop 2 and a half. That kind of increased commercial tax base, the linkage fees, that's going to help take pressure off our residents for some of those rising costs. And most importantly, we know we need more housing. I was mentioned at the meeting last night I think how much more the need for assistance has gotten just in the last few years in our city. So I'm really glad that we are trying to make an effort. We can't solve it by ourselves but it seems like a real effort is being made to think about that with the plan that I saw tonight. The only other thing I want to mention is I know design review was mentioned earlier. I hope that if we institute some kind of process like that, that the rules are very clear. and the process for completing it is clear because there are, in a lot of cities that have housing crisis like ours, that process is often used to delay housing indefinitely with subjective, vague rules. So just something to think about with that. I think we can do this and keep everything, keep our historical buildings, but let's make sure that that's, you know, no matter who's on that committee, it's something where there is a real deadline. That's all I got, thank you. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: We're going to go back to Zoom. Paul Geraghty, name and address for the record, please. And you'll have three minutes. I've requested to unmute you, Paul. You should be seeing that pop up. There you go. All right. Go ahead, Paul. Paul, we can't hear you if you're speaking. No, he unmuted, but we can't hear him. I think there might be a technology issue maybe on his end. Paul, I'm gonna request you to unmute again. Paul, feel free to speak. We can't hear you, yeah, okay. We'll stay at the podium and we'll see if we can get Paul on some other way. Name and address for the record, please.
[SPEAKER_20]: You have three minutes. Hi, my name is Zoe Dukoch. I live at 72 New Bern Avenue. Heard a lot of discussion tonight about historical preservation. I would just like to really emphasize that just because a building is old does not mean that it is helpful to our community. One thing that I really appreciated seeing in the zoning was conversation about incentives for having a pleasant facade, a plaza, green space, a fountain, that kind of thing. And talking about things that are draws to the neighborhood. It's not just having an old building, it's having a building that is pleasant to be in, that is inviting. And I think that that is so much more important than just was this building built 100, 200 years ago, especially when we are in desperate need of more housing, more new development, and bringing in more commercial space as well. I've also heard a lot about parking, and if we want to have a vibrant, thriving community, including for seniors, including for everybody in our community, we need to have less space dedicated to parking. Parking is truly a neighborhood killer. It is the least useful, least productive way to use our limited space. I would much rather see taller buildings, with more housing, more commercial space, mixed use development rather than more parking lots. And also parking minimums are really detrimental to anyone's ability to come in and redevelop and build more in the current space. I'm even looking at things like neighborhood retail has a parking minimum and I can't imagine why I know that I bike, take the bus, take the train to all sorts of retail places all over the various cities and communities in this area. And if that's the kind of community that we want to see, one that is thriving and growing, adding parking minimums is the perfect way to kill it. Just as general comments, like I said, I want to see taller buildings. I want to see more buildings. I want it to be easier. And even if this zoning process doesn't result in the exact perfect thing that I want to see, I want it to go through fast enough that we can have exciting new developments like the ones bringing in a grocery store. So, you know, I don't want anyone to get too bogged down in the details. But I just want to really encourage the efforts to create that kind of walkable community that will help Medford thrive into the future. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Paul, right on time. Paul, we'll try you again. I see your hand still up, Paul, on Zoom. If you want to try to speak, I've requested you to unmute again.
[Paul Garrity]: Can you hear me now?
[Zac Bears]: Yes, we can. All right, David, I'm sure you'll have three minutes.
[Paul Garrity]: Thank you. Mr. President, I do want to thank all the folks who've been involved with moving the zoning issues this far. But I begin by saying that zoning is a tool to support a vision, a strategy. And as I listen tonight, what I'm hearing is that there's conflicting endpoints for different people. And I'm saying, As part of this process, will both parties at least attempt to come to some unified vision of what should be in the square? Not letting the developer come in and say, I want to put this here, but saying, this is what we like. And the reason why I say that is the city, the square is really a tale of two cities, two squares probably. You know, you have the East side, you have the West side, you have Route 60 right down the middle. I'm saying, well, do we need to have certain provisions for, you know, aiding, working, relaxation on both sides of the square. I don't know. Is the vision for the square to be focusing on culture? Is it going to be in economics? Is it going to be in housing? I mean, there's a whole lot of pieces here that I don't see tied into a consolidated vision. So, I would hope as part of the process, there can be a generally accepted unifying vision to say, what do we want in on the square and then move forward to say, okay, once we decided what we'd like to have built here, then let zoning take its proper place. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. We will go back to the podium. Name and address for the record, please. And you'll have three minutes.
[SPEAKER_21]: Hello, my name is David Shank. My address is 72 New Bern Avenue. I would like to start by saying thank you all for doing this. We desperately need new zoning in Medford. Ideally, more dense, urban, mixed-use zoning that can create a beautiful, walkable environment that everyone can live in as people and not as cars. My sister-in-law is currently pregnant, and she's due in February 19. And her and my brother do not own a car, but I do. And I am going to be lending them my car because I can afford to get around on foot, by bicycle, by train, by bus, in the area where I live. So I will be able to lend them that car for a period of months. And that's possible because of the urban environment that we live in. And it is also the environment that I would like to see us move towards with this zoning. I am concerned at the level of protection that people feel over parking. Parking is not human. That's why the plan includes mixed use residential and commercial buildings. People can both live in that space and shop and work there. And I think that is so important going forward. I would support no parking minimums in the area. I understand that there may be Disagreement on that. And as a follow up, I would say I support getting this through as quickly as possible. As was said, there was a plan made in 2005, 20 years ago. There has not been a significant overhaul in 50 years. And we are in a housing crisis in Massachusetts at large, especially in the greater Boston area and in Medford specifically. And we desperately need more units. I would also like to say that the plan, the deal made to bring in a grocery store is an excellent addition to the mixed-use residential area. People will be able to shop there. They'll get their groceries. They can take advantage of all of the other amenities that are in Medford Square and will be built up. as more businesses take advantage of that first floor area with the new customer base of people living on the stories above them. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Seeing no hands on Zoom, we'll stay at the podium. Name and address for the record, please, and you'll have three minutes.
[MCM00001614_SPEAKER_01]: Hi, I'm Kit Nichols. I live at 37 Governors Avenue. It was one of the pieces that was actually, I guess, cut off, bounded off, out of bounds for discussion tonight. I also serve on the Medford Historic Commission with Doug. I just want to make a couple of comments about historic preservation in Medford, because while it's absolutely true that not every house, every building in Medford that is old is worth preserving, we do have a pretty remarkable historic building stock. This morning I was looking just at how many buildings or historic places we have in Medford, and there are 36. And eight of them are in the Medford Square District. And as has already been said tonight, being on the National Register does not protect a place or a building. And it is also true that the protections for historic buildings in Medford are really There aren't very many. I mean it really is the Medford historic commission and the most that the commission can do is if a building is decided to be historically significant and preferably preserved we can levy an 18 month demolition delay. But all a developer needs to do is wait that out. So if there is a serious concern about saving and preserving some of the historic stock of buildings in Medford, I would strongly recommend that you figure that out before you pass a zoning of Medford Square. Because there's nothing that anybody can do if a developer decides they want to buy something up and tear it down. There really isn't. They just need to wait it out. The other thing I would say is as someone who is trying to turn a property into a single family historic district there are all sorts of incentives for developers. to, for all sorts of reasons, there are no incentives for individual homeowners to do anything like this. There are no incentives to turn, in fact, it's a losing proposition to put your house in a single family historic district. And the people who do it, do it because they care about the history. So if there is really an interest in incentivizing not just developers, but homeowners. I mean, maybe there are ways that you can think of to incent private property owners as well. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Kate. All right, we have one more hand on Zoom. Caitlin, name and address for the record, please. You'll have three minutes.
[Kaitlin Robinson]: Hi, Caitlin Robinson, 31 Everett Street. I just want to say thank you for having this meeting. I'm excited to see this process restarting. And I very much agree with the comments about like not needing to wait for something to be perfect. I think that this has been a process that feels like it's been very drawn out. And I do hope to see progress soon. I do also want to speak to my concern for the parking minimums. I am very concerned about the impacts of having parking minimums in Medford Square. Historically, Medford Square as a historic district was not built, was not like meant to be built around parking minimums. And I am excited now that the rotary, the Salem Street Rotary has been much improved. I can walk over to Medford Square much more easily, and I would like to see Medford Square itself be a more walkable place, and I really don't wanna see parking minimums continuing to hamstring development, as well as continuing to hamstring having a walkable place. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you very much. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. PB, Harmon Zuckerman. I'll take that as a motion from Council Vice President Lazzaro, seconded by Councilor Leming. On that motion, Mr. Clerk, please call the roll. I got the date right, Alicia, right? Great.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan?
[Kaitlin Robinson]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro?
[Kaitlin Robinson]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Leming? Yes. Councilor Malayne? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli? Yes. Councilor Tseng. President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, I have the affirmative, none the negative. The motion passes. Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Yes, I'd like to entertain a similar motion to continue this public hearing to February 21st.
[Zac Bears]: Second.
[Doug Carr]: 25th.
[Zac Bears]: 25th at 6 p.m.
[Doug Carr]: 6 p.m., not 6.30. Not 6.30. 6 p.m., okay. Roll call. John Anderson.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: Sean Began.
[Unidentified]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: Ari Goffinhart-Fishman? Yes. Paige Maldini? Yes. And myself, yes. Motion passes six to nothing. Thank you, Councilor.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. All right. Is there a motion to adjourn by the City Council? The motion of Council, I mean to adjourn, seconded by Vice President Lazzaro. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Meeting adjourned.
[Doug Carr]: We don't do it fast.
[Zac Bears]: I can't because people are on Zoom.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan. Yes. Vice President Lazzaro. Yes.
[Unidentified]: I was close.
[Rich Eliseo]: Close. Didn't get it, though. Councilor Leming. Yes. Councilor Mullane. Yes. Councilor Scarpelli. Yes. Councilor Tseng. Yes. President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yes. I have the affirmative, none the negative. The motion passes. Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Ditto. We'll have the motion to adjourn, please. All right. John Anderson, Sean Began, Dina Colagaro, Ari Goffman Fishman, Page Buldini.
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