[Chair Doug Carr]: Good evening and welcome to tonight's meeting of the method community development board. It's Wednesday, February 18th, 634 PM. My name is dog car. I'll call the meeting to order, but let's begin with some obligatory procedural matters. This hearing of the Medford Community Development Board is being conducted via remote means. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings. Anyone who would like to listen to or view this meeting while in progress may do so by accessing the link that was included in the meeting agenda posted on the City of Medford website. A recording of this meeting will be posted on Medford Community Media website as soon as possible. A reminder that given the remote nature of this meeting tonight, all votes from the board will be made by roll call.
Please know that the project materials for all projects before the board can be viewed on the city's website, medfordmass.org, forward slash boards dash commissions, forward slash community development board, and by clicking on the current city board filings. For those on Zoom, you can also find the link in the chat. So I'll call the roll call. John Anderson. Present. Sean Began. Present. Page Buldini.
[Dina Caloggero]: Present.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Dina Calgaro.
[Dina Caloggero]: Present.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Ari Goffman-Fishman. Present. And myself, Doug Carr, present. Thank you very much. Daniel, can you introduce some of the staff people or Alicia if you can?
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, myself, Daniel Evans, Senior Planner. Also with me is Alicia Hunt, the Director of Planning Development Sustainability. They also have our our graduate student intern, Christian Zepeda-Lepofsky. And I think that is everyone from our office tonight.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Very good. Thank you, Danielle. So we're going to talk about two items today this evening. We're going to talk about 400 Riverside Avenue. And we're also going to spend the majority of the session of the meeting talking about Medford Square, the proposed zoning amendment. But this is not a public hearing. This is not a continuation of the public hearing. We'll get into that a little bit later on. It's a conversation with the land planning consultant. But we're going to start with 400 Riverside. So this is a CDB file number SPR-2026-1. This public hearing was continued from the last meeting on February 4th, 2026. I was going to turn it over to Danielle to give us an update on where things stand. I understand that's been a lot of activity even just today. Danielle?
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Update on 400 Riverside? Yes, please. So. Similar to the last meeting, it's still we're working on some concerns from 2 of the city departments regarding fire access and ADA for the sidewalks. Unfortunately, some key members of staff are out this week because it's school vacation week. So. Getting their final review of some interim plans that came in that weren't quite right isn't able to happen yet. So unless the applicant wanted to accept all the original conditions that the engineering and fire were requesting, unfortunately, it's not ready to have a recommendation from them yet. So we had requested that the applicant Request to continue, but I not sure if that was communicated to Kayla. Who's the planner in her office who was.
Liaising with that applicant, but. Your board can certainly continue it. Without discussion, or, I mean, it's within your rights to also discuss the project if you wanted to without them here. There's no rule. It says they have to be here.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Understood. Do you see them in the list of people on the call, any of the applicants?
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: It's just one page of. Yeah. Sometimes it is a scroll.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Danielle, I'll say that I don't. If I'm misunderstanding someone, please raise your hand. And I just want to apologize. We had some email with them where we recommended that they probably wanted to continue this evening and ask for a continuance. And they may have misunderstood and thought that meant they didn't have to show up at all. We wanted them to literally email us confirming that. And I think there might have been a misunderstanding.
[Chair Doug Carr]: That's OK. I think there's a couple of things I want to do. I want to ask, first of all, go around and ask if the board has any questions about where things stand right now, because there are a few open issues still. And I do want to open for public comments as well, if any of the public have any comments, so we can at least get some of that stuff under our belt, so to speak. So does anyone on the city board have any questions for, I guess, for Danielle and Alicia about where things stand now beyond what Danielle just told us?
Is there anything? Seeing none, I'm going to now open it for public comments. Is there anybody with the public who would like to speak in favor or against or make a comment about the 400 Riverside proposal? If you do, please raise your hand and we'll take your name and address for the record. I do not see anyone. So I guess I will close the public comment section, uh, hearing, um, and I'll ask for a motion to continue to, uh, a date certain, which I would assume would be, uh, March 4th, 2026, our next public meeting. Could I have that motion, please?
[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, Mr. Chairman, I'd move to, uh, continue this hearing to, uh, March 4th of 2026.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Seconded. Very good. Roll call, please. John Anderson. Yes. Sean Began? Yes. Page Buldini?
[Ari Fishman]: Yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Tina Calogero?
[Ari Fishman]: Yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Ari Gothman-Fishman?
[Ari Fishman]: Yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: And myself, yes. The motion passes six to nothing. Very good. Thank you all. Hopefully the next meeting we'll be in a position to move forward. All right, switching gears now. We're going to have the board working session, the Medford Square District Proposed Zoning Amendment. This is a working session to talk with Innis Land Strategies Group about the proposed Medford Square Zoning Amendment. As I said before, this is not a continuation of the public hearing. So we will not be taking any public comment regarding this amendment. Should members of the public want to comment on this proposal, they should submit a comment through the CD board's public comment form, which can be found in the agenda, or attend the next joint public hearing with the city council on February 25th, 2026. That's only seven days from now.
Most of us, I think, will be in person at that meeting in city council chambers, as we did last month. So the goal of this working session is to learn about and discuss the proposed map and language of the zoning amendment and provide feedback or action items to the consultants that's in this land strategies group. Alicia, Danielle, do you have, before I turn it over to Emily, do you have any comments or do you just want us to dive in?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I'm fine. I don't have any comments. I do need a minute to make Emily a co-host so she can share screen Emily and unmute herself. Emily, is anybody else from your group needing to be able to share the screen or unmute? No, just myself. Okay.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay. Obviously you're unmuted. Welcome, Emily. Thank you for coming. Appreciate it.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. With the board's permission, I will share my screen. Please. Thank you so much. Delighted to be in front of you today. So as we get, I'm just opening up my screen a little bit so I can see you all again. So, our remit for today was to basically catch the CD board up with what happened last year. So, when you go back to work with the city council at the next joint public hearing is to make sure you have as many tools and as much information as possible. So I am going to walk you through this presentation. You should see the City of Medford 2026 zoning update up there and take you through the work that the document that was sent, referred by the City Council to the CD board last year and some of the technical information that we provided. during that planning process and then also some of the recommendations or suggested changes that have come out of that. Saying that, we recognize that we are in a new conversation now. We anticipate that there will or there may be additional changes. This kind of just brings you up to where we left off.
So I'll talk a little bit about the process, the current standing of the table of uses and dimensional standards. We also have some development standards in there. And then one new thing that did come up were some questions about historic buildings in Medford Square. And so between the last meeting, which was the first joint public hearing between the City Council and the Community Development Board, and this meeting we were able to get some additional information on the historic buildings in the square that we hope will inform the conversation. So that's the new part but let's start off with the original pieces. So just going over the project scope because I know not everybody on this meeting will be familiar with it is we are in a new phase of the zoning project here and we're going to be looking at four different topics during this process. One is Medford Square, which is obviously the subject of today's meeting. There's some cleanup items from last year that have been requested by city staff. Those are mostly technical administrative, but they are part of this phase one. And then our phase B, phase A, phase B, the phase B is to look at the Tufts Institutional Zoning and Boston Avenue, but we won't take those up. until Medford Square is well on its way or possibly even all the way through the process. So this is what the next two months look like. Here we are on the 18th of February. There is a public meeting at the senior center tomorrow during the day. I believe it's one o'clock. Then the joint hearing is February 25th, so that's next week. We are having an evening public meeting on March 11th, and there'll be some information about that on the city's website and put out by city staff. And then that is sending us towards the next joint hearing on March 25th. And I will walk through at the end what we're expecting to be doing at each of those when we get to next steps. So let's start off with the current zoning. I think a lot of people over the process have seen what this looks like, but just to set the stage for our discussion here, there are two primary areas. This pink area is commercial one, and the orange area is apartment two. These are existing zoning districts. We do have, just as a way of distinguishing them, there are, of course, other differences for uses and dimensional standards But just note that commercial one, residential buildings are allowed six stories by right. Commercial buildings, four stories by right. Hotel, 15 stories by right. And other permitted structures, four stories by right. Apartment two, residential buildings, six stories by right. Commercial use not allowed. And other permitted structures are 15 stories by right. There's also a little bit of general residential, which is single unit or two unit dwellings and ADUs. And this idea of height by use is going to come back to us as we look at the zoning. So the dotted line is the boundary that we're currently looking at. And then you can see here the colors in the background that are not part of Medford Square are the existing zoning. There are no proposed changes there. So this just summarizes the height that I mentioned earlier. So you can see it a little bit more clearly than on the legend. And as I said, there are, of course, other differences between the two districts.
So the 2025 process was really a process of us working with city staff to understand the existing conditions and then working with city councils planning and permitting committee. to propose ideas, listen to ideas from them, come up with what would then get referred to the Community Development Board. So this was the very first Medford Square map that went to the Planning and Permitting Committee. You can see this mixed-use 1, mixed-use 2A and 2B, mixed-use 3. Some of the mixed-use names are coming out of the other mixed-use districts that we used, and for example, Mystic Avenue, At the time this was created, we were still looking at the neighborhood residential districts. Those, as you'll see in a few minutes, have since been removed. but paying attention to kind of the pattern of the colors and what that might mean, because you're going to see some shifts in where these are. There's also these red lines, and the red lines are what we refer to as site sections, and I'm going to show you those sections in a minute, but those were used as methods of understanding how taller buildings might relate to shorter buildings across the sections. So, for example, this one here is looking at two sides of High Street. This one here looking at two side of Riverside Avenue. And the reason we did the site sections, and we had done them before for Salem, and I can't remember if we did them for Mystic or not. I'd have to go back. It's been a while. But the reason is to look at the idea of what is the impact of shadow studies. If we increase the height on both sides of the road, what does that mean? So using the existing zoning here on High Street, where there's a single-story building here, a three-story building here, where does the shadow line fall for that? And then if we allowed an increase, for example, to four stories, where would the shadow line work on here? So you see this is the section that this is calling out, looking from one side to the other. The blue is obviously the riverside of High Street. And so trying to understand the implications of raising height on the other buildings in the area where the sun would hit and what that would mean.
Again, in High Street on this side, so now we're in this section here. This, interestingly enough, also calls out the significant topographical differences between the street level and the land as it slopes down towards the river. So again, trying to figure out what are the shadow studies going to be. This section here looks at, and again, When we do these, these are test fits or things that say if we allowed X to happen, what could happen? We're not showing actual proposed developments here. These are illustrative scenarios, basically. So, in this one, you see a single building and the height going up. In this one, this gray refers to structured parking. So this particular exercise was to understand what would happen if you connected two buildings with structured parking. They had some sort of common green space between them, and what would the shadow line look like on that? And I don't, unfortunately, have my fingertips, but the exact day and time, but usually we look for what is going to be the longest shadow of the year.
[John Anderson]: Mystic Valley Parkway, same way. Excuse me, can I just ask for a clarification? Sure. I see. Let me go back. Yeah, V1 and V2. Which of those little red lines are V1 and V2?
[Emily Innes]: It's the same line, it's the section two here, but what we're doing is we're just showing different alternatives. Excellent question. Okay, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Sorry, before you leave that, this is a great section, by the way, and just to give this board some context, the projects that we've approved at Wellington, Essentially, V2 are those projects. Remember, they were four or five stories over two levels of parking. That is essentially what you could put there on that site, which is what that site would be developed today. I think Emily is completely correct about this. Back in the 70s when those were developed, that building type wasn't allowed, but you could only do surface parking. Now you can put in parking, and it's a much more pedestrian-friendly way of designing. It's actually a pretty solid move. Go ahead, Emily. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to clarify, interrupt me at any time and I'll do my best to answer the questions. So here we move down into this area here, the S4, a little bit of Mystic Valley Parkway. Again, you can see this topographical difference. Kind of an interesting discussion here. I was having this discussion with some of the planning staff members, Danielle and Alicia, a little while back about this idea of where do you have commercial development in Medford Square. So in this case, what we've shown for this FIT study is keeping the residential on High Street, but as you get to where you have green space and the water, does this ground floor have a little bit of commercial activity just to activate that space? And again, what this does in terms of getting to the zoning is thinking about what are our requirements for ground floor use and where they make sense. When we start to work in districts like this where we're looking to create a mixed-use area, we've got existing businesses and other uses, what we try to think about is how do you support the core areas and then where do you want some of that business to move out and where do you want it to stay residential because you don't want to essentially cannibalize the downtown by forcing the additional commercial that might not get filled or that might draw people away from the center of the square. So I think this can certainly continue to be a discussion. There's strategies that we've used in different communities for this type of discussion and happy to talk further. And then again, seeing where those shadows end up. Down here, this little section here on Salem Street, and I'm not showing all the sections because it got too confusing, but just, you know, many selected ones. different angle of the sun now, so now you're looking at Riverside Ave back towards Salem Street, a little bit of a shorter shadow there. By the way, something I should call out is you'll notice the ground floor is taller than the other floors, but something else to think about with new buildings is that there's been a gradual shift towards having ground floors that are taller heights than the upper floor residential, and that's to accommodate a preference for taller floor to floor for both retail space and especially for restaurant space because of the increased need to accommodate the mechanicals. So I've heard 15 to 20 feet, you know, depending on the area and the building. So that's an important consideration as we talk about infill development with historic buildings around. Typically, a common design technique is to have, for example, the storefronts line up so that the infill buildings fit in neatly with the historic buildings. But if the infill buildings now need, for market purposes, that taller ground floor, we need to think about other ways that those buildings can relate to existing buildings. So when we get to historic buildings later on, just keep that in mind. That might be a discussion we want to have.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Emily, Dina has a question. Go ahead, Dina.
[Dina Caloggero]: Emily, thank you for the shadow studies and making sense of the little red lines. I had a question. Do the shadow studies include, for instance, I'm looking at Salem Street, and there's a small piece of residential that's just right next to it. Are there shadow studies for those areas too? Because I'm considering those residential houses that are certainly within 12 feet of each other.
[Emily Innes]: Let me check and see how far out. Yeah, we just did Clippership Drive. We can certainly go back and add those if those are interests. I think we tried to pick different types of conditions to look at. We can certainly look at those.
[Dina Caloggero]: Right. So it's Salem, Oakland Street, Ashland, and then down Governors Ave. Not so much there, but certainly Oakland Street, Salem, and then Ashland.
[Emily Innes]: Great. I will have a chat with our team. Thank you for bringing it up. I did want to definitely make sure that we showed these because this starts to talk about a more intense potential fit study here where you could get more structured parking. And when you do something like this, I should have mentioned this terminology earlier, but this is what we start to call liner buildings. And the idea is that these buildings are lining the interior parking structures here so that you're not seeing the parking structures from the street. You're getting at ground level that commercial activity and then the upper level, the residential activity. Now, these are interesting because normally you might want to consider having some green space here. In this case, the shadow would go over that open space. So maybe it's a plaza. Maybe it's a great place to be in the summer, but less so in the winter. Something else when we start to think about shadow. The other thing to think about, too, as we look at that is this idea that we've got a sidewalk, the green area for a tree, the road area, tree, and then sidewalk again. So thinking about where does the shadow hit relative to the sidewalk and when. These are all going to feed into development standards thinking about what types of requirements do we want to have for daylight or the provision of daylight throughout the year. And then this is a really long section taking in two different streets and kind of, it's not that we would expect, again with the FIT studies, we don't necessarily expect something like this to happen or certainly not in the short term, it's just How would they relate if something like this did happen? Again, it's just scenario development. In this case, we're also, you see the dotted lines here, we're also looking at the viewsheds. If you change the heights of the buildings and you've got a taller building sort of back between Salem and Riverside here with this double thing, look, suddenly now you've got a potential viewshed for this building. back over the others towards Clipper Ship Drive in the water. That's interesting to think about this idea of what is a view shed as well as a shadow or a daylight area. Again, testing these out.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Emily, could you just pause one second and address that I think most of what you're showing in these sections appear to be new construction because I don't think a lot of these you can add on. buildings that we're adding on to, we're largely putting, replacing buildings. Is that correct statement?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah. And again, this idea of these being fit studies or test studies, it's not that we're recommending that buildings be replaced. It's that we had a question about what would these taller building heights, what would the impact of these taller building heights be? So the advantage of choosing these particular lots and these particular stretches, As that you kind of show the relationship of the infill developments to each other, but this isn't a redevelopment plan in which we or anybody else's proposing that these specific buildings be built. It's merely to show the relationship of. really what we talk about is the total building envelope. This is obviously not architecture here. This is just massing of the buildings. And so if you built out something to the entirety of the building envelope, how would that affect the shadows or the views of all of these buildings? Thank you, Emily.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Lisa, did you have a comment?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I thought I would just add, in a very simple way, I like to talk about these as the what if. What if somebody actually did it? How big could it possibly be so that people could have a sense of if they actually built to the numbers that were in here, what would happen? It's not that we necessarily, in some cases, we think maybe they will. In a lot of these cases, we don't really think they're going to do it. But you should know what would happen if somebody actually did assemble the parcels and built something to the tallest possible. So I call this the what ifs.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you, Alicia. I'm going to recognize John Anderson. John, go ahead.
[John Anderson]: Thank you. Do these heights include the incentive bonuses?
[Emily Innes]: In some cases, yes. I'll go through and show where we have the incentive bonuses as we get closer to the rest of the maps. But yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay. And Dina as well?
[Dina Caloggero]: Yes. So going back to the daylight minimum standards, we would have to define that. And my question is, would those daylight minimum standards also apply to those residential units that I pointed out on Oakland Street and Ashland?
[Emily Innes]: So none of them would apply to existing buildings because they're already built. So the daylight standards would have to be applied either to new construction, i.e. additions on top of existing buildings or the infill development. What they would do is they would apply to the impact of the new construction onto existing buildings. So, for example, if you were going to build a building that could potentially create a shadow for those residential, then the standards apply to the building that would potentially create the shadow, if you see what I mean.
And you will see, actually, that there is a TBD on that because we were just in discussions of how this would actually work when we hit that June 30th month.
[Dina Caloggero]: So, Emily, if we determine what the daylight minimum would be, that would apply to the residential units that abut the new developments that would be within the zoning of Medford Square.
[Emily Innes]: In other words, the new developments would not be allowed to shadow, to create shadows on the existing buildings. Yes, that's what we're looking for.
[Dina Caloggero]: Can I ask one more question? Would that minimum daylight also apply not only to Medford Square, but to other areas as well?
[Emily Innes]: Well, now that's an interesting question because right now we are dealing with the Medford Square zoning. it had been the original intent that we might go back at the end of the zoning process and reapply because it was and still is an iterative process that there might be something that came up later that the city might want to go back and reapply to something else. So I think that would remain an open question if it's developed here, where else should this or could this be applied?
[Dina Caloggero]: I think we should consider it as part of the phase to define that as we move forward to do that. And I would also like to see your guidance on other communities and what the daylight minimum standard should be.
[Emily Innes]: My colleague Paola, who's on vacation this week, was doing a deep dive into exactly what you just recommended. We were looking, there's a couple of different ways that communities have measured the daylight minimums. Some of them are less effective than others. So we were in the process of weeding them out. And so we would come forward with a recommendation of how this would work as part of one of the next steps. Thank you very much, Emily. You're welcome. This is also a great way for me to introduce the fact that after each of these sections, we're going to talk about the suggested changes. We had sent an earlier version of this PowerPoint presentation that had them all at the end, but in chatting with Danielle and Alicia as our sort of logistical prep for this meeting, they suggested that maybe we just put the suggested changes after each topic. So, it's not learn about everything and then let's talk about the suggested changes. So, that's just a new thing. So, this was the referred map from the City Council to the CD board. This was the April map last year, and it's really the beginning map for this process. You're going to see that we have a few tweaks, but here you see the Mixed Use 3 has been expanded. There's a little bit of shifts from where the Mixed Use 1, 2A and 2B Those old neighborhood residential districts are still in here. And this is actually in June. We have provided this second map where we just took out the residential districts because they were no longer going to be part of it. And then we just cleaned it up for the joint hearing. So there's no change to the Medford Square part. but we removed and went back to the current neighborhood zoning just so people wouldn't get confused about what we're talking about. So this is what we're talking about now. The big changes are this yellow area, the neighborhood residential three. and the urban residential one. We're no longer talking about those. The boundary has been revised. And I will say that this is something that the Community Development Board, when it does make its recommendations back to City Council, this will need to be part of your recommendations because this wasn't the original map that was referred to. And this is something that will work with you and with staff step by step.
A couple of things going on here. This of the suggested changes, what I just said, is exclude the residential districts. Rename mixed 1 to mixed 1B and mixed use 3 to mixed use 3A. You'll see because of when we stopped that 1B made it into the map change, but mixed use 3, which should be 3A, is still referred to as 3. So just note that we will clean that up when it's time to make recommendations. obviously update the draft to exclude all references to the residential districts. That part did get caught. It was just the 3A that didn't get caught. So just clarifying each of those points.
We'll start talking a little bit about the uses, and for anybody here who may be going to tomorrow's meeting, you'll see a full-size version of what I'm about to show. So we have the table of uses, and if I switch my screen, did my screen just switch so you see a different document? You should have a big yellow bar on the right-hand side. No, we're still seeing your next slide. All right, let me stop. Thank you. I had set it up to do that perfectly earlier today, and then, of course, it went and switched on me, so I'll just do the reshare.
So, this is what I think we are all referring to as the truncated zoning. It's just the Medford Square zoning. The original document had both Medford Square and West Medford Square. So here's just the Medford Square District. This is the actual table of uses. It lists every single use that would be allowed in the four sub-districts of Medford Square District. You can also see in yellow that is the current parking and the current loading requirements use by use. So we're going to take some of these in turn, but I just wanted you to see that there is a full table. I believe you have this document. And now I'm going to go back to the slide deck that we had that I was showing earlier.
And here that is. So this is a summary of those, and it focuses on the building types, really. So we have no one- or two-unit dwellings in these districts. We do have three-unit and 1B. That's the lowest-intensity use. The historic conversion of these smaller buildings into three- to four-units minimums. No row houses in this area. Townhouses, multiplex, which is four to six dwelling units. Residential only of greater than six dwelling units. And then there's a story maximum, which ranges from four to eight stories, depending on the subdistrict. This is also where we get into that incentive zoning. So in 1B, it's one story. In 2A, it's two stories, two stories in 2B, and four stories in 3A. Commercial buildings, so commercial only, and then mixed use, which would be a mix of residential and commercial uses. So this allows you to tie that. Now, there are other uses that are allowed within each of these buildings, but these are essentially the building the types of buildings, the combination of buildings that you would have. So couple of- Emily.
[Sean Beagan]: Sorry, go ahead.
[Emily Innes]: Yes.
[Sean Beagan]: Excuse me one second. So on the, I'm looking at the Medford Square proposed zoning.
[Unidentified]: Yep.
[Sean Beagan]: Was handed out at the last city council meeting that we had the joint meeting on the 21st. Right. And that has three unit dwelling detached allowed, through MX1B through MX2B?
[Emily Innes]: So we have recommendations, suggested changes. And I think that's where this is coming in. So we had recommended that the three unit dwelling be by right in 1B. So this table here reflects these proposed changes. Yeah, so if you continue, It was, we were trying to accommodate a lot of suggestions and requests for uses. So that's why sometimes the things that we produced don't completely line up. So if you do spot anything else, we are continuing to go back and look and just make sure that we are all on the same page with what was being recommended when. But if you do spot any other inconsistencies, please let me know, but that should now We're hoping this now reflects what's missing.
So this is where we're also suggesting that multiplex in 1B and 2A, the townhouse in 1B and 2A. We had also added municipal parking area or garage as a principal use to be allowed in 2A, 2B and 3A and how that's done, whether it's by right or special permit, I think we still need to talk about I'm going to talk about commercial parking in a minute. This is just municipal parking. And then you would have to renumber uses because we were adding uses.
[Chair Doug Carr]: We have a question from John Anderson and then Danielle. Go ahead, John. Yes.
[John Anderson]: Could you fill us in on what the thinking was about making these, I mean, not in every detail, but what sort of process led you to say that uh, these three-unit multiplexed townhouses should be tweaked. Should be tweaked?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, let's go back to the map briefly. So when we see the mixed-use 1B, um, uh, there was the blue area here, and I think we were looking at maybe some other ones. The idea was just to make sure that we were providing the flexibility. There were also some existing uses in there. think on the three-unit dwelling detach that we were adding there, we may have been talking about some of those areas. This is going back a bit, but we may have been talking about some of these areas here. So, we know, for example, there's a building up here next to the CVS that is actually zone C2. but is a four, I think it's a four unit residential district that maybe we want to apply 1B to. There's one here that interestingly enough, didn't actually have a use in the original map that we need to talk about. And I think there may be have been some others that we were talking about whether or not 1B should be applied to them as opposed to 2A, but I don't remember all of the specifics on that.
[Chair Doug Carr]: You all set John?
[Emily Innes]: I don't remember either. It was back last June, I think, so it's been a while.
[Chair Doug Carr]: A lot of layers here, a lot of time. Danielle, you had something?
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Oh, I just wanted, in case I missed it, if you want to go back to that slide that shows the, yeah, this one. I think, because we talked about this at our logistical meeting, there's also the use A6, multiple dwelling grade more than six units currently in the referred draft. It's a no in the 2B and 3A. So that's the question, though. I don't know which would make sense because the 2B is over by Winthrop. Circle those apartments where we wouldn't want to at least, I think, from from the staff perspective, we wouldn't want to require mixed use. We'd want to allow just the residential uses. They are not create these nonconforming uses as well. And also the commercial uses might not be successful there if we required it, but that's also to be is also the same zone. as the transom parcels and some of those other parcels that maybe we would want to require mixed use there. So I don't know if it's a blanket change to 2B or tweaking which sub-districts are where.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, that's a great point, Danielle. So we do allow multi-unit dwelling of more than six units for 2B and 3A. That's on here. Yeah, but not in here. Right, exactly. So that's one of those proposed changes that I think you're right that we didn't, we didn't put the line in here. That's again, one of those things where the slides were changing a bit. So we would have to add that here. You know, part of the thing here is to allow that option of do you want to do residential only? Do you want to do a commercial? Do you want to do a mixed use? So any of those threes, according to this table, would be allowed. But you're right, we need to put that into the suggestion changes and then confirm that that's what people want, right? That's part of the discussion. I think the other thing that we need to confirm, and it's a good segue of the things that are still outstanding questions that Danielle brought up, is we had talked about allowing municipal parking. do we want to allow private commercial parking uses? So this municipal parking area or garage is a principal use. That was the one on the previous page. It's these one through four are different ways of thinking about private commercial parking. Is it not accessory to a permitted principal use? Is it accessory to a principal use which is on the same lot? Is it accessory to a principal use and it's within 500 feet of that conforming principal use? Or is it, you know, or does it have to be accessory to a principal use? Can it be just a standalone parking garage? So, I know parking is a topic that people want to discuss.
So, but just to let you know, we've got some definitions in the use table already. Some are allowed, some are not. The question is, are these the right definitions? Do we need to add more definitions? Do we need to change some of these permissions? So, just to give you a sense of what's out there and what these conversations might end up being.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Emily, I don't want to get into the parking. We could spend an hour on parking. I want you to complete your presentation. But I do think, obviously, it is a hot topic for this group. But to pick up on what Danielle just said, the proposed zoning for where the condos are now, those sections didn't show any mixed use. They were just showed residential only with that podium structure that we talked about earlier, wave over. on the far left on the mixed-use 2B along Winter at the far end of your boundary, right? The section don't call for mixed-use, right? But the table does?
[Emily Innes]: The table allows it. So, you know, the sections we were testing, one of those sections had the commercial along Mystic Valley Parkway, but the residential along High Street. So I think that becomes, there's kind of two sections in the zoning where this can happen. One is in the use table that just said these are the uses that are allowed. Then the second part is going to be in the development standards. And I think that's what Danielle was getting to is this idea, do we require that all ground floor has commercial? We have, and I believe you're going to see this later on, We have done something where we define active uses, but active uses aren't necessarily in the ground floor, but active uses aren't necessarily retail or restaurant, which was traditionally the definition of active uses. Active uses, for example, could include the residential lobby and common spaces. And so that may be another thing where we want to think about.
Maybe we're requesting that the ground floor be activated, but it's not a commercial activation. I think that's a discussion we can continue to have. Very good. Thank you. Yep. All right. Dimensional standards. This is the current dimensional standards for C1 and apartment 2, and I'm showing this complex table with its multiple colors because for dimensional standards, we are recommending and have been in the past zoning a fundamental change from how Medford has done its dimensional standards. So right now they're by use. So the minimum lot square footage, the frontage, open space, yards or setbacks, height, those are all defined by use and we're suggesting and have suggested and have started the city has started to move away from that because you really don't get consistency within the district if the heights are by use. If you allow a dwelling height of six stories And then you're allowing a hotel height of 15 stories and then you're allowing other commercial at four stories. you're not going to get a consistent feel in the downtown. If the setbacks change, if the frontages change, it's just not the same feel. So this is why when we look at our Mix 1a all the way up to the Mix 3a, we're trying to keep within the same district consistent dimensional standards. And so this is both a demonstration of the or a layout of the dimensional standards and also the definitions, because we're aware that not everybody is familiar with these definitions. So we've illustrated them there on these, and I can certainly go through all of them and will. And then we've also been adding the word definitions, the text definitions into the zoning ordinates where those definitions haven't been added before. So, for example, I'm going to just jump a little bit. We're adding the definition of building coverage because what was in the zoning was not clear for the building commissioner or anybody else.
So this is where we get into some of these principles around activated use. So the lot area, of course, is the square footage of the land for the parcel, and we have minimum definitions there. There is a change. I believe an earlier version had this as 4,000 square feet. The frontage is basically the length of the parcel at the street. It is a way of determining how much availability you have at the street for the building, for access, for green space. Facade build-out refers to how much of that frontage should be built out. Um, we were having, in our logistics conversation, we're having interesting discussion that I think was a continuation from last year about just what that percentage should be in many urbanized areas. You're not assuming access from the principal street to the lot. Um, it's meant to be from a side or a rear, uh, but that does get a little bit tricky, um, uh, with mid-block buildings and infill development. So that's something we want to think about. The active ground floor is, as I mentioned before, what's going on on the ground floor that activates the space, that makes it walkable and friendly. Base height is the height that's allowed as of right, and then the incentive height requires that the developer meet certain requirements, and we have a menu structure of those requirements in order to get that site. Setbacks is how far away from each of the lot lines, front, side, and rear the building needs to be built, and building coverage is the maximum percentage of the area of the lot that can be covered by a structure. Pervious surface is the amount of surface that wet rainwater can infiltrate. Open space landscape is the amount of the area that is not built that has to be landscaped. A green score is Medford's new as of last year green score that is requirements for more intense developments to address stormwater and heat island impact. And then the parking requirement is how much parking and where it's located on site.
[Chair Doug Carr]: John Anderson, you have a question?
[John Anderson]: Yes. Active grounds floor. I'm wondering why a apartment building lobby would be considered active ground floor. It's something I would just walk by.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, but that's a great question. It is something, however, that does contribute to pedestrians, the people who live there, coming in and out of the building. I have also seen newer ones where that lobby is connected to, say, the common area, the gym area, other things. The problem with some of the earlier requirements for active ground floor is that active ground floor was defined as restaurant and retail. And what was happening was that people were building buildings and they couldn't fill it with the restaurant and retail. So then it became a discussion about how do you create that pedestrianized activity without creating empty space that can't be filled. And so for some communities, early work we did in Pittsfield, we were doing a form-based code or hybrid form-based code for their downtown arts district. And they have this really interesting structure. We've got a very, very long street in their main street in the middle of town, and they've got this crossroads area that has a lot of the historic buildings. And so the southern part is where the arts museums are, a lot of the cultural things. The northern part is where the traditional retail was. And then there's this east-west crossover that has some historic apartment buildings, some of the churches. So it was kind of like the center area. And Pittsfield doesn't have enough economic activity to require that that whole length be activated uses. So what we did is in this hybrid form-based code, we said, look, the retail and restaurant needs to be concentrated in this section. And beyond that, residential needs to come down to the ground floor, can come down to the ground floor. but we want that ground floor to feel like a storefront still. We want it to feel like people are coming in and out and doing things. So that same principle, we've had more and more clients require that idea and active uses, but that aren't solely limited to retail and restaurant. So did that work? Yeah, actually, it's been really nice. We've continued to do some work for Pittsfield, And they've had a couple of new buildings. There was a hotel and a couple of other new buildings that were coming in under that code. We actually ended up doing some additional design guidelines for them that created checklists for the mandatory requirements and then just some photographic and illustrated guidance on the rest of it. But yeah, it was it was. You know, the Western Mass has a different economic profile from Eastern Mass. But yeah, it was it was starting to work. So really excited about that.
[John Anderson]: It's interesting you should mention hotels, because I can see it working very well for there, because the typical resident in a hotel goes in and out a number of times during the day. So as opposed to the residential, which is more likely to be go out in the morning and come back at night.
[Emily Innes]: Well, we hope at least on weekends that what they're doing is they're leaving and coming down to the rest of Medford Square and spending some dollars, right? That's part of the strategy of adding more residential to us.
[John Anderson]: Oh, I understand. I'm just saying comparing a hotel to an apartment building is, it's kind of a different deal.
[Emily Innes]: But still, and you'll see when we get to the definition of activated spaces, the other things that we're considering as driving activity for the spaces. So, there's also some newer uses that are coming in that weren't available when people started talking about active spaces. So, things like co-working where, you know, a typical office, it would be exactly as you just said, people walk in in the morning, maybe they walk out at lunch, maybe they walk out at night, end of story. But the co-working spaces, you tend to have a little bit more back and forth with. So some communities consider that an active use, others don't, right? This is a community discussion about what counts and what doesn't.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, John, to pick up on that, we've seen a bunch of uses that Emily referred to, seen even really high-end lounges and bike storage rooms that look really cool. And we can sometimes refer to those as fake retail, because they feel like retail even though they're not. But they do what I was talking about, which is activate the street, and leasing office, and all kinds of stuff. It's also screening parking usually behind it, which really helps to make that street much more pedestrian friendly. So I think it's a great strategy.
[Emily Innes]: I will tell you the most interesting one I saw recently. I went to the ULI conference in San Francisco last fall, and we did a tour of a recently developed area. And one of their activated storefronts was actually their water treatment plant. And it was built within the building itself. They had a lot of stats about how they were saving water and treating the water and all of that. You could look through and see the machinery. And it was just like, wow, this is not what I would have expected to see walking down the street. But it was fascinating. So it's part of their overall conservation strategies. A lot of it is is how are you relating it to the street and what does that do in terms of lighting and interest and creating, you know, making sure that the facade isn't blank as you're walking past it.
[John Anderson]: I was up in Eastport, Maine, a number of years ago, and the downtown was just probably 70 percent empty storefronts. But they all looked like storefronts because the town had been used to shoot a movie. So it truly was fake storefront, but for a tourist, it helped.
[Emily Innes]: That's great. So so we do have some recommendations. I mentioned the building coverage already adding that definition. We have some suggestions. So most of this, I believe all of these changes are now reflected in here. I was looking at it earlier today just to check. But these in yellow are a little bit different from what was referred to the CD board last year and just came out of the different conversations and the poking back and forth. Again, we recognize there may be more conversations around that. The open space permeable has been taken out because the green score is in here. And then just discussions of things like the building coverage and the landscape. Some of these, the green score in particular, you know, it used to be that your open space had to be done at ground level. And especially when we're looking at these buildings where the building coverage is higher, the opportunity to redo roof decks or terraces or something like that, we're able to have that open space at an upper level. And then in yellow here, we've just made some changes to these are part of the dimensional requirements and waivers. So, creating some additional guidance around the setbacks for active public plazas. this height step back requirement, just making sure this is actually part of this. How do the buildings relate to an abutting residential district? This came out of some of the work that we did in Salem Street of making sure that there was a plane from that residential district to sort of force the upper stories back so they don't overshadow the residential. And then this is that ground floor active frontage I was mentioning. So I think this was built on something we've been working on with another community and are continuing to modify. But the different things, the residential lobbies and the active amenity spaces, residential stoops and areas where that's important, setbacks that allow for some sort of seating. One community we worked with considered public art to be an activation because it drew people's eyes. So, you know, again, open to other discussions about how that can work for Medford.
So, that sort of catches you up to where we are now. Those are the recommendations we have in place, the high levels of the map, the district, the different sub-districts. the table of uses and the dimensional standards, just to sort of touch on some of the development standards we have in there. Of course, in the document itself, the truncated zoning, it has everything that we talked about, but we're certainly looking forward to continuing the conversations. I'll stop there for a quick second just to see if there's any other questions about the process to date, then we can talk about the historic assets of Medford Square.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Go ahead, Dina.
[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah, I was looking at the mixed use table, right? And one of the things I was questioning, it's under section C, open recreational and agricultural uses. And then it says exempt agriculture. Yep. Land use. And it's yes, all the way across. Yep. Why would we need that?
[Emily Innes]: State law. So agriculture is exempt as one of the exempt uses under state law.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay, very good. And I have another point too. I think the discussion on active brown use and the higher residential areas along High Street just fills in kind of nicely into that whole thought about the two areas of Method Square, right? You said the primary pieces, the primary discus versus the other. In each of those units, like we separated the square in two, you'd get a different feel for it, more of a commercial vibe toward Salem Street, Riverside Avenue, and then more of the residential historical side along High Street. Just a point of reference. I've walked around Medford Square many times and I do get that vibe.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you, Tina. Go ahead, Paige, you had a question.
[Page Buldini]: I just want to make a quick comment that I'm excited to see on the active ground floor table, that addition of potentially artist space and or public art and local art. I think that's something that we were kind of missing. So I'm happy to see that put in there. So thank you.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Keep going, Emily. You're doing well.
[Emily Innes]: All right, awesome. So historic assets. So, you know, Doug had brought this up, the chair, sorry, for Maladie, had brought this up and looking at it and we decided it, you know, we would like to continue to do a deeper dive in this. So we have a historical expert on our team. So we had looked at the MACRS inventory I should also stop and say that we did do a lot of non-conforming analyses. We are building a website for this project. I expect it to be live next week. I think we just had a couple of other tweaks to do to it, but all of the analysis on non-conforming parcels and all that, that will be on that site. But for today, because I know you didn't have 12 hours to go through everything, We just pulled forward the MACRIS inventory, and MACRIS is the Massachusetts Historical Commission does the inventory or takes inventories that have been done by others, and they host a server that has all of the GIS for it. So this calls out this whole area in blue was inventoried Part of it is like the Chevalier and the high school. Our post office are on the National Register of Historic Places. We do have a local historic district, and actually this is the map that calls out that building. So all of these up here in the screened back pink are within the local historic district, and they're zoned residential. This one building, which as I've said, I believe is four dwelling units, is actually zone C2. So we're going to want to talk about this building at some point.
There's a preservation restriction on Grace Episcopal Church, and there is another preservation restriction property that's the cemetery, the burial ground. So we want to call out, when you're looking at the inventory, there's a couple of different things going on. So the National Registered Buildings have a clear architectural and historic relevance. Oh, and I should say that Grace Episcopal Church is deed protected. We pulled the deed, and it's got a massive preservation restriction on it, so just so you know that. So National Register buildings, clear architectural and historical relevance. The inventory buildings vary. So some of them are identified as being a good example of an architectural style, a specific architectural style, or they have well-preserved elements. They also identify buildings that are historically significant, but they've undergone major renovations. They identify those that have been altered beyond recognition, and then they identify those that have been demolished. I will say that there are a few buildings that have been inventoried in Medford Square, but don't actually have an inventory sheet. It's just that they've been noted that they're there, but they don't have any details about them. So we pulled all of them so we can just go through them. Basically, we wanted this slide deck. Oh, sorry. I see there's a hand up. Go ahead, John.
[John Anderson]: I would suggest you add another criteria that identifies a historic building. That's if something of real historic significance happened there. For example, the birthplace of an important person. That sort of standard in evaluating properties, I believe.
[Emily Innes]: It is. Yes, and I believe that in here, it's just we didn't, In inventory these, we are taking the macros inventory. So we are taking the information they gave us. I do believe some of them do identify something that important that has happened there. It just depends on the building. But for zoning purposes, I mean, all of this is going to feed into our conversation about how you want to treat historic buildings under the zoning for this. So what we wanted to do is make sure that the slide deck basically grouped the different types of buildings or different characteristics of buildings together so we can have that conversation. So Grace Episcopal Church, National Register property, individual property, preservation restriction, as I mentioned, and we've pulled that the Light Guard Armory, also on the National Register, the Post Office, also on the National Register. And you can see from the inventory that all of this is on MACRS. Anybody can access it. But we just pulled critical information, the year of construction, the architectural style. And then these numbers here, the MDF, are the numbers in the inventory, so you can track them.
Jonathan Wade House, also National Register Individual Property, the high school, Medford High School, Old South Wing. And then I think we're sort of working our way down all of these. So if you want me to stop on any of them. Interestingly enough, the Honor Roll Memorial, because it's a memorial, one thing to note is that MACRS includes structures as well as buildings. So, something like a memorial would be a structure. Just calling that out. So, now we get into the inventory properties. So, these aren't National Register individual properties. These are inventoried. It's eligible only in historic districts. So, that's recommended for a National Historic And it's listed because it's contributing to a potential historic district. So those are the criteria again for the MACRS inventory, your constructed architectural style. I always find it interesting when you've walked along a place to suddenly see where, when it came from and where.
So St. Joseph's is on here. And what I also think is fascinating about, and this one, the Swan Benesau, it was on the inventory, but it's since been demolished. So it no longer exists. We've got actually a couple of those. I'll stop for a question. Go ahead, Dina.
[Unidentified]: Hi, okay, here I am.
[Dina Caloggero]: So on the map in Medford Square, at the top of Salem Street, corner of Forest and Salem, that is, I think, the Bigelow building.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, the photo's not right.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, it's the photo of the high school, it's actually not the right, it's just an error, just because the Bigelow building obviously is not that building.
[Dina Caloggero]: I'm just trying to keep up. And that is protected, that is protected, that building. But that was not, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. That is protected. Is that correct, Emily? The Bigelow.
[Chair Doug Carr]: The Bigelow is where? It's right on the, Forest and Salem is that triangular lot right there.
[Emily Innes]: That purple one there?
[Chair Doug Carr]: Yes, that's it.
[Emily Innes]: We didn't have it as a protected. That purple means it's on the National Register of Historic Places. So that brings up an excellent point. Just because it's a National Register building, even a National Register district, does not mean it's protected. Gray's Episcopal, which has the preservation restricted, That is protected, so in order to be protected, somebody has to hold a preservation restriction on it. Just listing it on a national register does not mean it's protected. Go ahead, Dita.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay, one more point. I just want to point out again If you look at the two sections of Method Square, more of the historical nature is at the high street end of it, whereas the area around Salem Riverside and the three parcels of City Hall, that is all inventory property with the exception of the burial ground. I think I'm correct on that.
[Emily Innes]: We're actually going to go through so because there's a difference between you've got an excellent point. There's a difference between property that was simply inventory. and the property that was inventoried and found to have some sort of value. And we'll keep going through all of this. So we kind of color-coded it so people can see. So we had the purples here. Now we're in the blues. So that was the demolished here. This was not. So Daniel A. Doyle building, this was not recommended for a National Historic This was Medford Cooperative Bank. But note here we start talking about additions and restorations. So you're going to see in a minute or two that we have some where they were altered beyond recognition. First Trinitarian, Old Post Office, Savings Bank.
So this one, for example, the Medford Oddfellows Blot, It was constructed in 1886. It actually was two stories higher, and its architectural style is listed as being altered beyond recognition.
[Chair Doug Carr]: which is a really interesting way of talking about a style. Go ahead, Alicia, you had a question or a question here.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, thank you. I just, as we're looking through these, I don't understand what one of these bullets mean. And so I thought I might ask in case it helps understand things. Under criteria statement form, it says eligible only in a historic district. Eligible for what? Did you say that? I think I missed that.
[Emily Innes]: I think it means eligible to be in the national historic places only as part of historic district. So if we go back up here, these are these are eligible as individual properties. So my understanding is that these aren't eligible as individual properties, but as part of the historic district. where they are contributing to a historic district, they're eligible. That's my understanding. If I'm wrong, happy to be corrected.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I think that's right, Emily. I think this comes up before the Historical Commission a lot. Not every property rises to that level, but they have value, so they are contributing if they're part of a larger context, which I think a lot of these buildings are. Go ahead, John Anderson.
[John Anderson]: That was the point I was about to make, but I also want to mention while you're still on the Daniel Doyle building, It's sort of an interesting one. Oh, sorry. Back to this one. So when you're walking down the street, it looks kind of historic. Step back like this, because basically there's nothing left of it except the front first story. But it's an interesting question of how do you think about a building like this? And is this a kind of preservation that you'd like to see elsewhere as opposed to just the building raised?
[Emily Innes]: It's a fascinating question, isn't it? Because you can see these 1988 major alterations, the three-story building there. So I'm thinking, too, of Summer Street on Boston. There's a building there that I think is maybe somewhere between four and six original facades. And those facades that are probably five to six stories tall, maybe a little bit taller, are hiding a ginormous skyscraper beside it, behind it. So if you were at street level, you would just see the original facades that have been cleaned up. I lived overseas for a while and I can remember a facade that had an empty lot behind it. And it's because they wanted to develop that lot, but they were required to integrate the facade into the lot. So the rest of the building was gone, but the historic facade remained and was being propped up. And I think it's finally got a building on it 10, 15 years later. So that's a very interesting question for historic preservation. Do you want to keep the facade, but you're willing to let something else go behind it? That may also have something to do with the condition of the building, right? Is it worth, if the building would otherwise be destroyed, is it worth trying to produce keep the facade and integrate it into something new. I think that's part of the discussion we should have.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I think it is. I think there's also, sorry John, did you have a comment?
[John Anderson]: No, I was just going to say that it's an interesting theoretical architectural discussion, but it's a city planning discussion too.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I remember this building caught fire, and it was only a one-story building. And they kept the facade, and they built the three stories behind it. They recreated details at the top to make it feel like it was combined. It's actually, I think, a lot of Riverside Avenue, which are a lot of one-story buildings. Most of them don't have a lot of detail that's worth preserving. But this kind of approach could be something that happens in the square in a few instances, I think.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, you can see what they've done at the top of the building here along the cornice line at the top and how it kind of, you know, is a streamlined reflection of what's going on on the ground level. So whether or not it's successful, we could discuss that. But, you know, they tried to do that. So this one, First Trinitarian, also altered beyond recognition. Similar things here, so I won't go through this is interesting here. We've got these that are eligible only in historic district. We talked about altered beyond recognition the city building here. They, they know that that's individually eligible. It hasn't been placed. on the National Historic Place, Register of National Historic Places, but it's listed as individually eligible. Note that it's had some different years in which they've been working on it. A couple more here just to look at. Here's another altered beyond recognition on the Timothy Teal Cotting Block.
It's a congregational church. These are all only eligible in the historic district. This is another. Medford City Hall is individually eligible, but is not yet a national historic. And then we've got the two demolished here. So now these are interesting because these were on the inventory, but they don't have inventory sheets. They're just listed by date. with the no style. So it's basically, as I read it, it was like, okay, we saw these buildings, here's the date they were constructed, but we did not have, we didn't take an inventory sheet for whatever reason that they were doing those. So I think that starts to lead us to how do we start, you know, given that historic preservation, preservation of buildings or the development patterns is something that is of interest and importance. How do we think about that? So we were trying to come up with this criteria of, you know, what is it that you want to apply? So you could do incentive zoning to say, if you preserve this building, we will. give you something else. I always prefer carrots when I can, rather than sticks, because they tend to work better. In some places, I worked in a city in Connecticut, and what they did, they said, if you do a development, and part of that development is restoring and preserving a historic building, because they had an amazing historic buildings contributed to the downtown, We will relax the parking requirements for the historic building, so you won't have to provide parking for the historic building. That's the benefit that you get in exchange for giving us the benefit of restoring the historic building. So there could be some sort of incentive structure. We could have development standards or design guidelines that address that. For the National Registered Building, same thing. There might be, you know, this is so important that you just need to do this, and these are the rules. These are the development standards you need to follow. You need to make sure that you're going through some form of site plan review. But for those buildings, those inventory buildings that have no architectural significance, you know, is there, it sounds harsh, I don't mean it to sound harsh, but do they rise to the same standard as the other historic buildings? Do you, just like with these, should these buildings be held to the same standards as those that are on the National Register or those that are eligible for a local historic district? So I'm not asking anybody to answer that tonight, I think we're putting forward this information to consider and think about as we come up with different strategies for how to protect, preserve, but also allow for adaptive reuse. I don't think anybody wants an empty historic building, right? We always want these to be contributing to the vitality of the square. So how do we allow that sensitive adaptive reuse? And then what do we do for buildings that don't rise to the same standards, at least according to the people who did the inventory forms, which is what we're currently using as our criteria, how do we deal with that?
[Chair Doug Carr]: Go ahead, Dina.
[Dina Caloggero]: Emily, thank you for that. I have walked by the Malden Electric Company transformer station since I was a child.
[Unidentified]: Mm-hmm.
[Dina Caloggero]: Who owns? We always found it a mystery, and I'd love to share it with the rest of my family. Who owns that building? Is it such a thing as the Maltese Electric Company?
[Emily Innes]: We could look into it for you. So I don't know off the top of my head.
[Dina Caloggero]: It's been there since I was five years old.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yeah. Which one? Do you mean the National Grid substation that's in Medford Square? Yes. Yeah, it's National Grid. I mean, I assume that's what you're talking about. Yeah, the Malden Electric Company. It's right at the front of the building.
[Chair Doug Carr]: It's a great Malden Electric from the 1920s or whenever it was built. It's been five things since then, I'm sure.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yes. Sorry. I just wanted to make sure because honestly, I see it as a substation because I dealt in energy efficiency before I did any of the rest of this. And so I never even read the words on the front of the building. Yep. It says Malden Electric Company. Yeah. Right there.
[Dina Caloggero]: OK. So National Grid owns it. Oh, yeah.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: The red building. I'm zooming in on it. It says National Grid on it, unless we're talking about something else.
[Chair Doug Carr]: No, it's the big brick building on Salem Street. You can't see it because it's buried behind trees.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I was looking at Street View and it says Medford, a little yellow sign, and right above it is the National Grid sign with a phone number.
[Chair Doug Carr]: We'll send you a photo. It's fine. It's going to be rezoned anyway. Hopefully it won't be there.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: But it's a National Grid substation. See, this is electrical infrastructure. It's not going anywhere.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I vehemently disagree with that. There's another home. It shouldn't be Streetscape in Bedford Square.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: There is a national grid to do that, but they do not they are going to have no interest.
[Chair Doug Carr]: That's that's like talking to the Pentagon. I get it. I understand.
[Emily Innes]: It's also, you know, once you start getting into the electrical infrastructure, it's what is it? connecting and if it moves somewhere else, what does that do to the connections? So it's also like, I can remember when I first started doing design guidelines and everybody would come to me and say, we need to get rid of the overhead electrical wires. I'm like, solid idea. They look ugly. And then I had an engineer pull me aside and say, that's going to cost a lot of money. Make sure they understand
[Chair Doug Carr]: So Paige, why don't you go ahead and make your comment or question.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you so much, Emily, and I think Doug and John can speak more to this, but I think this is a great opportunity to talk about, or maybe we could do it at the end, but LHD is in the local historic district because I did learn through this process about how some of these buildings that are clustered together, if we can determine that they are impactful to the community, whether it's historic conversion or preservation, is that something that we should be looking at, specifically when we go on the other side of Forest Street? I don't know if that's something we can chat about, because we have it as bulleted. Thanks. Yeah.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I go ahead, Alicia. Sorry about that.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Do we want to just refresh everybody? How does a local historic district get made? Because it's not literally the authority of this board. And so letting people know how that does happen might be helpful.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Yes, please.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: So I'm happy to share. There's a book put out by the state that explains it. To very simplify it, Medford has a Historic District Commission. The Historic District Commission has to undertake a study to look at the area and determine if they feel that there should be a local historic district there. And that study then also, after they have the study, they then have to do public outreach, they have to engage the property owners, they have to hold public meetings, and then they pull all of that together in a recommendation to the city council. and then the city council votes on whether it should be a local historic district or not. So that board would need to be engaged in a process in order to create one. Yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: And just for at their last meeting, Paige, I went before them just to tell them this is coming and say, you need to be a stakeholder. You need to be in the game, so to speak, because Alicia's right, it's got to come from them. I think there's several different options we can go down paths, you know, individual buildings versus an actual district that tries to capture as many of these as we think that's important, while still allowing the development that we want to occur around them, you know, some cases on them. There's a lot of different questions there. I don't have answers today. But I think you're on the right path that That is one path we wanna go down, but there's also, as Emily referred to in her presentation, there's a zoning path too. We wanna, I think we want, it's not either or. In my mind, it's both. Go ahead, John Anderson, and then we'll get to Danielle after that.
[John Anderson]: I have two questions. One is, Doug, do you or Alicia, can you comment on why we have established so few historic districts Is it just everybody's too busy or there was opposition to it? Because I know it's been talked about for decades. And my second question was just, I wonder if someone could clarify what the steps are to set out an individual house or building as a single historic district.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Go ahead. They're both great questions. I don't know if I have the answer. I want Danielle to chime in here, because I think you know more about it than I do.
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Thanks. Yeah, so the planning board does have a bit of a role for establishing the historic district. When the South Street one was going through that process, it had to come before the board. I think it was just a recommendation, but there was some action that had to be taken. I'm looking through the handbook now. There's an Establishing Local Historic Districts that's published on the Secretary of the Commonwealth page, the Massachusetts Historical Commission. It's 64 pages. I could provide the, I could link it in the chat, I think.
[John Anderson]: Okay.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I didn't mean to hold things up. No, no, no. This is a great question, John. This is important because it's going to take years, right? We're not going to hold up this process to get this historic commission district in whatever format it goes on. That's obviously not going to preclude us from making serious decisions on this that I think are really important. But Danielle, could you also speak to I guess why they've been so few? It's a fair question. I don't think it was a strong board for years, but I've not been part of it.
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, I think it might not have been a strong board. I haven't had too much work with them, but it's a lot of work. The city doesn't even have a historic preservation planner on staff. They literally don't have one. I really wish we did. I think that's on our wish list if we ever were able to add anybody. Medford has run on the backs of volunteers for a very long time, and you really can't get that much done when it's unpaid volunteers.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay, I want to recognize council because I think he has something to say about this. Go ahead. Mr. Councilor.
[Councilor Matt Leming]: Sorry, I didn't intend to jump into this meeting just wanted to watch, but I did ask I did ask Teresa Dupont about this specifically. She's the planner who works the most with the historic district commission. Um, I was interested to know a bit about the history about this, but apparently, at some point, the historic district commission did put forth a proposal for another historic district. And then it was denied by the city council a few years back. I want to get clarification on exactly. What happened there and I investigate I was like trying to, you know, figure out sort of the history behind that. But I think part of it, part of the reason for so few of them might have been.
Discouragement about the process, because previous city councils that so that could have been 1 factor. Another factor was just. Like, yeah, it was it was the same people on the historic district commission for for a very long time. And I think it, you know, I just needed a little bit of energy after a while. I believe. John also asked about the difference between making sort of historic districts and individual historic, like, making historic districts for, like, individual buildings. I don't think the processes are any different. It's just that Medford was never really in the habit of making historic districts for individual buildings. But I think that's just kind of a municipal habit, a municipal quirk of Medford. We certainly could do that. But again, like Doug was saying, it would have to come from the Historic District Commission.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I agree Councilor and I think what's important here and I'm going to reach out to page in a minute on this, but I think if there's a consensus that this board thinks it's important, and that the city council says, we really want this to happen if we want to be respectful of property owners, but allow them. preserve those buildings, but also develop. We need the property owners and the business community to be part of this conversation and not fighting us. We want to kind of all get together because we think there's a win-win here on the historic. And I think, Paige, I think you're one of the key liaisons for that group as well.
[Page Buldini]: I think it's a great opportunity for sure, however I can be helpful. And I think also the idea, I know that we saw public comment from a resident who had spoken about the opportunity with historic conversion and smaller units and affordable units. And I think that can also help out with supporting housing as well as economic opportunity. So for sure.
[Chair Doug Carr]: And I think back to Emily, your carrots and sticks, trying to do more carrots than sticks approach, I think that's really wise. I love the idea. I think it segues to the whole parking conversation. If you can weigh a parking for a historic building where it's maybe almost physically impossible to do, to again to encourage that restoration, that renovation, or maybe an addition in the back or whatever it is. I'm thinking St. Joe's is just one example where there's a tremendous opportunity there for potential future reimagining of that property.
I think that was one of the major comments of this group was like, okay, we need that defined parking somehow, but we want to have the ability to not one size fit all. Because we want to have, can we wave it here? Can we have it be remote? Can we have it be in a garage 500 feet away? What are the different tools to give us the flexibility that we need so that we encourage all this development, but we do it in a way that enhances the pedestrian character of the square, the historic character of the square, and encourages new development. I don't know, Emily, how many Hundreds of thousands of square feet of new development are potentially on this plan. It's a lot. And it's good. I think that's tremendous important. I view that as a very positive thing overall. I just want it to be in the right place and to make sure we do no damage ultimately.
[Emily Innes]: With your permission, I'm sure you all want to continue the discussions and what I've heard so far is really very interesting. I just want to let you know what the next steps are, because that might feed into what and how you're discussing it. So obviously. In addition to the presentation, my colleague Grant Perry and I are listening to everything that you say and trying to get a sense of what might feed into the next steps. We have the meeting tomorrow at the Senior Center, looking forward to comments and questions there. And then we're going to, our role is to report back on what we heard from both this, although you will also be doing your own reporting back, but also what we heard at the public meeting at the next joint session, and then we want to be listening to that. Our hope is at the end of the meeting that we have direction from you all and the City Council together on what our next steps are. We have a public meeting scheduled on the 11th, so we'll be presenting there and also collecting feedback And then the idea is whatever direction we've had from you all, both city board and city council that on the 25th, we'll be reporting back and say, okay. You gave us this direction. This is what we have in response. So either whether it's the additional information or it is the additional suggestions for changes to the zoning in response to the direction we received. And then obviously reporting back on what we heard on the 11th as well. So those are our next steps. And with that, that is actually the end of everything I had for you today. So I'll stop that share and happily listen to any remaining discussion that you have.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, I'd like to go around the board starting with Paige and then Dina and have each individual board member ask you questions or any concerns that haven't been addressed so far. And then we can, we'll just go through everyone and then we'll have, we'll talk about the kind of common concerns that they haven't been addressed. So why don't you start off Paige?
[Page Buldini]: Thank you so much, Emily. This has been so helpful and I'm really excited for next week too with City Council. So one thing, and I think Dina actually kind of touched on it too, is what we're really seeing is how distinct the square looks in different ways. And I don't know if there's the hope, but I know that, and we'll talk about this more as a board, when we're coming to the plan, specifically the parcels near City Hall, we know obviously there's an RFP there. And I know that you had touched upon parking too, so I appreciate that.
How can we address that? How can we look at that as a proactive board? Because talking about historic overlays in districts, we're talking about incentivized zoning, which is so important. But we want to also make sure that we look at the square as effective and as efficient for all of the goals that we have based on the comprehensive plan.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, it's a great question. It's one of the reasons for using sub-districts, and I think the issue may be, are these the right sub-districts in the right areas? One of the other reasons, we had started off with Mystic Avenue and the sub-districts there. You're seeing the breaking up, maybe there's a 1B, a 2A, a 2B, a 3A, this idea that The sub-districts are also being, so while you have this general idea that there is a graduation of intensity of uses, change of uses, change of dimensional standards by sub-district, that you're not going to get a mix three that works citywide, right? We have these geographical or functional changes to this. So I would say, as you all are thinking about your responses to this, you know, do we need to shift that, the lines of where the 1Bs and the 2As, et cetera, are applying? Do we need particular development standards that may be Medford Square only? Certainly that can be worked into this. While we were trying to come up with some universal standards that would apply throughout the city, especially incentives and the idea of public benefits for incentives, we do recognize that some things may be more appropriate for certain geographic districts than others. And I think that's really, as we're looking to this area, is making sure we've got the right combination of requirements and benefits that are specific to Medford Square. So, I think that's where the historic conversation comes into.
Certainly, that could be very specific to this area. You've also got this really interesting relationship to green space and the water that I think is worth considering. That section that I showed where we have the commercial on one side and the residential on the other was an attempt to think about what's happening between, you know, how do you activate the green spaces? How do you activate the transition to the water? There are opportunities, not just for the transom development, but for other parts of Clippership Drive, for example. And then this idea, you know, you've got such an interesting network of streets going on here and working into each other. Again, that was another focus of the the idea of the FITS studies is how do you have a continued relationship, especially, I would say, the buildings on Riverside Ave and Clippership Drive, the buildings on Riverside Ave and Salem Street, where you have these possibilities, you've almost got two front doors in these areas, and thinking about how those, so are there ways that we can continue to tweak our understanding of the development standards to respond to some of the issues that you've brought up tonight and other issues that I'm certain will be brought up in the next few meetings.
[Page Buldini]: Well, I'm very excited. And I think that the speaking of the vision of what we want to see the square to look like, not just tomorrow, I think that's really exciting. And I think with the transom RFP, just knowing that, you know, and it's a proposal, and I'm aware of that, but a grocery store, parking near the senior center, a ton of housing, which I think is awesome, in a space that's not technically abutting a lot of the smaller existing businesses and buildings, I think is awesome. But yes, utilizing it for a way that works for the square. But again, that's all on that side. So I'm just really interested to see what that truly could mean and not in a way that I know it's urgent that we keep this rolling, but I think these conversations are really helpful. So thank you.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay, I'll set a page. I'm going to move on. If so, I'm going to move on to Dina. Dina, do you have any questions, comments?
[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah, I just want to make sure that we're going to include as part of the next revision to consider early on what the daylight minimum is and how the daylight minimum also applies to any type of residential area that abuts the zoned area in Method Square. I thought that is particularly important. Then I just want to echo again, it's almost like the two faces of Method Square. You have the very commercial area around the senior center and up around to the Riverside Avenue area, and then to the left up at High Street. Again, it's a different type of maybe use. I think it would apply to that. There are certain things that would apply to the High Street sub-district that would only apply to that area. and not to the area which is far more commercialized around City Hall and the three parcels of land. Perhaps considering those as two different phases, we move along. I know it's only an RFP, but the RFP on Transcom as well. Thank you.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you, Dina. Ari, do you have any comments or questions?
[Ari Fishman]: Sure. I wanna thank Emily and co for the presentation. I think this is a really great summary. I kind of, it's interesting to be the only one who was here for a lot of this process on the committee. It felt like a very accurate summary of kind of what we were talking about. I am interested, One of the things I find interesting, and this is just an observation, is what we're focusing on as our priorities. I think last time it was very focused on the potentials and the things we want to see changed. We want more housing. We want more activation.
we were focusing today kind of more on historical, what we don't want to change, parking, what do we not want to lose? And I think there is a place for both. Like I want to be clear, I think there is a place for both, but I think those are two very different energies and I look forward to us balancing them in the future. I think it would be helpful to put in the legwork now to figure out something where we can do historic preservation, but not get caught every time we touch a building that's more than five years old. I think that way just prevents a lot of things that everyone agrees should be done. Obviously, I'm speaking in generalities, nothing is ever absolute, just assume asterisks on that.
But yeah, I want us to find a way to make genuine historical preservation for genuinely historical stuff and let the rest you know, be part of history, which involves change. I live in a historic house right outside Medford Square. And the fact that it has adapted with time has been a big strength. Yeah, I think our next steps are good. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know that I have any particular things right now to add to it. But it has been a very interesting discussion. And I look forward to continuing it.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you, I appreciate it. John Anderson, you can go next.
[John Anderson]: Sure. I just want to lay down a marker that one thing we never just. I'm sorry. Oh, my beauty.
[Chair Doug Carr]: You know, your style went out just for a second. Could you start over again? Sorry.
[John Anderson]: Sure. I just want to put down a marker that one of the things we've never talked about, at least not recently, regarding historic preservation is the whole historic conversions thing. I think there are lots of questions and discussion that needs to be done about that. But I don't think this is quite the time and place for that. I really agree with people who've expressed the opinion that Medford Square is a really mixed bag. and we're trying to develop these districts that break it up into these districts that kind of reflect the, well, what's there right now and what we wanna see there. And some things, I haven't been able to figure out, for example, if you look at the transom, And there's more than an RFP now. They have a very specific proposal.
Two of their lots are in, I guess, mixed use 2A or 2B. And one of their lots is in mixed use 3. And I sort of see that as a project in and of itself. One of the things I think we're struggling with is We're trying, as we go along, we're trying to develop a vision of what we want the different parts of the square to look like. And I don't think we have a really articulated vision like for that at the time. I know we had the comprehensive plan, but what we're really missing is a master plan, which the legislature says we're supposed to have, and update it, and if we had such a plan, that would include a vision for what these areas were going to look like. Now, I don't want to stop this process for two years while we develop a master plan, but I think we could take the properties that are being developed by Transom as sort of a prototype where we first focus on the vision of what we want it to look like. start with the proposal that they made and say, does this meet our needs? And then make sure the zoning matches what we want there. And then we can go forward with that project because, you know, the plan to sell off these lots goes back to the days when Luchini Burke was mayor. Uh, it's been a long time and we need to get going on it. And I think if we can focus, we end the city council, really focus on this area, get this going, get that done. Then we can move on to these more complicated issues, which is the rest of Medford square.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Can I just clarify something?
[Chair Doug Carr]: Go ahead.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: So just to be very clear, when the state requires a master plan, what they are requiring is actually, in fact, our comprehensive plan. We just decided that the language master plan is not, we don't use the term master anymore. So that is legally, our comprehensive plan is meeting the requirements of the state law.
[John Anderson]: I would have to respectfully disagree with Well, actually, we did hired a consultant to do that.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: You're talking about a more detailed local plan.
[John Anderson]: Well, that's what the law specifies.
[Emily Innes]: So the, I'm just, can I just ask, I'm assuming that you're referring to chapter 81 D of section 81 D of chapter 41. Yeah, the comprehensive plan, I was, I was part of the consultant team for that. The comprehensive plan was done according to 81 D, the terminology. Much of the rest of the country uses the word comprehensive plan instead of master plan. It was a shift. I think some of the, maybe all of the New England states, their legislation still refer to master plans, but the, terminology is called comprehensive plan now, but we did look at 81D and follow the requirements of 81D to create that comprehensive plan. So it talks about effectively the nine different elements, the vision plan, the implementation plan, and the other seven planning elements that are within 81D. Those were all addressed in Medford's comprehensive plan. Massachusetts is unusual, too, and I think most of the New England states follow the same practice, is we are what one of my colleagues was calling a planned state. In other words, in other parts of the country, your zoning must match your comprehensive plan. The New England states are a little bit more flexible. They prefer that your zoning match the plan, but it's not a legal issue if it does not. There are certainly many other legal issues, that we can run into, but that is not one of them. But so we're not what's called a planned state. But just again, to clarify it, as Alicia had done.
[John Anderson]: Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to knock the comprehensive plan. Understood. I think it's a great start. But I mean, and I'm not a lawyer. but I look, for example, 0.4 and 0.5, one talks about an economic development element, another natural and cultural resources element and inventory, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, policies and strategies for the protection of such areas. I mean, I don't see the kind of detail that I read into this, but.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, and not disagreeing with you at all, the way that comprehensive plans have done have also shifted since that legislation. while when that was originally, the legislation was originally written, you tended to have these chapter-based comprehensive plans. Most of them now are moving more towards a thematic structure, which is what Medford has. So you are talking about all of those elements, but you're doing it in a much more holistic way than, this is your transportation chapter and this is your economic development chapter. So when we got to the implementation plan, we do go back a little bit more towards the chapter-based structure, the theme-based. So you have the overlying themes, but then you have those individual elements are discussed. So I'd be happy to get into a conversation with you about comprehensive plans at a later date, but I see there's another couple of hands up.
[John Anderson]: And yes, and I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to put down the comprehensive plan. I would really just stress though, that if we had more detail and more vision, more specific vision, we would be in a lot fewer quandaries now about what to do with Medford Square. And we need to maybe backstep at least with the transom in order to make sure that that can move forward quickly. It's sort of a contradiction to backstep to move forward.
[Chair Doug Carr]: All right. John, I'm going to move on to Dina. Are you good for now?
[Dina Caloggero]: I just want to say, when I was looking, I reviewed the packet of materials ahead of time, and I didn't see the changes on the table of use for the parking changes in the presentation that we were given. Were those updated? And if they were, could you send that particular slide? Because I was going to update my working copy of the mixed use that I'm referring, that I'm looking at when I review packages.
[Emily Innes]: I did send the presentation. So Alicia and Danielle and I had a logistical meeting earlier today after they did the presentation's response. And I sent it to them. So you should be receiving that.
[Dina Caloggero]: OK, so I'll get the parking update in there because I wanted to match it because I have comments on the parking. Thank you very much.
[Sean Beagan]: John Bacon. Thank you. Emily. So what I was wondering about is, as you were putting together what's the proposed Medford Square zoning, in terms of the, let's say that just as it is, it's approved today. What kind of was the vision or the expectation about how that would be put into effect practically? And I guess more specifically, was the vision that individual unit owners would be improving their parcels by building up on their parcels or was the vision or expectation that by creating these new dimensional standards that would entice developers to come in and maybe buy and put together several existing parcels, tear down and build something brand new. Was there any discussion about that as these zoning ordinances were being created as to how you actually saw them coming to fruition or how they'd be used, because I'm still struggling with, you know, and I'm struggling with if they were passed as is, what is an individual building owner in Medford Square actually going to do if this zoning is passed as it is. There's still restrictions in this zoning that are going to make it very difficult to, without, I mean, without jumping through hoops and getting variances and things of that nature, to actually activate these zoning ordinances. So I'm wondering, was there talk about what we expect to happen? In other words, we're going to make the lot sizes smaller. We're going to make, you know, we're going to change this and that, and that's going to entice transom to come in and buy the entire pie-shaped block between Salem and Riverside Ave. And they're going to buy that and knock it down and build something brand new. Or was it more the thought of, this is going to give the current building owners the ability to build two, three floors on top of what they have existing, or tear down and build new on their own lot? And I guess there's one more question that goes along with that. In regards to Medford Square, was there any discussion about whether Medford Square qualifies for high frequency transit parking relief under the definition that we're currently using in Medford?
[Emily Innes]: So I'll jump back to the initial questions. When we look at doing zoning changes, we're looking at a couple of different things. One is, how well is zoning working now? And that's, I mentioned the nonconformity analyses. I'm actually going to just, I'm not going to go through them one by one, but I am going to show you the types of things that we look at. So what we typically find in New England is that hopefully that map just changed. So you're now seeing the frontage. A lot of New England communities were built out before zoning came into play. So many communities, zoning isn't starting to come in till the 19-teens, 1920s. I had one community whose first zoning was in, I think, 1967. There's a lot of building that was done in Massachusetts before 1967. So what we find is that the zoning regulations don't necessarily match what's on the ground. So the first thing that we tend to do, these are what we call our non-conforming maps, and they identify, in this case, this is just looking at the dimensions, We have the non-conforming maps in another section, but this just says, what exists now? And then we start to look at the zoning and say, does the zoning actually match what happens now in that if there is, for example, we've got these parcels where frontage is less than 15 feet, front setback is less than 15 feet, front setback is less than 30 feet, front setback is less than 45 feet. If I'm looking at this and I say, wow, the front setback requirement for Medford Square is make it up 35 feet. I've got a lot of non-conforming parcels here. So maybe I should make my front setback less than the majority. So those parcels are no longer non-conforming. Those buildings are no longer non-conforming. and what we can do is start to make it easier for people to invest in their existing properties. So, because zoning isn't just about buildings, zoning's about the uses as well. Zoning is about saying what can happen in these existing parcels. So first off, are we already requiring people to go for variances because the existing zoning doesn't match what they have? So let's see if we want to correct that first. Then the second thing is what are the uses of those buildings and do we have the right uses in the right place? This is a downtown. This is the center of the city. This is a primary commercial district, historic commercial district. As we look at the uses, are these 19th century uses, 20th century uses, 21st century uses? How do we give permissions to those? Again, so people can invest in what they have now. They can fill vacant spaces. They can add uses. I have one client who still has tinsmithing on the books, and I'm pretty sure they don't have any tinsmiths in their community right now. So it's modernizing the use tables. Then after that, it becomes exactly your questions. Are we giving people permission to reinvest in their buildings by adding stories? Is that possible to do? We know we've got some very shallow lots where if we were to allow them to add stories and require them to do parking, they're not going to be able to do that because they can't fit both on those sites. So that comes back to our parking discussion.
Are we allowing people to, a lot of communities only allow one building per site? And when you look at the larger sites here, we might be able to have more than one building per site. That would allow for a different type of infill development. Is that something that should be here? Do we think that there would be parcel assembly in this area? And should we create conditions that would allow for parcel assembly? Um, these are basically the questions that come into our minds as we ask that. So I would say, you know, the conversations are kind of all of the above. How do we, I tend to prefer to work with communities to give the maximum flexibility that they're comfortable with, because we know that there will be, you know, the zoning will go in place. It probably won't be tweaked for a while. There will be multiple market cycles that happen during that period. And so how do we allow people in one market cycle to invest in what they have and maybe in another market cycle where the conditions improve? They have some parcel assembly, but that parcel assembly and the resulting construction matches what they wanted to go on when they were also allowing for the investment of the site. So it's that flexibility, that balance of flexibility and control that we're looking to work with the community to create.
[Sean Beagan]: So just to follow up on that. So do you think that the proposal that we have in front of us from Medford Square, does that represent maximum flexibility in your view? Are we at maximum flexibility?
[Emily Innes]: I think we're getting there. I think some of the questions around parking and historic preservation that you all have raised will sort of help temper that the idea of getting it closer to what Medford wants for Medford Square. But I think we're reasonably close given the concerns that we heard about heights, shadows, relationships to the other districts. We're pretty close. We did the, you know, we tried to get those higher heights closer to 93 where it made more sense and they would have less impact. I think the mixes of where we have the mixed use 1-2A-2B is working pretty well. I know there were some questions from some of the property owners along High Street with those shallower parcels that they would have preferred to have a little bit more height there. It's those shallow parcels and even if we gave them more height, some of the current other restrictions would work against them there. So I think that's part of that conversation. You know, if you allow parking within 500 feet, that might open those up a little bit more. So that's something for us to continue to discuss. But I think we're getting closer. to that flexibility. I'm interested in your thoughts. And of course, the other thoughts of the members of the city council and the city board in whether they think, whether you think, whether they think we've got that right balance and control.
[Sean Beagan]: Yeah. I guess my thought is I think this parking issue seems to be a big issue that's out there. And I feel like the city board wants to address it. And I don't know if the city council wants to address it. They want to address it. I don't know if they want to address it now. And I guess my, my hesitation and not addressing it now is what are we really doing if we don't include parking in these, we pass the zoning ordinance with the, with the current parking requirements.
I guess you're going to have everyone looking, I guess, it's just going to come back to the CD board with everyone looking for a special permit for some exemption for parking, right?
[Emily Innes]: You know, there are different ways of addressing parking and that's a conversation we can have. There are the parking requirements by use and we had had that on our list. address kind of at the end of the process, but there's also the parking requirements of the development standards and in the table of uses. So that idea of does the community want to allow for private garages in Medford Square, that would be a table of uses issue rather than a parking by use issue. I think the idea of do you want to have a calculation for allowing for shared uses? So, this is for people who are not familiar with this terminology. This is the idea that if you have a mixed-use building and some of those uses are daytime uses and some of them are evening uses, then you can share the parking among the uses. There's usually some form of calculation on that. There's that idea mentioned earlier about maybe you have allow parking within a certain number of feet of the building to count towards that. We're talking about earlier today about the idea that you don't want to double up on it so that you have multiple developers counting on the same spaces serving their building. But these are strategies that can happen in the development standards specific to Medford Square, and that might be worth discussing. Um, at this stage, and then the table of the parking that is assigned to each use in the table of uses that applies throughout the city could be a later discussion. So, um, so it is, uh, I had a former boss who talked about the fact that everybody wants to create these great walkable spaces. And places, but then people drive there to be able to walk there. And so you can't ignore parking.
[Sean Beagan]: I think it's I was having that same thought the other day. Actually, today, when I drove in to Medford Square at 11 am, couldn't park anywhere, but just thinking, like, we're going to have all this new housing. but someone might want to come visit someone who lives in this new housing in a place to park in Medford Square, right? So I do think it's a complicated question because I don't want to put a big parking requirement that prevents residential building in Medford Square. I do not want to do that.
But I do see that bringing more people to Medford Square, whether they individually have a car or not, is going to bring more cars to Medford Square. And we're kind of maxed out. At least on one end of the square, we're maxed out. On the other end, not so much. But we will be after Transom builds.
[Emily Innes]: And you also have business owners that, you know, the idea of bringing housing to a downtown is the people who live in that housing are going to support the local businesses. Absolutely. But you've got business owners, including, you know, Chevalier Theatre, that is a regional draw, those restaurants are relying on that regional draw. So your conversation is a little bit more, it's a little bit trickier than just we're adding residential to a downtown. So these are all, again, Zoning tends to be all about balance. And that's the conversation we're trying to balance.
[Sean Beagan]: And just my final question, was there any discussion about whether Medford Square qualified for a high frequency transit designation that would lower the current parking minimum requirements?
[Emily Innes]: We mapped that out. And I don't remember the answer. I do remember us doing the mapping. I'll have to dig up the map, but we definitely mapped that out.
[Sean Beagan]: It's part of Transom's, I saw it was part of Transom's proposal that they have, they want to use that designation. I don't know, didn't know if it had already been considered.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right. We looked at that and the fact that there are so many bus lines going in so many directions was sort of plus the MBTA. So there is a little bit of a chicken and an egg. The MBTA is actually planning to add high frequency bus lines that will stop in Medford Square. One of the things that they want to be able to do that is to actually have some bathroom facilities for the bus drivers. And Transom has committed to including that in their building so that they can have a high frequency line. And I mean a line that runs more than once. It's like once every eight minutes or 10, maybe it's 12 minutes, whatever their new definition is, to Kendall Square. And then one that runs just as often out to Malden Center to the T line.
[Chair Doug Carr]: That's great. So, Sean, that does really answer your question. It is high frequency. And I think, Danielle, were you going to add on to that as well?
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: I was going to say that there's issues with the definition. It does need to be rewritten because it's clear as mud. It talks about, you know, same direction, doesn't talk about whether those same directions, like how far it has to go. Do they have to share terminus? Do they have to share a segment? Can it be parallel? But I feel like Outside of the actual rapid transit stations, our light rail and heavy rail, well, not our heavy rail because the commuter rail wouldn't be rapid, or high frequency rather, the Medford Square is probably one of the few places with just buses that would qualify. But I say that with the caveat that the building commissioner is the one who Makes a determination whether parcel qualifies for that. So, um.
At some point, we need to clear up that definition to. But I agree, this is really clear. What is the direction and just like, how.
[Chair Doug Carr]: But can't we do that as part of this process? Isn't this the opportunity to do that? It's muddy right now. We saw that on Salem Street. And it took us a month to figure it out. And it was painful for everyone. This is the opportunity to fix it, right?
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, because imagine that that developer acquired that parcel for a certain amount of money based on how many units he thought he could get, based on how many parking spaces he thought he needed to provide. And so, I mean, the zoning sends messages of what you can do on your land, which drives up the cost. And so, you know, I get a little worried when things are so buried. It's like, oh, I can do 10 stories here, and I can do all this stuff. But then, you know, the devil's in the details. It's like, well, no, once everything pushes on that, and then the parking, it's like, you actually can't do that. And that's when they become, for the boards, asking for waivers and variances, because now they are sitting on something that's really expensive, and they can't get their return.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, I just threw up. This was the transit map that we had done with the bus lines as part of our discussion about transit in Medford, so. with all of the different forms, including the routes. But Danielle, as you were talking, I was remembering the definition, and we were trying to figure out, is it the total frequency on the road? Is it the frequency of each bus along the road? Because they share the routes. As you said, was it in both directions? But we did look at the options and the locations. So as part of the discussion.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Well, OK, I'm going to pause here and go to Paige and then to Ari after that. Go ahead, Paige.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you so much. So one thing that I was kind of thinking about, too, when it came to parking, obviously, was what it would look like if we did have a building like Somerville or Cambridge with no on-site parking, just out of interest. And Emily, this could be something that we can chat about maybe for our joint meeting. Because I thought, well, I am hearing from some of the public that that is something that they don't rely on cars. That they want, you know, the ability to have a space like that. And so it's interesting to me because I was thinking if we did have the opportunity to maybe have a parking garage back where like Colleen's was, which was something that had been there before. would that be something that we can use for incentivizing zoning, especially for affordable housing? One thing, though, that in my research, just speaking to other city departments, is I think that we would be mindful, because with our site plan reviews, we've been saying no residential parking, no off-site parking when we're doing some of our current site plan reviews, is I think that that would be a whole city, again, more of what Sean and John have said, vision. right? Because then theoretically, it would be the whole city's parking enforcement, right? Like where I live, there currently it's on street parking for everybody, we don't have permit parking. So I think that that's some of those vision questions that I'm so excited that we can talk to the city councillors and have the public comment next week. Because I would love to know the vision because if there are, you know, public if we have members of our community that do not want parking, that don't have guests coming for parking, that don't need to go to a business to use their car for parking, then maybe that's something we could think about for incentivizing. But if there's any research, I've tapped into Housing Medford. There's really wonderful folks over there that have been trying to give me information to just to see what that looks like. Because again, this has to be collaborative. None of us want this to stop. But there is certain markers coming from the business community that's existing that I think Sean is speaking to too. I couldn't find parking in the square either when I went to the chamber office, Sean, so I get it. But what are some of these other incentives that we could potentially provide?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, I think the conversation becomes really interesting and this may be a good reason not to take it citywide just yet because I know when we were talking about it earlier for some of the conversations, it was. this concern that the permitting strategy for on-street parking was not the same throughout the city and that people were concerned that if you didn't require parking in Area A, then that would just simply push the parking demand to Area B. So I think that this idea of whether it's reduced parking or parking minimums Um, even within my own staff, you and my colleagues here, you have differences of opinions. It's kind of fascinating. You also have the market. You know, one of the things that I've certainly talked about in other communities is the idea that for financing purposes. a city might choose, okay, we're not going to require a certain amount of parking, but a bank may say to a developer, look, we want to see X amount of parking in order to fund this. So it becomes a really complex conversation. But I do think that idea of, it's one of the reasons I like menu-based zoning or these carats instead of the six is saying, you need to have something for this area. These are the different ways you can get to providing what is necessary. You know, one thing that some communities have done is encourage the developer to split the parking from the unit. So we're used to, you rent a unit or you buy a unit, you automatically get parking with it. In some communities, they're saying you get the unit and then you have to pay extra for parking. And that can be somebody saying, well, I don't need the parking. Why do I have to pay $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 for a parking space? I think one went in Back Bay like maybe two or three years ago for $100,000 for a parking space. So, you know, that actually gets to other levels of affordability. If I don't have to pay for the parking space, I can get my unit for less, and that's my choice.
So, I guess with what I'm saying and kind of this sort of There are ideas for how we can get to that, and I'm looking forward to those discussions.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Ari, why don't you go next? You had a question, or raise your hand.
[Ari Fishman]: Thank you. I think actually the last two comments started hitting what I wanted to say, which is That we had a, I think, very enthusiastic discussion over the last 2 meetings about the ideas of parking garages and combined parking and really shifting our mindset of when we're thinking about How we're going to zone for parking in the square, not building a city square where people are driving from 1 part of the square to the other that. Absolutely, I think it is true that people will drive to the square or come visit someone, but they should be parking their car and then walking and that there will be many people who are coming in through public transport. And I think that looks really, really different, both on paper and how it lives. And I think we are simultaneously talking about it often the way we are talking about it in other parts of the city where.
Do I love connecting parking directly outside buildings? There are lots of valid critiques, but it does make sense in other parts of the city. It does not make sense in the square. And I want to be very explicit about that. I like the idea of a parking garage. I think that we should be doing the work of figuring out how do we kind of have those spaces in a limited square footage that can be used in the evening for the and restaurants and during the day for businesses and then kind of later at night for residents. I will be very opposed to something like, oh, if you want to build housing, you need.
100 spots on the street, that space doesn't exist and it would in fact destroy exactly what's there that's good and prevent the sort of space that the comprehensive plan wants, that public comment wants. So I just want us really to back up from here and kind of talk about parking in the way we seem to have a consensus that we actually wanted in this very specific space. And I do think that applies in many ways to both parts of Medford square. We do kind of, we can talk about what it looks like and mix 1 versus mix 2, but I think we are. Separating them from the individual buildings.
[Sean Beagan]: But they're not separated yet under the current. proposal that's on the table. That's not how it is. So I guess that's been my pushback with city council to kind of do this quickly and pass it is okay. We can, but it's not what you want. I don't think it's what anyone wants in actuality on that issue anyway.
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Go ahead, Danielle. Yeah. I was just going to say that we, we have to, I know there was a joint statement that went out about not touching the parking, but I think that was around changing the parking minimum citywide. But I think that we're flexible here about how do you provide it and sharing it. I mean, there are provisions for that, but it's very clunky and it's not clear. We definitely want to pass zoning that could actually yield actual you know, housing and redevelopment and not just look good on paper, but actually can't be executed in any way. Um, yeah.
And, um, as far as I just want to address, um, member Buldini's comment about, you know, like a zero parked, um, housing, um, I'll out myself as a former Somerville resident. And when I was on the zoning board there, we actually, I was on the board when we approved our first zero parked building. No parking at all for housing and 1 of the things that we did, that was the 1st time we that the city did not allow parking for those residents. So it's like, okay. If this, if this building is designed for folks who don't have cars, well, then you don't need parking permit to park on the street. Because you don't want, there's the incentive when you're on bundled parking is, yeah, they won't pay for parking, but they're going to find it on the street somewhere. And that's just not sustainable. There's just not enough on-street spots. And then just really the design of making sure, because there'll be a lot of, there'll still be trips to these buildings. They're just not in a personal car and being stored there all night. There's going to be Ubers, there's going to be a lot of delivery, grocery delivery, because that's the reality of when you don't own a car. So you have to be able to design to accommodate the trips and having that curb management for, um, so, you know, Ubers aren't stopping in the middle of the road and people can get out safely. So you just have to be really clever with the design to mitigate having a zero park building. I think that can be done. Um, it's pretty exciting. You just have to, you know, be really, um, you know, intentional about how you do it.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Very good. Dina, I'll go to you, and then I'll go to Councilor Leming after. Go ahead, Dina. Can't hear you.
[Dina Caloggero]: There I am. Yeah, the other day, I wanted to go to Medford Square. I wanted to run a few errands. I couldn't park. There's no parking in Medford Square. So I went somewhere else to do it. I'll maybe drop off my dry cleaning, go to the post office, those different things. And the other thing, the transom deal is a grocery store. If I went to the store, I would probably want to bring my car. If I purchased maybe more than three bundles of groceries, I think I would want to park there to do other things in Medford. Go to the post office, perhaps go to one of the restaurants there, go to the Chevalier. You're going to need it. And I think you're going to hear from the Chamber of Commerce as well, is a need for parking to support the businesses that will hopefully be in Method Square as part of the new zoning that we put into place.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you. Thank you, Dina. Councilor Linden, go ahead.
[Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah, so my so my view of this, and, you know, I, I have we have had extensive conversations about the order in which in which things are in which things are taken is. The reason that parking and residential were put last within that joint statement is because those are two of the most, sort of the most hot button issues. And the idea was to kind of get momentum within the rezoning process, kind of get Um, get the city council the CD board used to the process and then kind of like, go with, like, some of the more big hot button issues towards the end of of the process and the.
When when you start, and it will become a hot button issue, especially with city wide parking policies. If we're talking about reducing the required ratios, like things like conversations about reducing the minimum parking requirements and things like that, that does and that does become something that that a lot of residents feel very differently about and will want. sort of its own conversation in and of itself. I am amenable to conversations about parking policies that are relevant to specific areas like whether or not to build you know policies around building a parking garage in Medford Square and so on. But I'm also kind of a stickler about keeping with the joint, keeping with the press release that was endorsed by the mayor and the city council last year, just because if we get in the habit of deviating from that, something that was already presented to the public by all of the elected bodies that sort of have a that are involved in the decision-making process of the zoning. If we get in the habit of going away from that, it ends up getting more confusing to the public. I am amenable to changing that if the mayor and the city council agree to it and agree that there should be changes in the proposed schedule. But I think that that would have to be something that is addressed at the joint hearing and then subsequently, we get sort of the mayor's input on that.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Councilor, thank you, I appreciate that. I mean, I guess I really feel strongly that we need to get it right versus a deadline that was set six months ago, just because you wrote a press release with the mayor to basically lay out the next year. To me, that's just not a reason to not address the issue of parking, which this board, has collectively said pretty strongly feels it has to be integrated into this proposal because we've already seen the results of it on Salem Street. The lack of it there has caused, not chaos, but inconsistency, stops and starts, you know, just with one or two, one proposal in the last few months. And we just don't want to repeat that. You know, I personally feel that was an error. not addressing it in Salem Street. And I feel like addressing it now, not citywide, just Medford Square, is not an unreasonable thing to fit in. And I'll go to Paige and to Sean to give their own thoughts. Go ahead, Paige, and then Sean.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you. And I think the responsibility of the community development board is to also listen to the community. And this is what we're hearing. And I appreciate the past community development board. I appreciate the city councilors, Emily, our planning board, but we are hearing this. And I think it would be such a disservice to the residents who are for or against it. That's the point of this board. That's why we're here. And I would hope that the city councilors and the mayor, who've done so much good work on this, also appreciate that we're coming here for support. We're coming here to collaborate. It's not us against y'all. So I'm super hopeful that that's why we have those conversations like tonight.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Very good. Sean Began.
[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, I just, you touched upon it, Doug, but what I wanted to say was, when I'm talking about parking in this instance, I'm talking about just Medford Square. What will be the parking requirements for Medford Square? And Emily, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no reason we can't have separate parking requirements in different districts, correct? We could have a parking requirement in Medford Square that might not be the same as parking requirements in another residential one zone or something like that.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, that's where I was getting to this idea of whether you're changing the parking by specific uses or you're doing sort of a district parking relaxation or requirements. we'd have to collectively think about the strategy a little bit more. I was suggesting stay away from the current table of uses and the parking requirements in there, but maybe say in Medford Square, we're going to give you these other options for how you could reduce your parking requirements.
[Sean Beagan]: And that might be- As long as you get to the same end point, it really, I don't think probably matters to too many people, as long as you're getting to the same goal. But I think what Councilor Leming is referring to was the process, how it kind of ended last summer. And I think it ended last summer with the proposed my memory is what the public was upset about was the residential, some of the residential rezoning and maybe changing density in residential areas and probably changing parking requirements in residential areas. And I think that fight is probably still gonna happen in two years when you get back to, when we get back to residential. I don't think that fight's going anywhere. But I don't think that should prevent us from dealing with parking in Medford Square right now, which I think we all agree, probably both boards agree, is a different animal. Great. Go ahead, Dina.
[Dina Caloggero]: I completely agree. I think you should deal with the parking. The longer that we wait on dealing with the parking and probably specified specifically for Method Square, let's handle that. The worse it is going to be for us, the longer it's going to take to go through these different proposals. So let's do it. Let's talk about parking as part of Method Square and how we should go through with it. Because if we don't, it's only going to delay things. I completely agree.
[Chair Doug Carr]: One of the things I would add is I certainly see a vision coming into play where I think the parking garage behind Colleen's that was proposed 15 years ago is a great, perfect spot for it. It satisfies a lot of that part of the square which is starved of parking right now. But, and on the east side with Transom, I think they're replacing their parking, their parking for the senior center and for the service slots, but they're creating enough parking just for what they're anticipating for the new apartments and the commercial. They're actually not adding a hell of a lot more parking for the whole square. So there's still a need there, I think on both sides of the square, that is going to be hard to address because we are upzoning and bringing more people into the square and It's a challenge.
I need to find a way to succeed. We need to make that work somehow. Go ahead, Alicia.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: To be clear, the transfer proposal includes public parking for the square. It is more than what is needed for their buildings. And it includes keeping some of the parking next to the river across from the senior center and directly behind the grocery store building as public parking. That was a part of the RFP that we knew they couldn't replace 100% of the parking that's there, but some of the parking is empty all the time. Some of the parking is being used by the U.S. Postal Service trucks because we don't need it. That's true. And so that won't continue once this development happens. But there will absolutely any grocery store that would come in there would require a certain amount of public parking available to people using the grocery store. Exactly. I just want to be clear about that. No, it's not 100% of what's there, but it's not going to be just what's required for their buildings.
[Chair Doug Carr]: So no, I apologize. I misspoke. So what's the net increase in parking then for the current proposal for transit on that side of the square?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: That's the difficulty in talking about it. If you count the literal number of spots that are there, it's not an increase from the numbers that are there, except that it might be. Honestly, I can't tell you that. I'm at this point, I know that we're talking about 373 spots on the lot that would be by the highway. So that would be a parking garage plus surface lots. There will remain some parking behind City Hall. There will be parking under the building that would be in the center building. There'll be some parking there for their residents and some of the residents will park in the garage and the parking lot behind Um, next to the river will continue to have surface parking. I think that one says 90 spots on it right now. Um, but it's, it's not an insignificant amount of parking. Um, because we recognize that we, we need to like, they know that this is about keeping the square alive and we need spots. Right.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Right. Right. So, um, Before I get to Councilwoman, Emily, the parking study that was done 15 years ago, is that something that we can use to kind of leap into this issue with both feet a little bit and to come up with some solutions that may tweak things around the edges? Is that possible?
[Emily Innes]: I just received that, what, yesterday?
[Chair Doug Carr]: And so I haven't had a chance to read it. Come on. 24 hours?
[Emily Innes]: Come on.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I know. I'm sorry.
[Emily Innes]: I had a few meetings. So I won't have a look at it. But I do, I do want to stress something, though, because this is this is a common thing that people start to forget about with zoning is zoning will give the permissions and the limitations. of what could happen in a particular district, but it is not going to specify this parcel right here. This parcel is going to be the parking garage. And so I know there's been a history. I'm sure there will be other people during the public part of this that bring forward. Well, maybe if you put the parking garage here, as we think about that, going back to that table of the table of uses, where right now it says no for different types of parking. And I was saying, Are these the right structures? Do we have the right permissions? Do we need to add a type of parking? Just remember when we say it can happen in a district, it means it can happen in any part of that district. And so that could be back to the, does somebody knock a historic building down to put up parking? When we look at the district lines again, we might want to think about where are we giving those permissions for parking? Um, so just, you know, put that into the caveat is those permissions are global across that district. And so that should feed into our thinking.
[Councilor Matt Leming]: Great. How's your living? So. I will clarify that I'm not saying don't discuss parking. What I'm saying is that if that decision is made, I would want it to have an endorsement of the full city council, which can happen next week, as well as additional confirmation from the mayor. And that's because One, having kind of dealt with a lot of the publicity around zoning for the last two years, I'm very sensitive about the idea of kind of changing things without sort of a public presentation or public reasoning why. So if I'm a little bit, if you can sense my PTSD from some of that, then apologies there.
uh but it but yeah it's it's also because i yeah i think that uh councilors we we do we do tend to we a lot of a lot of the folks on council now have had like extensive conversations about parking and people and people's different viewpoints about it parking as well as other aspects of zoning for a very long period of time so i would want to hear what my colleagues uh think about that in an open meeting prior to, it could be that I'm just being a little bit overthinking it, and then the rest of the city council will probably be like, yeah, sure, let's talk about parking for Medford Square. Let's include that in this proposal. That's absolutely fine. But it could be that sitting elected officials are not comfortable with bringing up um, potential changes to parking minimums at this stage in the rezoning process. And there are there are reasons there are reasons for that. So what I'm saying is I want it to be endorsed, uh, by the elected officials that agreed upon the schedule back in that agreed upon the schedule back in December. That's that's where I'm coming from. Hope that's
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you, Councilor. Appreciate that clarity. Um, I do have a few comments I like to go through. Um, I think everyone has had a first pass. I don't think we're done. I think there's a lot. Oh, go ahead, John.
[John Anderson]: Um, thank you for the opportunity to speak again. Uh, I would just like to. put in everybody's mind the possibility of really using the transom development as a test case for how we can really get something done. Us, the city council, and of course, PDS whose hands it's in right now. And as soon as they're ready to talk about it with us, I would encourage them to do so. And maybe we can put a win under our belts moving into the, The bigger problems with Medford Square, the more complex problems. Thank you.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you, John. I actually agree with that. I feel like transom is obviously the consensus of this board is to separate those three process. We've already said that clearly get those as done as quickly as possible. But I do think I agree with you and other people who said that. developing the design standards. There might be a little bit of a test case here that will help inform the rest of the square because certainly the eastern part of the square is going to be of a transom scale for a lot of those sites.
Right. So you're going to see stuff like that. There are much bigger parcels. They have the ability to park on site, which most places in Medford Square do not. and they have in their zone for a substantial amount of height and mass that some of the rest of the square, smaller lots just can't do, right? I mean, so I feel like it is a kind of beta test that we should help, we should use and learn from and see if we can develop, you know, something that could be extrapolated a little bit. So let me jump, sorry.
[John Anderson]: And it gives us the possibility of turning our back not At the river, but turning our face to the river.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Absolutely right. It's back on the river for too long. Let me go to some specific questions, Emily. Just to go, what can we do to disincentivize teardowns of any kind? What can we do? You mentioned carrots and sticks, but what prevents somebody from taking a site that is on the list of National Historic, and they say, no, I'm just not interested. I can build eight stories here. I'm going to do it. What can we do?
[Emily Innes]: So first of all, you're getting into people's property rights, right? So if you zone the district to allow for something and they have that development right, then how do you give them a carrot to not exercise that right? So you could do pairing. You have to keep the historic building, but in return, we give you something else. Is that a form of a transfer of development rights? And if so, where are you going to transfer it to?
You know, with the best will in the world, communities have put in regulations and people say, well, I'm just going to let the building fall apart by neglect and then do what I want. You certainly don't want to encourage that. So I think this is that goes back to that discussion of what are you trying to preserve and why can we give them incentives for keeping the building, that adaptive reuse. I have worked in any number of communities where their preservation technique was unfortunately a lack of economic development, and that's what kept the buildings going because nobody could afford to redevelopment. That's not what we want in this area, right? I think it's thinking about what are your goals? Your goals are revitalized square. That was clear in all of the planning that's been done for Medford Square over the years. So how do we get there? How do we encourage that adaptive reuse? How do we encourage strategic infill development? And what are the restrictions that we're going to put on? I mean, certainly, If you don't want, if you're looking at the site for a, the size of a site that you need to do a garage and you see that that site size is the same site as a historic building, well maybe the district in which that historic building is assigned uh, should not also be the district in which, uh, a parking garage is assigned. So, you know, let's, let's take another look at those districts and the permissions in each of those. I think that would be important as well.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you. Doesn't that beg the question, if you don't want somebody to build something, why would you zone it to allow it, if that's not what we want? I see that across the square, and it makes me worried, because if you allow it, Like, even if there's other safeguards, or frankly, until now, isn't there literally zero protections for historic in the current zoning map that was a year old?
[Emily Innes]: Wait, the current zoning or the current proposed? Yeah, but there's equally no protections in your current zoning, right? So there's no change there. The conversations that we had last year, nobody had brought up this idea, this stronger idea of historic preservation, right? The zoning conversations weren't finished last year, but you don't have those protections now. So I think you probably want to consider, yes, we want to rezone because we'd like to add those protections, The question is, how are you adding them? Where are you adding them? In terms of not zoning what you don't want, you know, the way I usually think about zoning is make it easy for people to do the things you want them to do, right? Have those uses as a right, have the flexibility as a right and make it more difficult, either the special permit or the prohibition of things you don't want them to do. And so I think that becomes a part of our conversation is, look at the table of uses. Are those the right uses at the right permission levels? Maybe going just briefly back to parking, maybe your parking is allowed, your structured parking is allowed, but it's a special permit and there are standards over how that's put in. So, you know, it doesn't have to just be the dimensional standards. It doesn't have to just be the areas. You've also got the permissions within the table of uses that provide the flexibility or the limitations.
[Chair Doug Carr]: So, I guess what I'm what we're asking you to do is to come with us to show us as many tools of zoning as we can. that will not inhibit development, that will not inhibit creativity, that will allow the reimagining of all these properties, but still not allow or not encourage teardowns and loss of the character of the square that has been there in some cases for hundreds of years. I know there's a balance. Zoning is always a balance, as you said. But I guess my critique of the current zoning is that there is no balance. And the critique of Salem Street is it was ignored completely. And I honestly think that what we're doing here in the square is actually setting a template that we're going to have to go back to Salem Street for the parking. There are historic resources along Salem that were presently rezoned that have zero protection right now, right? That's the reality I see. Tell me if I'm wrong.
[Emily Innes]: So actually, we did look at the historic buildings on Salem. I remember one in particular that had a nice little sort of turret on it. And one of the things that we looked at, one of the things that we've done in the past is if a historic building is, say, four stories, right, and you want to preserve that historic building, if I remember correctly, again, it's been a long time since I looked at Salem, that some of those buildings were, We rezoned them to be the height that they are now, so they would not be an incentive to tear them. You're not going to tear down a four story building in order to build a four story building, right? You're not going to tear down a one story. you might tear down a one-story to put a three-story up. Probably not gonna tear a one-story down to put a two-story up, unless you've got a really big lot and it makes it worthwhile. So some of the rezoning we did on Salem Street was to zone what was there, so as not to create the incentive. And I'm pretty sure that the strategy, I'll have to go back and check. I think the building I'm thinking of, that was a strategy that we did, but I do know that there were some others. So that might be some of this here, We actually did that in Medford Square, the block on, hang on, I'm pulling the map back up again and I'll share it quickly just so we're looking at the right place.
So, this zoning here, these lower scale historic buildings, the ones that are right next to the river, we got some pushback from some of the owners, because you can see we zone the mixed use 1B, that four stories as a right. Because some of those are historic buildings, so we zoned them for the lower scale so that they wouldn't be torn down and redeveloped. So that's something else to consider. Now, you may have a property owner that says, I've got a historic building that's listed, and this becomes your question, you know, the question for all of us to discover. What if we say, We think that this building should be preserved and protected. It's a four-story building. We're zoning it as a four-story building. There's no incentive. And the property owner says, I want a six-story building here. Why are you allowing somebody across the street to have a higher height than I'm allowed? What's your justification for that? So you may, during these conversations, get pushback from some of the owners where In some cases, you know, here's a line where we've got a 2A and a 2B and 2B gets a higher height. You may have somebody saying, well, how come you zoned me 2A and them 2B? I would like the 2B zoning. So I'm not asking you to answer this tonight, but just think about how would you address those situations as a community development board? How will the city council address those situations as well? when the public desire, the community desire, is different from the property owner's desire. Understood.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you. What about the institutional option for religious and publicly-owned, Medford-owned buildings as another form of guardrail protections that would put it in a different category than the commercial buildings and the other things. Is that an option that has merit?
[Emily Innes]: So on the city-owned buildings, many communities don't follow zoning with city-owned or town-owned buildings. They're exempt from zoning generally. A city can choose It was a long time ago, I don't remember the exact community, but they did have their buildings go through some sort of site plan review process, but a municipality is not required to do that. Schools, which also fall, by the way, under the Dover Amendment. For the institutional use, so same kind of thing on the institutional buildings. Religious buildings, for example, because you've got several churches in this area, those are Dover Amendment. They're exempt under zoning. So we're putting them in the zoning district because that land has to be zoned for something. I guess your question becomes, and it's an important question because it's happened throughout the Commonwealth, If that religious organization, that owner, were to leave and another religious organization doesn't buy that property, what do you want that to be zoned for? Because I've seen instances in which people thought, oh, well, that's a church. That'll always be a church. That's a school. That will always be a school. They've never changed the zoning. that institution leaves, whatever it is, and now suddenly somebody comes in and does something that people don't want because it wasn't zoned for a future use. And so I think that's something, again, as we talk about this, that we should keep in mind. What happens if the current owner of any of these properties leaves? What do you want it to be?
[Chair Doug Carr]: So if they were zoned, say, just take St. Joe's as the site, it's a camp, right? You've got a church, a directory, and a school, four or five buildings there, several acres, many great potential. If that was an institutional zoning and the school went away, does the zoning remain and has someone who buys it has to now deal with with us, essentially, the CD board or variances? What are the possibilities there that would help us guide that development without having it be just a blank slate that anyone could do anything for? How do we do that?
[Emily Innes]: So great question. So say you've zoned it as an institutional use. A buyer comes in. They don't want to do an institute, or a potential buyer comes up. They don't want to do an institutional use. then they're now limited to that institutional use, but they don't want to have you reduced the property value to a non-institutional owner by zoning it institutional. I had a community where they had a ginormous park And the park was privately owned. It was not a municipal park and it was zoned single family residential. So this is a very large multi acre park. And so the question became, you know, did the community want to rezone that private park as an open space and recreation parcel? Because that's what it was being used for. And we got not direct pushback, but pushback through the grapevine that the owner of the park did not want to lose their single family zoning because they wanted to preserve their property rights should they ever decide that they don't want to be a park anymore. It's not municipal. It's not a state-owned park. It's a private park. So I think that's something to consider is if St. Joseph's were 50 years from now, they want to sell that land for something else and you've zoned it as institutional, does that reduce their property value? Does that become a problem? So given that it's already exempt under Dover uses.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Are you recommending we do not do any institution?
[Emily Innes]: I'm not recommending anything tonight. What I'm saying is these are the things that we need to consider as we think about it.
[Chair Doug Carr]: But do you think it has any value as protection or not?
[Emily Innes]: I don't know that it does, because you're talking about protection of buildings, but you're proposing a potential restriction on use. I think if you're wanting to protect the buildings, Institutional is probably not the right way to go. I would go better to a carrot to keep the buildings, the historic buildings, and do an adaptive reuse for them, which could be any use. I mean, that just off the top of my head in the discussion tonight, I think that's based on the direction. That's the thing that I would be looking at.
[Chair Doug Carr]: You mentioned you had a historic I guess hopefully that person will come next week and can offer a menu of solutions that will help us address this concern. We have the parking concern, we have the historic preservation concerns as well. I think those are the consensus of this board. from big issues, but I think they're both achievable. I'm not seeing anything here that cannot be solved with a little zoning, and certainly there are things outside of zoning we've talked about this evening.
[Emily Innes]: So I will say that she will not be able to join us next week, A, because she's not here next week. And B, because next week is our remit is to listen to all of you talk with the city council and receive a joint direction of the next stage of moving forward. That's not to diss the conversation we have tonight. I've heard how important all of these topics are to this board and certainly would report that same back and support that this is something that you all, but this is going back to a joint hearing. And so we want the joint direction of the next phases, but certainly when she, you know, she is a part of the conversations on this and we're drawing on her past expertise to be able to inform what we do next.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Appreciate it, thank you. I think the last category of stuff we've touched on a little bit tonight is some of the boundary issues. You mentioned that one property, that little bite out of the CVS parking lot. I'm not clear if you think that wants to be zoned differently, or what do you think the options for that, just that one site are going forward?
[Emily Innes]: I think it should definitely, I don't think it should be zoned C2. We've had this conversation in-house. It's part of that local historic district. Whether you're not, you just go ahead and zone it, whatever its neighbors are. We just have to double check that that wouldn't make it non-conforming or whether you pull it out of Medford Square and wait to address it when the city addresses the other residential districts. I think that's a conversation to have, but it shouldn't be C2.
I do know that it shouldn't be C2.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Right, but it's part of a historic district. It just seems like we should just take it out of the zone.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, I don't think it should be part of Medford Square. I just want to make sure that it's part of a local historic district. I don't know if the number of units in that, I didn't check before tonight's meeting, if the number of units are consistent with what those other districts are zoned, and we would just have to double check that. Because that would be an easy one, is if it's consistent, just zone it the same thing as the others. If it's not consistent, it's got to be zoned something else. But what we do know, it shouldn't be zoned what it is now. That doesn't make any sense.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Couldn't agree more. OK. I know I mentioned this, I think, in my email with some of the comments about the things that are currently the Medford Public Library, the church, the parsonage, stuff that is a residential zone that is clearly nonconforming. and has been for many, many decades. Why would we not fix that now? Again, kind of fixing the obvious problems on the zoning boundary.
[Emily Innes]: I mean, certainly if you all decide next week that the library and the UU church and all should be included, we'd be more than happy to change the boundaries. I don't remember why they weren't in the original one, but certainly given the civic uses in the area, certainly it makes sense to add the library given the other institutional uses in terms of their contribution to the development pattern of the square. It might be well worth adding the Unitarian Church as well. So, but again, we'll, we'll seek our direction. I'd look for that meeting next week.
[Sean Beagan]: I had heard at one point that the library has its own deed restriction, that it can only be a library, that it was given by the family and can only be used as a library.
[Chair Doug Carr]: You mean when it was first made a library? Yeah.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I remember hearing something about that. I think that might be true, but I couldn't say certainly without going back.
[Sean Beagan]: 1 of the 1 of the prior city solicitors. I remember having a conversation about that with him.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: There was a lot of discussion about that when we rebuilt.
[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, exactly. Yes. I think that's right. Alicia. That's what it was. It was around that time. Yeah. John Anderson. What do you got?
[John Anderson]: I just, I think I can clarify that. I heard this from Barbara Kerr, the librarian. Basically, the city can get rid of it, but then they have to give a bunch of money to the descendants of the person who donated to them. And they would never be able to find these people anyway. So the dead have tied the hands of the living there.
[Emily Innes]: That's clever. That's very clever. I mean, land has to be zoned for something, right? So whether you leave it as a municipal use in a residential district or you tuck it into the boundary of the square, it's got a deed restriction. It probably doesn't really matter. So I think it's just how you want to draw that boundary on a municipal property. But leave it to the discussion next week about boundary changes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Fair enough. And I know we've talked about this in the past. And I know Grace Church has all kinds of protections. But when I see something that you could build eight-plus stories on it, like the condos next door, it makes me worried. I've seen too many buildings in Medford torn down. There's a building on High Street that was torn down for eight parking spaces next to the bank for no reason at all, because they wanted eight parking spaces on a surface lot. I don't know. You would never endorse that, obviously, but it's just like there's been so many terrible things that have happened, mistakes. And I just don't want to repeat any of them. You know, I want to have as many guardrails as possible to stop crazy things happening, like a fake armory next to the real armory. Like the U.S. Trust Bank that was a white panel 100 feet long, unbroken, that we shamed them into changing it, you know, 25 years ago. It's like we've got to do better as a community.
[Emily Innes]: And that could be, do you put a mixed use 1B over Grace Church, right? The point of having these sub-districts is, you know, they don't necessarily have to be contiguous because it's all a sub-district within this one geographic area. Do you go back and put a 1A? Do we add that fourth district back because it was the lowest? So that's what I was saying is thinking, looking carefully at these parcels and saying, okay, maybe, maybe that 2B isn't right for Grace. Maybe we want to put the 1B on it and that would help it. Maybe we want 1A on it. That would help it. We can be a little bit more fine. With the way we've defined these sub-districts, we can be a little bit more fine-grained about how they're applied.
[Chair Doug Carr]: I think that would go a long way, because there's not a will on this board to start making five different divisions in Method Square and tackling them. We can make this work with the parking and with historic and some tweak boundaries, but essentially 90% of what it is now, because a lot of this plan is really good,
[Director Alicia Hunt]: And so I just want to a little bit play devil's advocate and one piece provide some info. For example, Grace Church has a really big parking lot behind it, and it has an old like a 1980s hall. I'm an active member of Grace Church and a former board member, right? But there's a building behind the historic church that maybe would be well-served by being rebuilt and stuff like that, right? And St. Joe's has a lot of land back there. They've got a building they're using as a dormitory right now. Wouldn't that be better if it was rebuilt and was an apartment building, maybe?
But when you say, oh, but we can only allow, are you actually protecting the historic building, or are you actually preventing them from doing another stuff? But it might be a moot point, because if you haven't seen it, the governor has proposed a law to allow churches to build housing, and it might be affordable housing only, but as of right on their properties. So there's stuff in the works, and anything we did wouldn't prevent that.
[Sean Beagan]: Do they still get their tax exemption?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I think so. And it might be that it's affordable housing. I don't remember off the top of my head.
[Emily Innes]: I think you may be right, Alicia, that it may be affordable housing, and it was part of that use of land. And that actually goes back to something I said at the very beginning of the presentation. is this idea that many communities, Medford included, only allow one building per lot. So if you allow two buildings per lot and you've got a historic building and you say, hey, we want you to preserve the historic building, and in exchange you can build a second building up to x, That might be one of those carrots.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: That's actually one of the things we need to fix. So we had this rule. We did, yes. And we tried to change it to allow multiple buildings on commercial and industrial and those. And when it went through all the different people who had their bit of flesh trying to wordsmith it, it came out wrong. And it literally says the opposite of what was intended, says the opposite of what was in front of the city council. It says you can do multiple buildings on single family and general residential areas and not on commercial and industrial. And when I tried to get the city clerk to fix that as a typo, I was told, no, that was substantive. And those were the words on the paper in front of the city council that day. even though it was described to them backwards. So by the way, that's on our short list of we need to reverse it because it's making the Walkling Court and the Housing Authority property and some of these areas that are multiple commercial buildings not legal when they were supposed to be allowed.
[Emily Innes]: We definitely need to get that one fixed. It will give you so much more flexibility.
[Chair Doug Carr]: So first of all, is there anyone else here on the board who wants to say any final words before I wrap up? I think we're in a good spot. I think it's been pretty clear what we're looking for. And I think you, I know you're not going to do anything by next week. You're going to continue to listen. But I think we're setting a pretty clear agenda for what we're looking for. And I'm going to go to Scott. I'm sorry, Sean.
[Sean Beagan]: I just forgot to say this earlier, but Emily, you use the phrase to describe Medford Square as an interesting network of streets, which I think is the most generous description I've ever heard of the chaos that is the traffic in Medford Square. So I want to congratulate you on that wordsmithing, because that was by far the best line I heard all night.
[Emily Innes]: I'll tell you, I'm always interested in how I'm going to get through it.
[Sean Beagan]: With a straight face. You didn't crack up laughing when you said it.
[Chair Doug Carr]: All right. So anyway, I'm feeling like we've reached a good stopping point here. We beat a lot of things up here, but I think we're looking for some creativity on the parking. I can't imagine if there's any place in Medford that's not rapid transit. If there's one place in Medford, it's got to be Medford Square. I just can't imagine that's not true. Parking is a tough one, obviously, but I feel like, again, a little bit of creativity, a little bit of flexibility. We're definitely looking for flexibility here, because we're not going to want to evaluate a historic building the same way we would a transom-scale development. We have to be able to mix and match things and have the ability for off-site shared wave it in some cases, like, we really want to have a lot of tools in our, in our box when stuff comes before us and be able to make common sense judgments, which I think we've been kind of do this board is very common sensical from my experience.
Obviously, historic property protections are, you know, whatever you can bring to that, whether it's tweaking the zoning. The various things you mentioned in your PowerPoint, we're looking for as much as we can there to give us a comfort level that the historic buildings in Medford will be reimagined and not torn down to the degree possible. I know you can't guarantee anything, but I feel like right now, there's not a lot in this plan, but there can be with a little bit of tweaking, I think.
The boundaries, we talked about a couple of things. You're going to look at that, obviously, not by next week. But we're not talking about wholesale boundary changes, I don't think at all, just at the edges in a few areas. And transom, you know, peeling that off, we've already kind of agreed that seems to be a done deal from in all but name right now. I hope the council would agree with that to get that early win to move that forward so while we wrap this up. So that's my kind of summary of it. I know that Christian has got some notes I'm sure he'll take. But you have your own notes, obviously. Let's reconvene next week, and let's talk with the council. And hopefully, we can come to a consensus.
Thank you for your time. It's been very helpful.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you all. Great. Really enjoyed the conversation. So I'll see you all next week.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Very good. Thank you, Emily. Thank you. Cheers. All right. What do we got left here, folks? We got, um, there are no meeting minutes. Are there any, uh, administrative updates, uh, Danielle or Alicia?
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Just a reminder, joint public hearing next week, um, in person, but there'll be a hybrid option. Okay.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: And I just wanted to share very administratively that our office has a new head clerk who started yesterday. So we have more staffing in our office again. You may at some point interact with her.
[Chair Doug Carr]: What's her name?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Lauren Carpinito.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Very good.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: And she's a Medford resident.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Lovely. John Anderson.
[John Anderson]: Can I just quickly ask, where are we with the transom Contract, has that been signed? I mean, when do you think this can sort of be unveiled to this council and to us?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: So, we are literally at the point where what you see in the proposal is still what is being proposed. And the mayor is working through, we're working through legal details. There's a land disposition agreement. There's surveys that have to happen. There's like cleaning up title of work. There's a lot of the legal language on some of the details about what's the company and how do they stay involved. I can't even. So they're working through a lot of these and what gets set in stone at what point during the process.
We're hoping to do this soon. The first step after we get that signed is that he then applies for site plan review. He doesn't actually want to finalize details until he knows that he has his zoning in place. And so we are playing a bit of a chicken and an egg game here too. I love that phrase, by the way, but it happens so much in planning. But he doesn't want to spend too much money on architectural drawings until he knows he's got the zoning that he needs.
[John Anderson]: He's got conceptual drawings.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: You have those, the ones he has, they're literally the ones that are in the RFP. But then the next step after that will be site plan review. As soon as it's available for this board to look at, this board will be looking at it.
[John Anderson]: Well, I'm interested in the zoning aspect though. I realized site plan review will come later.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I've asked his lawyer to redline the zoning that's in front of you right now with any concerns that she has as to what. she would need for the project. There are some details that I cannot speak to off the top of my head. But last July, she sent us like four bullets of things she would like to see changed so that it would be completely as of right with no question. And it wasn't the height or anything like that. It was like in the performance standards. Thank you. So I hope to have those tomorrow.
But yeah. Yeah. They're happy with the zoning that's in front of you, except for a couple of little tweaks.
[Chair Doug Carr]: All right. Danielle, any final comments? Otherwise, I'll be looking for a motion to adjourn.
[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: I don't have anything else. If you don't think you'll be at the meeting next week in person, just let me know. setting up chairs and stuff to figure out where everyone's going to sit.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Can you raise your hand if you're going to be there in person next week, if you know you're going to be there in person?
[Page Buldini]: I'm sorry to miss you guys. We had a family trip, but I'm going to be on Zoom. I will be there on Zoom.
[Chair Doug Carr]: All right. So that's it, then. That's it.
[Ari Fishman]: Everyone will be there. I'm planning to, but it's the baby's first partial week at daycare, so there may be chaos. Oh, there'll be chaos.
[Sean Beagan]: It will be chaos.
[Ari Fishman]: It will be chaos. That's fair. It's just a question of what type.
[Chair Doug Carr]: All right. I'll take a motion to adjourn. So moved.
[Sean Beagan]: Second.
[Chair Doug Carr]: All right. Roll call. John Anderson. Yes. Sean Began. Yes. Page Buldini.
[Page Buldini]: Yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Nina Calagaro.
[Page Buldini]: Yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: Ari Gothman-Fishman.
[Page Buldini]: Yes.
[Chair Doug Carr]: And myself, yes. Thank you all. It was a great meeting, great conversation. Well done, everyone.
[Sean Beagan]: Take care, everyone.
[Page Buldini]: Good night. Good night. Good night.
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