[Unidentified]: That's actually a good question. So the camera is seeing that screen, but I'm assuming you want us to share the screen. Okay, cool. So you just have to go back after you share that. All right, it's screening. OK, so I can cancel one answer. OK, just don't close your laptop.
[Kevin Harrington]: So, Paola, you're going to be presenting from up there.
[Unidentified]: Oh, she's going to advance the slides.
[Kevin Harrington]: Okay. So, we lost our microphone.
[Unidentified]: I'm going to put it up. So I can't, I can't go get cars for everybody?
[Kevin Harrington]: Yeah, that should be fine. I'm going to want to be right around here.
[Unidentified]: Yeah, I mean, I might go to the other side of the, you know, we could do is we can move that chair.
[Emily Innes]: over to here.
[Unidentified]: That would be perfect. I brought this chair out. I think over here.
[Emily Innes]: Paula's got the high tops and sided sheets, which are blowing away. Paula, our comment sheets are blowing away.
[Unidentified]: Paula's got the screen. I'm just going to let people in from the waiting room because people are in here.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Affordable housing. Yeah. Yes.
[Alicia Hunt]: There's a deed restriction on it. So it has to always be resold. So actually, Danielle is an expert in that. Is that Danielle? She can really, but... You can never make a windfall. But you can make some sort of profit. And I don't... Is this Danielle? I'm afraid these questions...
[Adam Hurtubise]: It's a rental. It's a rental.
[Unidentified]: It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental. It's a rental And then the next available apartment in that building, perhaps in case anyone is looking for it, please ignore it. Yes, we have to. There could be a moderate sum of money, I think that's a good point. I let people in the waiting room.
[Alicia Hunt]: Oh, I sent Christian outside. Let's move on. Is Paola also a co-host? Yes, she can share. She's not going to be able to necessarily. For right now, before we start, can you let people in from the waiting room until I'm sitting back here? Just anybody who shows up, just let them all in.
[Adam Hurtubise]: All right.
[Unidentified]: Well, let's just do a quick math. There are 14 on the Zoom. Yep. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 are not. There are 6 on the Zoom who are not city staff or technology. All right. And we have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 here. Christian, me, Beck, you.
[Alicia Hunt]: building commissioner, Laurel's in my office, Teresa's in my office.
[Unidentified]: And where are we? We're about 6.05. Yeah, and I just sent a message saying let me start in a few minutes. Yeah, this is usually when it's already out, just because I want to be respectful of people who are physically in the room, and also there's four people, literally two people who slept in the room. Yeah. Yeah. Is she a screen share? She will be screen shared when we're ready to screen share. Do you want us to have lots of people? I think it's helpful, like it lets people know when the Zoomie are in the right place. Huh, you must be picking me up from a nightcap in the room. Yeah, I already got a few things out, so if you want to hold off just a second before we start. Okay, the people remote are probably speaking.
[Alicia Hunt]: I would say they're quietly talking to Emily, and they will hear us on the Zoom. So, is this the mic? That's the mic for them.
[Unidentified]: They could hear us on YouTube discussing whatever it is.
[Emily Innes]: It's especially that one thing while they're doing it. Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: Once we start the presentation, I'll be letting people in. I just said, while we're standing here, nobody's looking. Once we come in, Christian will speak on his computer.
[Emily Innes]: Okay, great.
[Alicia Hunt]: And that mic is also live. That must be the one that's picking us up.
[Unidentified]: Okay, I'm just like me. Does this turn off? I think we are. It does not turn off.
[Alicia Hunt]: Because it's picking up a lot of surround sound, and people were like, we can only have here.
[Unidentified]: This is?
[Alicia Hunt]: OK. Yeah, because it's not for the room.
[Unidentified]: It's unmuted now. All right, so whenever you're ready, Alicia, are you muted or am I muted? It should be the only one of my soul. Yeah, it really doesn't want me to do the introductions. All right. Okay, my laptop speakers. I don't know what you mean by that. Oh, let me turn off my staff. Yeah, we did that.
[Matt Leming]: Everybody, welcome to this to the zoning update on some of the work that we're doing on Medford Square. It's going to be going to be a little bit of a cozy audience tonight. But thank you. Thanks everybody for for showing up and engaging with the process and thanks to all and thanks to everybody who's tuning in on zoom and or who decides to review the review the recording later. My name is Matt Leming. I'm a city councilor here in Medford. I'm the chair of the planning and permitting committee. We're joined here as well by Dina Caliguero, who is a member of the Medford Community Development Board, which the city council is collaborating on to some volume issues here, who the City Council is collaborating with to engage with the community and pass some of these zoning changes, which will lead to a more vibrant and affordable Medford Square. Joined here by Alicia Hunt, who is the Director of the Office of Planning, Development, and Sustainability, so one of our staff experts, as well as Emily Innes with the Innes Land Group. who is the consultant that the city is working with to sort of help us really focus on some of the expert who will provide expertise to the city as we go through this rezoning process. Joined as well by Daniel Evans, a senior planner with the city of Medford. And is there anybody else that I'm neglecting?
[Alicia Hunt]: We want to thank the MCM staff.
[Matt Leming]: But yeah, and would also really like to thank the Medford Community Media staff and volunteers for helping to helping to put this on. I see Kevin Harrington, Mark Davidson, who are taking taking time away to from their evenings to help put this meeting on. And I'd like to thank all of you for for coming out here and just listening to our to our presentation. Some of the just a little bit of information about the process. I'm going to bore y'all for for a couple minutes here. So the way that these zoning changes work under mass general law is zoning changes come from the city council, come from elected officials, and The procedure for that is in order to pass zoning changes, we then have to refer those over to the planning board, which is the Community Development Board here in Medford. So we've been holding joint public hearings between the City Council and the Community Development Board in order to hear resident feedback on some of these zoning changes. In order to officially kind of sort of give feedback to the City Council and the CDB on these zoning changes, you would need to email us or show up to one of these public hearings and the next one will be March 25th in City Hall at 6pm in order to let your feedback be known. We do plan on holding some Q&A after this presentation. But it should be noted that unless that's emailed or it's written down on some sort of a card and handed to the boards later, then that's not officially entered into the record as public comment. But the folks here are listening to you all. We really care about you. what the public thinks about this, and engaging people in the process as best we can. So we are bringing that back to both boards in sort of an informal capacity. But just so you know, if you do want to give feedback to anything you hear, it would be best to email the city council and the CDB later on. So with that, I'm going to hand the microphone off first to Alicia Hunt, who will go over. Yep.
[Alicia Hunt]: Good evening. Thank you for coming. I just wanted to do a little bit of housekeeping for this evening, like we do when there's a public meeting. This is also not a typical space for a lot of us, so I'll just let everybody know that there's a direct exit to the outside right there under the exit sign. We also have a sign-in sheet there. We'll be happy to capture your information. We also have physical comment cards. So if you want a comment to be given hand hand delivered to the boards, so you can fill that out and you can give it, leave it with us and Emily's team has been transcribing that for us to then share with the CD board and the city council, so you can write it, that makes it a comment officially to them. We also for those on zoom have a online form that maybe Christian are you able to grab the URL for that and drop it into the chat for anybody online. I think people are always curious about this. We have 15 people online, eight of whom are members of the public. The rest are staff and technical. And then we have, wait, I did count, was it nine or 10 in the room? That are members of the public 10 in the room the members of the public I feel like people on zoom always want to know how many are in the room and people in the room want to know how many are on zoom. So I wanted to share that. We also have the bathrooms here if you go out so this is the other exit from the auditorium is over here on my right, and that will take you into the main lobby for the school. For anybody who's not familiar with the school, if you just go straight across the lobby, straight ahead, you'll be practically looking at the men's and women's rooms. I think they say men and women. They might say boys and girls. But they're right there, and they're full size. It's not like an elementary. And there's a water fountain right there as well. But we ask that you please not wander around the school. We're just using the bathrooms in the auditorium tonight. And I think that was all the things we caught the comment card and I will hand this off to so Emily Innis and her team is the consulting team that we have hired to help us with this project.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you so much Councilor Leming and Alicia. Good evening. Thank you all very much for being here in person to those of you who are online. Thank you very much for being online we appreciate your participation. So what I'm going to do is walk you through where we are today where we are in the process Councilor Leming gave you kind of the overview I'm going to go into a little bit more depth on that. show you some of the things that we've been doing in terms of research into the existing zoning and built environment of Medford square how that has been informing what we're doing. Talk to you a little bit about how the public hearing has been changing what we're putting out for the, the changes for the city council and the CD board to consider. and how we're taking public comment from tonight, from both here and from zoom and incorporating that into the work so this is still very much a process we did meet with some people earlier I'm going to talk about that. If you can click on the, just click on the PDF again. There we go, beautiful. So these are the things that we'll be talking about. So just where we are overall in our scope as consultants working with the city, we are in phase one. So we're working on Medford Square, there's some items for cleaning up in the zoning that we're assisting with, but primarily in this phase one, we are working on Medford Square. Once this zoning has been complete and gone all the way through, We will be moving to working on Tufts institutional and also Boston Avenue, and that takes us to the end of June so these are just the things that we're talking about now, you can see we have two community meetings this is community meeting. Number two, for the Medford square process we are meeting with the city officials that's the joint hearings primarily although we did bring the CD board up to speed on the whole zoning process, and then in phase two we will also have to community meetings. and the same four meetings on those joint boards. So just so you know where we are with that. In terms of a timeline, you can see second public meeting right here, March 11th, where first public meeting was at the senior center. It was a daytime meeting. So what we're trying to do is capture people at the different times and places that work for them. We then had that joint hearing on February 25th with the city council and the CD board. The two groups together discussed some things that they would like us to delve further into, and we've been working on that. So on March 25th, we will be presenting our recommended changes based on what we heard on 219, what the city council and the city board gave us on 225, and what we're hearing from people today. So it's one of the many reasons we really appreciate you being here. After that, we will get any further instructions from changes or anything, but at that joint hearing on 325, the two groups will be talking about the next stages. So, let's talk a little bit about why we're here doing zoning for Medford square we've really got some major planning documents that the city has done over the last few years. The top being the Medford comprehensive plan and 2023 that laid out a vision for the city. actions and recommendations. And one of those was to work on zoning and had some very specific ideas and vision around Medford Square. Now, the comprehensive plan is only the latest in the series of planning documents that the city has done for Medford Square. So we have delved back through those, including going all the way back to 2005. There were some intervening studies, but we wanted to give you the earliest. The city also did a climate action and adaptation plan in 2022, and that has fed into some of our ideas for development standards. In other words, if you are going to do building in Medford Square, what standards is the city requiring that you meet? So that feeds into part of it. Talk about some of the other things that feed into the standards as we go through. So the first thing we start off with is the existing zoning and there are two major districts commercial one is the the pink zoning district you see on your screen apartment two is the orange and then there's a sort of yellowy orange general residential. that's just on, I think it's about maybe two or three parcels in this area. So we've primarily been focusing on commercial one and apartment two to understand what's allowed. Now, commercial one, strangely enough, allows commercial uses. You would expect that. And apartment two allows residential uses. One of the things that has been part of the vision for Medford Square is this idea of mixed use. Mixed use could be mixed use within the same building or mixed use within the same lot. That's coming out of planning discussions and theory and practice about residential supporting the local businesses. If you get enough people living in an area, they support the businesses that exist in that area. One of the things that we have seen over the decades is a hollowing out of downtowns because there's just simply not enough people to support them and the planning practice has been to add the mixed use. to create that support. So that's one of the things, commercial one and apartment two don't allow for that mixed use, so one of the things we're doing is adding that back in. The other thing that's quite interesting, and although the dimensional standards were on that map and on the physical maps we have in the room, We always look to see does the zoning actually allow what the community wants to see and it's quite frequent in New England towns and villages and cities that the building came first. And then the zoning, actually the type of zoning that we mostly have now, which is one very much focused on the separation of uses, turns 100 years old this year. It's the anniversary of a court case that led to what's called Euclidean zoning after Euclid, Ohio. And that zoning was about separating uses, having commercial and having residential, but not putting them together. But most of our communities, especially in New England, are much older than 100 years. And so what we find is at some point zoning came into a community, didn't always zone well for what was already there. So one of the things we look at is what does your current zoning allow? And it doesn't match what you have and doesn't match what you want. And I've just cherry picked height as a dimensional standard because a lot of people, you know, to talk about this, because a lot of people, you know, it's easy to look at a building and say, well, that's four stories or three stories or 10 stories. It's sometimes a little bit harder to say, well, is that front set back 25 feet or is it five feet? Easy if it's zero. So we're going to talk about height. So right now the commercial one district allows for four stories for other permitted uses, which is basically anything other than the multifamily assisted living at six stories or a hotel at 15. So the commercial does allow multifamily, but it doesn't allow mixed use, i.e., multifamily and commercial in the same building. And it allows 15 stories for a hotel. Apartment 2 for, and this is symptomatic by the way, Medford's dimensional standards are pretty much all use-based. So how high, how much, how it fits on the lot is all based on use and not based on district. And what this does is it leads kind of a choppy effect depending on what use comes in. It also limits what can happen if a use you want in an existing building doesn't match the dimensional standards. So an apartment two, remember side by side with commercial one, two and a half stories for a detached single or two family, three stories for an attached single or two family, that's a townhouse or a row house generally, six stories for multifamily, and 15 stories for other permitted uses. We have heard through many conversations with the community that 15 stories is not a height that people have wanted in much of this part of the area, so we're taking that into account. And then we're also looking, well, what happens if you want a mixed use at six stories and that's not allowed? The other thing that, as we think about dimensional standards and uses, that is really important is how do you allow it? Do you allow it by right, which means the person who wants to do something just has to get a building permit? Do you allow it by site plan review, which means the use is by right. You have to allow the use, but you can put some conditions on the building or the site Or do you allow it by special permit, which includes site plan review, but has a higher level of discretion, which means the planning board can say no to the use? So, as you're thinking about this, all of this is coming into play. What do you allow? The where, the how much, the how high, the how wide, where it is on the lot, and then the how do you use it? What is the permitting process? So we also did a lot of maps on the existing conditions. I'm not going to show everything. I believe they're still online for the city's website. We are building a new website which should be ready to launch this week actually. So this shows just the boundary of the area. This is the Medford Square that we're looking at. We have talked about how that boundary should shift and would be really interested in hearing your thoughts. We looked at the existing uses, so just so you know, the lighter yellows, oranges, and browns are residential. Red is commercial, purple is industrial, and the bright blue is municipal use. So we like to know what's on the ground, not just what's zoned, but what's actually there. We looked at the historic buildings. So a historic inventory was done of Medford Square. There are some buildings that are on the National Register. There's one building that has an actual preservation restriction on it, which is deed restricted. There are others that have been deemed to be architecturally significant. There are some where the architectural significance either wasn't there or it's been lost over the years, and some were just noted. So here are some of the buildings that are on the National Register of Historic Places. One of the things that we heard from the Community Development Board in thinking about the zoning is how do we put into place either standards or incentives to protect these buildings, and so that's something that we've been working on. and are looking forward to sharing at the March 25th public hearing. So those are kind of the things, you know, the existing conditions, what's on the ground now, what uses are allowed now, what's the zoning, where are the historic buildings, how do we think of this? And this was the map that was referred from the city council to the community development board last spring. So this is undergoing some changes. We're going to show you some of those. Tonight you can see there's a couple of districts that we more this map is boundary is larger than I just showed you and that's because we've already been making some changes in response to public comment. So you can see a mixed use one which is the paler blue. 2A is the bright blue, 2B is the purple, and mixed-use 3 is the very bright purple in the southeast corner there. There are also some neighborhood zoning districts that are not being discussed now. So taking those neighborhood zoning districts out, you can see again 1B is the lighter blue, 2A, 2B, and 3. The uses mostly remain the same among these mixed-use districts. It's a square. We want a certain amount of commercial and residential and certain types that are appropriate to a downtown of a community. Where the changes really come is in terms of the height and in terms of some of the other dimensional standards. The the setback, which is how far from the edges of the lot you can build and some of those other key standards. So I'm going to actually go back because I can see it here. So we've got two height levels. One is the base height and one is what's called the incentive height. And what this means is that you have a base height that you're allowed to do as of right. You can go and put your building permit in, you may have site plan review depending on what else is going on, but that's allowed as of right. However, if you provide a greater community benefit, and there's a table in the draft zoning that identifies those benefits, if you provide that greater community benefit, you're allowed to go up in height, and how far up you're allowed to go depends on the zone. So for the 1B, and I'm going to talk about some changes that we're proposing in a bit, but for the 1B, it allows four stories by right. In many cases, that's where those buildings are, not all of them. And then it would allow just one more by that incentive in exchange for the public benefits. Public benefits include things like affordable housing, different levels of affordable housing gives you the right to more height and includes some of public amenities as well in terms of things that would be helpful for a downtown area, plazas, parking changes, energy efficient buildings, those sort of things. There's a structure system in there of which benefits allow which levels of height. So 1B, four stories, one incentive. 2A, four stories by right, two incentive. 2B, seven stories by right with two incentive. And 3, which is right up against 93, is eight stories by right and four incentives. There are some quite tall buildings there already. And of course, you're right up against the highway. So for those of you in the room, these tables are up on boards, so you can go and have a look. And if you want to go and have a look and come back and ask a question, that's fabulous as well, but I'm just going to tell you what they are. I realize they're a little bit difficult to see. For those of you online, we can always come back to this if you have a question on it. This will also be available online for anybody who wants to look and then use that form that Director Hunt mentioned. It says the 2025 joint hearing may include additional suggested changes. I will say that the 2025 hearing did include some additional suggested changes on some of these boards, so we're working on those. But what this does is this tells you what building types or uses are allowed in each of these districts. So you can see historic conversion, i.e. the conversion of an existing historic house into more than one dwelling unit is allowed in 1B and 2A. A multiplex, which is four to six dwelling units, is allowed in 1B and 2A. And then after that, multi-unit dwelling, six or more, because this is a downtown, we do want to have more units. The commercial building and the mixed-use buildings, these are allowed in all of the districts, but the height varies by district and other dimensional standards vary by district. These are the dimensional standards, so just running down what dimensional standards are, so I think I said before they govern where you can build in terms of what lot sizes and also where the building is on the lot. So they range from the lot area, which is just the square footage of the lot. There's a minimum lot area that's required that has the frontage, which is the length of the lot along the street is what the frontage is. The facade build out is how much of that length has to be the building facade. In other words, how much building you have to have. That's important for walkability. What we don't want is large gaps between buildings that break up the teeth. You don't have a lot of those now, and we don't want to create an incentive to create those. Active ground floor talks about what's happening. If you're a pedestrian walking along, what can you see? Now, it used to be that active ground floors were just retail or restaurant, but what we found is that depending on the market cycle when something is built, It can be really hard to require that. People were building mixed-use buildings and leaving the ground floor empty because they couldn't fill it. So now when we think about active uses, we think about things that are just beyond retail and residential. It could be, for example, a building that also has, if it has a multifamily, It has the active lobby, it's got the common spaces, the spaces that create some sort of sense of vitality. It might be a public plaza counts as your active space where people can sit. Maybe there's a cafe in the building so people can sit and eat outside. So the planning theory has been to expand that in many communities. The base height is what I was just talking about, the height of the building and then the incentive height. Setbacks are how far away the building is from the front, the side, or the rear lot lines. Building coverage is how much of the lot is covered by the building itself. Pervious surface is how much of the lot allows water to filter into the ground underneath. This is really important, especially in downtown areas. We want to make sure that stormwater from a building and a lot are not running off into the public street, are not creating flooding problems, so the pervious surfaces help with that. Open space landscape is how much of the lot actually has green on it, so shrubs, trees, other plantings. Green score is for the higher buildings, so the pervious and the open space landscape applies at some level, but when you get to those taller buildings, The green score is a better measure than open space or pervious surface of how well the building is responding to and interacting with the environment in terms of stormwater efficiency, shade, etc. And that is something that the city passed Last year, no, end of 2024. End of 2024 for the green score. That applies not just to Medford Square, but to any of the districts. And then the parking requirements, how much parking is allowed on the site. So you can have a look at those. Actually, I'm just gonna go back. On the parking requirement, we have been receiving public comment, either at the meetings or written in at the last meeting, that parking is a large concern in Medford Square. That is not a surprise, given the street layouts, given the number of buildings on it. So one of the directions we heard from the February 2025 meeting was this, well, actually got moved. Sorry, I keep referring to it. 2025 joint hearing, but it was actually moved because of the snow to March 3rd. But one of the things that we heard was we need to get more creative on the parking standards and what's allowed. So that is something else that will come back to the March 2025 meeting. We've been working hard on that historic preservation and incentives for that and also on parking standards and some flexibility on that. So this again, because height is such an easy one for us to all think about and understand, some of the other analyses that we did was, I mentioned what's existing now, so this is an example of how as we're developing the zoning, we're going back and saying, okay, what's going to be the impact of the zoning as we make these changes? So we looked at, there's the aerial view, we looked at the existing building height, the allowed height based on the existing zoning, and then the allowed height in the proposed zoning. So we can get a sense of what's there already. This becomes really important when you're trying to incentivize certain things. So for example, for a historic building, If that historic building is four stories, we may want to put it in a district where the height is four stories because we don't want to incentivize a change to that. Whereas if we have an empty lot, we may want to make the stories higher because we want to incentivize some sort of change. So just the considerations we think about as we go back and forth. So, almost done. Next steps. Here we are. We are listening, we hope, to your comments and questions tonight. If you have them written for us, we'll take them back with us, or if you want to think about it and put the question in the online form, that would be great. And then March 25th, we are back to the joint hearing. We're going to provide our response, the directions that we received, and anything that we heard from today, and then just hear what the joint boards have to say about that, see if we need to provide anything else, or if they're at a point where they say, okay, now we need to have our own discussions. So as I said, really pleased that you're all here tonight. I'm going to stop talking and we're happy to take some questions. Don't know how you guys want to do that, so I'm going to turn it over to you, Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Right. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Emily, for the presentation. So at this time, if anybody has any questions, comments, feedback, input, concerns, anything they'd like to say about uh the presentation then would be very pleased to to hear it. I'd also like to recognize my colleague Councilor Anna Callahan who came in at around 6 30 so she's another resource uh resource as well and uh Alicia is Zoom set up to receive questions from people who are here virtually? Right so
[Alicia Hunt]: here I was do you want me to stop the screen share unless people want it yeah it's gonna do is usually we go back and forth with people on zoom want to raise their hands we can call them did turn on the Q&A function if people can write or they are welcome to write their questions in zoom in the Q&A function Or raise your hand and we can unmute you. And if people in the room have questions, we have a mic. Paula has the mic. So, okay. Sorry. So Paula has the mic for people in the room. We have to use the. Sorry, I should never have looked up at the screen. We have to use the mic so people on Zoom can hear the people in the room. And so, we can hand that around. And so, raise your hand on Zoom. I don't know if you heard that. Apparently, that was an issue. If you want to ask a question or make a comment or raise your hand in the room and Paola will, I'll call on you unless Matt, you want to call on people. But I, we were going to alternate between the Zoom and the.
[Matt Leming]: Is the audio set up so that we can hear?
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, Kevin is taking care of it so that we can hear audio from the Zoom if they ask questions on Zoom. Oh, my chat must be hidden. My chat says there's no, oh no, she just hasn't, the screen that they're showing hasn't cleared the chat. So yeah, there are actually no hands raised and there's nothing in the chat right now. Is anybody, nothing? Somebody must have a comment or a question. All right. So, we have one in the room. So, for tech help, we just want to make sure that this mic is, Paolo, do you want to just talk into it for a sec? No, this, I mean, Kevin, maybe we don't know how to turn on the mic in the room.
[Unidentified]: I know she's tapping on it, but words into it.
[Alicia Hunt]: Sorry, here comes Kevin. Do you want us to use?
[Maryanne Adduci]: He's got a wired one. We don't.
[Alicia Hunt]: I can. Does that mean people will just kind of have to come over here? We can't. Yeah. Is this the furthest it's going to go behind my chair? That will go further.
[Kevin Harrington]: With that one or. You can start.
[Alicia Hunt]: Do you want to just start with this one here? But you're going to have to come over here, unfortunately. If you wait one second or you can talk into this one.
[SPEAKER_03]: My question is regarding the electric substation that's on Salem Street. Who owns the land?
[Alicia Hunt]: National Grid owns that land. It is a National Grid.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do they have a long lease? I mean, are they planning to move out of there or what's the situation?
[Alicia Hunt]: Right. So National Grid owns the land and they have never indicated to us that they want to do anything else with it. We think it's an important substation for them. But usually utility companies would not move something like that very, very easily.
[SPEAKER_03]: OK. That's all I wanted to know.
[Alicia Hunt]: Great. Thank you. I'll just say there are no hands on the Zoom. There are no hands on the Zoom. My mic just stopped working. We're using this one instead.
[Kevin Harrington]: If you can keep going with this one, I'm going to bring this up to the booth and see if I can put it back up there.
[Alicia Hunt]: Mike is now working. Is the level ready? Good, okay.
[Paul Garrity]: Hi, I want to thank you for the good work you've all been doing, but my question is in listening to the presentation tonight you talked about zoning by use and zoning by district. And I was just wondering, does the zoning in its final form, will it reflect the impact on traffic? You know, if we have certain uses in certain parts of the square, how will zoning incorporate or reflect the quite a bit of traffic that, you know, transits that area today?
[Alicia Hunt]: Emily, you wanna, this is one that you've answered before.
[Emily Innes]: So that's, that's a great question. Traffic frequently comes up as a concern in zoning projects so you don't generally model traffic while doing zoning and that's because zoning gives permissions for somebody to do something, but the timeline on that you know a building owner might not do anything to their building for 50 years right and by that time. Any traffic projections wouldn't be valid so the zoning doesn't deal with it, but where that does come in is insight plan review or special permit process that the traffic study can be done at that point to understand the impact of any individual development on the square. We have experience driving through the square at different times of the day and evening so we understand the concern, but it's not one that zoning itself typically deals with. I think one of the that also gets to kind of some of the work that we're doing on parking management because parking and traffic tend to go hand in hand right if people don't have a place to park. They may do some circling around which doesn't help with the traffic. If they have other alternatives, such as the bus lines, and there's an encouragement to use that, it doesn't solve the trapping problem, but it does, you know, help address parts of it. So we are cognizant that that's a concern, but it's not necessarily one that the zoning itself can fully address. It's what happens when an applicant comes in that addresses that. So, Alicia, I don't know if you have anything else.
[Kevin Harrington]: Microphone check one, two. Pardon for the interruption, folks, but the wired microphone, wireless microphone rather, should now be working.
[Alicia Hunt]: Thank you, Kevin.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you, Kevin. We have three microphones now, folks. No, I'm not seeing anybody on the Zoom who's raising their hand. If there is anybody who wants to ask a question, just feel free to click the icon on Zoom.
[Maryanne Adduci]: Hi, my name is Rene. I live on 11 Ashland Street. And thank you for having this meeting. I'm trying to envision what that would be like if you allow 15 stories on Salem Street.
[Alicia Hunt]: So actually, to be clear, 15 stories is what's currently allowed, but it's not what is proposed. The only place it's proposed is the two parcels where those senior buildings are that are already 12 stories. Those two parcels and the parcel right next to the highway where the hotel is and where Transom is planning to build a parking garage. At this time, it's proposed as a four-story parking garage. So it's actually only those parcels that would allow 15 at this moment. Oh, the max that is proposed in this is 13 stories. And at this moment, somebody could propose to build a 15 story hotel in the middle of Medford Square and that would be allowed. And the quote, all other uses could be 15 stories in all of those areas that are listed as apartment two right now. So actually the zoning is lower. than what is currently allowed at its max. What it would not allow right today is a 15-story apartment building. That would not be allowed. So does that help a little? Because we're not envisioning that either. We don't think that that should be allowed.
[Maryanne Adduci]: One of the key concerns that I have, how does maintain our neighborhood to be really our neighborhood? Because we've been there like over 40 years. We love it there. and we want to continue to live there, but I don't know what that would be like if everything around us were towered by all sorts of buildings without green space. There isn't much green space to begin with, and that is a concern that I have.
[Alicia Hunt]: So a lot of the zoning. So what we're anticipating that there would be interested is a couple of stories, a couple of stories so right now those empty lots in Medford Square. We put them out for RFP and we asked what people wanted to do on them. And the max that they want to go up to is seven stories. and that would be on the building next to City Hall. And off the top of my head, the other one closer to the river, they're proposing, and I'm sorry if I can't tell you if it's four or five stories without looking at my computer, but that's what they're proposing and what they want to do with that location. What we do think would benefit the community a lot would be for all those single-story buildings along Riverside Ave, and the river, for them to maybe have two floors of apartments on them, because then you'd have more people coming downstairs, using the cafes, using the restaurants, being around in the evening and having a little bit of nightlife in the square without people having to drive in. Right now, all the nightlife in the square, practically, is people driving in, coming to the theater. And so this would bring some activity in the evenings when there aren't shows, at the theater. That's sort of what we're looking at. And I don't know if you had anything you wanted to add to that. There was one word you said that I missed. Oh, it was sort of about the green space. So one of the things that there are no requirements in our zoning right now is about pervious, like so land that water can seep into. And we don't have really good requirements around environmental stuff. So the green score is where people get points for grass, trees, bushes, green walls, you know, maybe you put vegetation on the wall. So adding some of that in, and I think you can speak a little better to some of the details of that area.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, actually on green score I'm going to pass it over to Paula who helped develop it. Sorry, Paula. But I will say that the we very much recognize that there's not a lot of green space in Medford Square. We also recognize the concern about the residential neighborhoods next to Medford Square. So there's a couple of standards we've put in there. One is to keep the height. They have to step back the height away from the residential districts. And one which we have not yet presented but have discussed, we will have the language for the March 25th meeting, is a daylight score that requires a certain amount of minimum daylight to be on those buildings, which will obviously have an impact on the design. I don't know if you want to talk about the purpose of the green score and some of the things that might lead to.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yeah, so the green score is going to be. is trying to considering the higher impact of more build out, trying to get that ecological green and stormwater management to be better than what it is at the moment. So you can have, there is like a table of a menu of many different things that you can do. And what it is based is to improve the ecosystem of the site. So if you have trees, bigger trees, that gives you more points. If you have a green roof, that it helps to absorb the water, that gives you more points. Pervious surface gives you more points. And so we have a minimum that every development needs to achieve so that we get that water management and that better public health, basically. Also, what he tries to do this zoning plan is to connect better to the public spaces that are already there along the river, for example. So, how can that be brought better into the area? So, how do we have some uses that are more connected to what is already there that it's not being really use.
[Maryanne Adduci]: I agree we have great resources in Medford Square, but how to be able to make them useful for everyone. I can't barely hear you. I'm sorry. I agree that we have wonderful resources in Medford Square. The grip of being one. How we can make that be accessible to everyone and for everyone to enjoy and have a healthier environment. So that's my concern. Thank you for listening.
[Alicia Hunt]: Since we don't have a lot of questions, I'll actually expound on that a little bit more. Because there's two different things that are going on. One is the zoning. What can people do? What are they allowed to do? What are they not allowed to do? And the other is that since 2020, the city has created a position of a director of economic development development and economic development staff, and we, and so those work in my office, and those people more engaged with developers and landowners than the city's really ever done before it used to be really just the mayor community development director doing that. And we said, we really need more people to engage with that. So the person who actually owns all of that between Riverside and Clippership, it's one company and it's one person. And we have been engaging with him, trying to work with him to help. How do we encourage him to develop something where you have businesses facing Clippership Ave. And what can we do to sort of incentivize him? As you may have noticed, some of those buildings are empty now. That was by his choice. One of them is in pretty bad disrepair and needs to be renovated. But we are trying to figure out how to encourage him to do stuff that faces Clippership Drive and therefore faces the river, maybe some dining patios or whatever. Could we work with him to relocate that city parking to inside the parcel or some other way so that you wouldn't sit there looking at cars? Or at least you might see Clippership Drive, but not all the parked cars, right? And how does that, how do we better use that space there? I'll just say it again, we're trying to engage with him, but not every developer in Landover is as responsive as others. So that's why we're very excited about our parcels, and that because we have the control over that we're working, I'm meeting more than weekly with the staff from that development agency, that development company, and their principal. To how do we create a pocket park there get a cafe I don't know if you've heard but he is been engaging with a grocery store to come and locate there. And so we're trying to get that project done, because we think those things were really benefit the square. And so, and the other thing he's committed to is doing a lot of public art with relation to that, mostly on that parcel but that he will be funding the art as part of it. We keep talking about a parking garage but the mayor and I have been very clear with him that we don't want it to like, look like that. concrete parking garage, how do we make it look nice, like if you ever go to assembly row, you're like oh that's an interesting kind of wall mural and then you go oh actually that's hiding a parking garage behind it, like that's kind of the feel that we're going for. and that he has agreed to doing that was what was in his proposal. So working with the property owners is sort of separate from the zoning, but we've encouraged them all the way in. So the transom developer owner, the one we're working with on our parcels, he has given us very concrete suggestions for what would and would not work in the zoning to make his parcel work. Whereas some of the other property owners, we've asked them and asked them if they would give us comments and feedback and I don't have anything. So that's some of what we're trying to do is build those relationships.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, and Alicia if I can jump in on the zoning side so, so interesting when you're doing zoning because there's a lot of kind of misconceptions about how zoning works. I do want to make it clear that zoning isn't retroactive in other words it's not passed, and then everybody who already has a business or a building has to comply with that zoning, it comes in place when something changes. So the things that we talked about with the green score, some of the dimensional standards, some of the parking and preservation, that would come in if something changes. It's not that business A that's been there for a while has to comply. that can sometimes alleviate concerns, but can also, you know, raise. Well, we I thought we were going to get X. Well, nobody's come in with a permit yet. So that's why I say zoning provides permissions. It creates some opportunities. It has some limitations, but it doesn't force anybody to change. I think the city is in the unique opportunity for Medford Square that it has some land that can work for for a closer change or more or more current change. But some of these things could, somebody could come in next year with that change, somebody might come in in five years with the change. So what we try and do is listen to the community, set up those conditions with the right balance of permissions and limitations, and that's what we're hoping to hear over this process, and then allow those with the property, whether it's the city or private property owners to come forward to meet those goals. So, you know, your comments, if we'd like to hear see more green, that's really important. Your questions about traffic really important is what we try to integrate into the zoning.
[Unidentified]: Any more questions?
[Matt Leming]: No, I'm not seeing any more questions on zoom. Is there any more Ralph? Ralph?
[Ralph Klein]: My question is, what impact have you looked at to solar rights? Because it's an east-west corridor. You already run into this at 300 Salem Street, where the apartments behind are going to be shaded for a good part of the day. Now, I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe you have to have solar for 50% to 60% of the day to put solar on your home. I have solar on my home. I have high-velocity heat pumps. We converted all that. Works excellent. But what are you taking away if you put a building that's too tall in front of these one- and two-story buildings? The other issue is the traffic in Medford Square, since that rotary's been done, is horrible. Chevalier Auditorium is utilized, but parking is atrocious. You need to get more parking, and the thing you're trying to do with 300 Salem Street eight parking spaces for 14 units which might be down to nine. You need to keep the 1.5 in Medford Square for the buildings that go in there and have additional parking for the businesses that are there. It's my understanding the city has no, if you have a commercial building or commercial unit in your building, you don't have to provide parking. I found that out on the 300 Salem Street issue. There's no parking, it's only for the residents. They're gonna have a business in there. So we need to look at that aspect of it as well. If you're gonna have these first floors that are gonna be a business cafe, you gotta look at that. You gotta look at the people's solar rights who were there on these streets. It's an east-west corridor. So that's my statements. Thank you. Questions?
[Emily Innes]: So, one of the things we did do in one of the earlier meetings and it is should be up on the city's zoning page for in terms of the presentations that are there, because we showed it again to the Community Development Board is we did do some shadow studies that would show where the shadow would fall relative to the building for the buildings along the quarters within the square. As I mentioned, we have a daylight standard proposed daylight standard, but that looks at how it's hitting the facade rather than the roof. So, you know, so we're hoping that people you know minimum amount of sunlight coming into the residential buildings. The shadow studies, I don't think showed anything on the, that would hit the roof, so it was all across the street. But we can take another look at that to address that concern. On the traffic side and the traffic, I mean, we have heard you out. I really appreciate your comment on parking. We're still working on that now in terms of how to provide that base level plus flexibility. So we'll have something for the 25th of March on that. But your comments are really helpful. I don't know if you have anything that you want to add. About because you'd mentioned the commercial regulations. Yeah.
[Matt Leming]: Yeah, I could I could take it. I can't answer every, every single detail about that because again the consultants are still coming up with recommendations related to parking which we're going to hear at the, at the March 25 meeting, what I will say is a general point about the scope of what zoning can solve and what it can't solve. What I will say is a lot of the traffic in Medford Square is due to the traffic being filtered out from 93 and kind of being poured out into Medford Square. And that is not something that zoning will be able to solve in a million years. That's where you need to start getting the state involved. That's where we need to talk about potentially changing traffic patterns in Medford Square. That's just not something that we have the ability to solve with this. With regards to parking, zoning does have some impact on parking, but we can't, for instance, change the zoning and then make another parking garage pop up behind Colleen's. That's going to depend on things like state funding. That would depend on the decisions of private developers. We could potentially build incentives into the zoning to encourage more uh structures with additional parking to be built but with But yeah, so frequently when we hear feedback about these proposals, we do tend to hear about a very wide number of issues and potential issues people might have with Medford Square, whichever other area is being rezoned. And I do just want to make it clear that zoning has an impact on what can potentially be built in the future. if developers decide to take it up, which they may not, but it can't address every class of problems. It's a critical step that we need to do, but I do want to make that part clear.
[Ralph Klein]: Alicia, I don't know if you have anything to add to... The other thing I want to say is, I understand it's the rotary that's creating the problem, but all of Salem Street, I cross it three times a day, four times a day. It's horrific every point of the day because the new 93 rotary. I know the city has nothing to say about that. The state did that fiasco. It's an absolute joke. We saw a police car trying to go around and all the traffic trying to get under the bridge, didn't work. They need to widen that and start with this. And when you merge into Medford Square, It takes away the right-of-way from the rotary and gives it to the people coming off 93 from the northbound side. That's something the city should have some say in. The other part of it is if you're putting apartment buildings on top of the businesses, the business needs parking, they need parking. A simple four-story parking garage, how many cars are they going to hold? Is it going to accommodate the people in that buildings that you're putting there? Or are they going to be resolved to moving into that four-story parking garage? That should be more for people coming into the square, not for parking for people who live in the square. People who live in the square should have their own parking, not go out to side streets. When they built the condos on Salem Street and Court Street, the parking has gone down to Park Street. Middle East called Park Street. but we have all the businesses on Salem Street parking down there during the day, so the residents have no parking. That's gonna filter into the people who live on Ashland, Oakland, and all over the place if this happens. You need to look at the long-term results and look at what happened in the past. They took away a ton of parking when they built that condo, the sink building. I travel all over the city, primarily on the northern side or the Glendale section, But I do go up High Street into West Medford, I go all over. And I see the traffic getting horrible. And everybody is parking everywhere. Salem Street and Park Street have been horrible. Getting to the Roberts Junior High, it's backed up all the way to the Fellsway and Fulton Street is backed up. So I mean, there's a huge issue going on with parking and getting traffic around. And nobody's addressing it. It's been horrible. Thank you.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you, Ralph.
[Alicia Hunt]: Just to note that something that we're aware of is that since the pandemic, people who were using public transportation have been using it a lot less. And more and more people have gotten their own cars and have gotten used to driving and parking. So it's not just that new things have been built. The sink condos were built with two parking spots per unit. And the problem is that more people are choosing to own their own cars. and to drive places rather than to use public transportation, walk or bicycle. And I know that a lot of people don't like bicycles and I know that a lot of people don't like that rotary. But as somebody who walks and bikes through that rotary, I feel a million times safer than I ever did before. My children were walking through that rotary starting when they were in fifth grade. to get from Salem Street to City Hall. And I just wish that it was the way it is now, because it is dramatically safer for people who are trying to move without using cars. And the easier we make it for people without cars, the more people will walk. A lot of people didn't used to let their children walk through there, feel comfortable doing it now. So we have to figure out that balance. How do we get people? There are some people who have to, I like to frame it this way. Some people have to use their cars. They don't have a choice. But you want to support buses and people riding buses because every person on that bus is one fewer person you have to deal with in your car and one fewer car causing you a traffic jam. So I just kind of put that out there that we're trying to figure out how to shift that. But it's not zoning.
[Ralph Klein]: It's cobblestone on the edge.
[Alicia Hunt]: No, the bikes are supposed to be on the asphalt on the 12 foot wide asphalt. That is where the bicycles are supposed to go. The cobblestone is just there to keep people from zooming through there and from going so quickly.
[Ralph Klein]: It's over the curve. So they're not going to jump the curb to go over the cobblestone. The bicycle lane could be on the other side next to the people walking.
[Alicia Hunt]: It is. That is. There is no bicycle lane in the road of the Rotary. Bicycles should not be in the Rotary.
[Ralph Klein]: Coming up to the Rotary as well. coming up to the Rotary, the bicycle lane is quite wide. The sidewalk is quite wide.
[Alicia Hunt]: There's no bicycle lane. No, sorry, there's no bicycle lane coming up to the Salem Street Rotary. I ride my bicycle through there.
[Ralph Klein]: I drive there every day and I see a white line out there. They put a bicycle lane down Park Street.
[Alicia Hunt]: It's not a bike lane, that's just a marked shoulder. It's just the shoulder, that's not the bike lane. Sorry.
[Matt Leming]: Well, yeah. So I believe we've had plenty. We've had plenty of time for the Q&A, and I'm not seeing any folks on Zoom. So I think it's about time to wrap up. And if we have for folks here in person, if you do have any questions, just informally in case you didn't want your questions and concerns to be live streamed over to YouTube, then feel free to come up and approach us in person. continue to discuss. But with that, I'd like to thank everybody so much for coming out here and attending. Once again, thank you to Medford Community Media for putting this on and handling the AV. And thank you very much to our city staff and consultants for coming out here as well. And with that, yeah, I'm gonna wrap up there. Come to the joint public hearing on the 25th of March at City Hall to hear some of the more concrete recommendations on how this could be changed. And once again, if you have any comments or questions that you'd like the boards to hear, then email, I believe it's ccmembers at medfordma.gov. And what is it? OCD at medfordma.gov for
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