[Zac Bears]: Special Joint Session, Medford City Council and Community Development Board, March 25th, 2026 is called to order. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Councilor Callahan's absent. I'm still in session. Councilor Leming?
[Matt Leming]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Mullain? Present. Councilor Scarpelli? Present. Councilor Hsing? Councilor Tseng is absent at the moment. Vice President Lazzaro. President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Present. Five present, two absent. The meeting is called to order. Councilor Callahan is stuck on a train, and Councilor Tseng will be joining momentarily. Chair Carr.
[Doug Carr]: Very good. All right, I'm going to call the, my name is Doug Carr. I'm going to call the Benefit Community Development Board meeting to order. I'll do a roll call. John Anderson. Present. Sean Began? Page Buldini? Present. Dina Colagaro?
[Dina Caloggero]: Present.
[Doug Carr]: Ari Goffman-Fishman?
[Dina Caloggero]: Present.
[Doug Carr]: And myself, Doug Carr, present. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Announcements, accolades, remembrances, reports, and records. Records of the special joint meeting of March 3rd, 2026 were passed to Councilor Leming. I know we approved these in our previous regular meeting, but wanted to make sure that both boards had approved the meeting minutes. Councilor Leming?
[Matt Leming]: I find the records in order and move to approve.
[Zac Bears]: On the motion to approve by Councilor Leming, seconded by? Seconded. Seconded by Vice President Lazzaro. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan, absent. Councilor Leming?
[Matt Leming]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Malauulu? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli?
[Zac Bears]: Councilor Scarpelli is in transit, so may just need to skip him. Okay.
[Matt Leming]: Councilor Tseng just entered.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Tseng?
[Matt Leming]: Present.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro. President Bears.
[Zac Bears]: Yes, five in the affirmative, two absent, the motion passes.
[Doug Carr]: I just want to mention that we have members of the PDS staff both here and on Zoom. Daniel's here, Alicia's on Zoom. Daniel, we do not have any meeting minutes to approve at this time, is that correct? Okay. So we will defer that. Okay.
[Zac Bears]: Do you want us to just distribute our records to you? Yes. Or were they not distributed to you?
[Dina Caloggero]: You want to just quickly read this?
[Danielle Evans]: Yeah, I guess so. I'm, I'm not clear on, were we, were we supposed to be maintaining separate minutes, or was there just going to be joint?
[Zac Bears]: I don't think so, but. Okay. I just want to make sure that our minutes get sent to you. So if they aren't, then we'll make sure that that happens.
[Danielle Evans]: Yeah, I didn't see them.
[Zac Bears]: Okay.
[Danielle Evans]: It could be, it could be an oversight.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Yeah. We'll double check on that, and we'll make sure they get to you, and get distributed to the Community Development Board. Not an issue. All right, great. Hearings 26023 offered by Councilor Leming, public hearing proposed amendments to the Medford Square Ordinance, Chapter 94, Medford Square. If there's anything you need to add for the Community Development Board on that notice.
[Doug Carr]: Yes. So this is our third joint public hearing on Medford Square Zoning Amendment. It was opened on January 21st, 2026. We'll be expecting to hear a presentation from MNS in a few moments. I want to say for the record that members Buldini and Biegun both have missed the March 3rd session of the public hearing, but have signed the Mullen Rule Affidavits attesting that they have watched the video recording of the session, so they remain eligible to vote on the matter tonight.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you chair Carr. So tonight we are reviewing the proposed amendments the Medford zoning ordinance for Medford Square. This is our third joint public hearing of the year on this. And in the past two public hearings we have reviewed. We had kind of the initial draft as we left it last year. We reviewed that. We submitted a motion at our previous meeting on March 3rd that contained a number of comments and questions for our planning development sustainability staff, as well as our zoning consultant from Innis Land Group, and they have taken all of those, that motion, all of the questions, compiled it, proposed amendments, changes to the proposed zoning amendment. And tonight we're going to hear from Emily Innes from Innes Land Group, who's going to present those changes. And then we will be able to ask questions as members of the Council and Community Development Board once we finish the presentation. After that, we will hear from members of the public as part of the public hearing, and then we will make a decision on whether to close or continue the public hearing at that time. So with that, I will turn it over to Emily Innes for the presentation.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. I'm just going to share my screen. Make sure it comes up. All right, so for the record, Emily Keyes Ennis, president of Ennisland Strategies Group, and I'm here with my colleague Grant Perry, who's a planner with the firm. I am going to walk you through an overview of the changes that we have made in response to the other public hearings and also to staff comments. So very quickly, where we are with the scope, we're still in phase A, is scheduled to terminate somewhere around the end of March, and we are here today on the 25th. The first thing I want to take you through is the map update. So since we last met, we also had a public meeting, and we incorporated some comment from that. This was the Medford Square map that was originally provided to the joint hearing. I'm going to show you some changes in the boundary, some parcels that were removed and some parcels that were added. I'm also going to call out the fact that the colors have changed. We heard that the blues and the purples were a little hard to read together. And we have also renamed them so that there's a clear understanding that these districts apply only to Medford Square. So we have Medford Square 1 in what I'm going to call the lilac color here. Medford Square 2 is a brighter blue. Medford Square 3 is this green color and Medford Square 4 is the purple color. Talking about the changes to the boundaries, so the long dash black line is the boundary itself. And then the different colors and dashes indicate what we added or subtracted. So the first thing that we added was the public library. Then there is a four unit house right above the CVS that is part of the local historic district. We have removed that from the boundary. So you see the black boundary goes around there. There are two buildings up here that have now been, they're still within the district, but they have been changed from MS2 to MS1, which is the lowest height allowance. As we come over to this area of Salem Street here, you'll see that this area also, which is right next to a residential district, is now MS1 instead of MS2. And we have these two parcels up here that are part of this residential. We have removed those from the boundary. So heights going down in these two areas. This area here, I believe, is all currently a commercial one district. But these two are in the residential so that they have been removed. And I believe that is all of the changes to the maps. And just as a reminder, Medford Square one is four-story as a base height or as of right height with a one-story if they meet the incentive zone requirements. Medford square two is five stories with two stories as the incentive zone. Medford square three, the green is seven plus two is the incentive zone. And Medford square four is eight by right with five as the incentive zone. Obviously we've called out height as a differential because it's a little bit easier for people to visualize but there are other dimensional standards and requirements that may put additional limitations on what could actually be developed on each of those parcels. With that, I'm going to go through the other zoning updates that we have addressed and what we've done. So we received a memorandum after the last joint meeting of these two bodies that asked us to look at specific categories. So I'm just going to note what we have done. So under dimensional requirements, we did review the side and rear setbacks, and there are some additional dimensional standards in there that address those. Just made sure that they were, that we understood the limitations that they might be placing on new development or additions. We did add dimensional waivers for eligible historic buildings to encourage the preservation and adaptive reuse and we updated the building height definition. City planning staff in particular had called out the fact that the current definition did not work well for the changes in the topography in the Medford Square area. For parking, we modified the parking uses in Table A, and there's a new note there. We provided in the incentive structure incentives to have additional public parking as part of a new development. And we've added two sections to allow for either reductions to parking space requirements or shared parking for across multiple buildings. For historic preservation, we added a historic conversion definition and use standards to that conversion. Waivers for dimensional standards and parking requirements for the eligible historic buildings. Again, to encourage the adaptive reuse and additional incentives for the preservation of historic buildings. We discussed the map for the boundaries. In arts, we actually had a lot of arts uses in there already, but we did make sure that public entertainment or recreation facility was a yes in all of the districts. For definitions and development standards, we added the requirements for the daylight minimum, and we addressed fire exits on public ways by providing more specific information. So it was a little bit clearer as to what we were requiring. For incentive zoning, we did modify some of the bonuses downward to address concerns that those bonuses shouldn't allow for a full story. We added the community solar incentive, a public parking incentive, and the historic building preservation incentives. And we also added, we had an incentive for local businesses on the ground floor, but we also added an incentive to help existing ground floor tenants during construction by adding an incentive for maintaining pre-construction rent for a period of time. We did update the table of uses and added in the table of dimensional standards an additional maximum height requirement in feet as well as the existing height requirements in stories. And there's another note that restricts the maximum height along High Street. And then, as noted earlier, we changed the Medford Square sub-district names to make it clear that these apply to Medford Square only and to no other areas of the city. And with that, I do have the draft available to answer questions and I have some additional diagrams if we need them. But I'm going to stop there with that overview to hit the key highlights and turn it back to the joint entities for any questions or discussion.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Emily. Appreciate that presentation of the changes that you made. At this point, would we like to go into a little bit more of a detailed presentation on the memorandum, or do we want to go to questions? We can kind of have a general overview. Not getting any feelings from either. Okay. Could we go into more detail, Emily? Great.
[Emily Innes]: The short and sweet is better and sometimes it's not. Let me just check. OK. Two seconds. I'm just going to reshare. What I'm going to do is I'm going to actually share the draft zoning itself. And then I'm going to walk you through because I suspect some of the people listening in may also not have had a chance to read the zoning. So this should be, this is in your packet. So I'm just going to walk through section by section so people understand where information is and then how to look at it. And I see it's on screen. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit more. I know it's sometimes painful to try and read this on screen. The first thing we do is we add this new district to the division into districts, which is a component of the zoning. And then I did set up comments earlier. Let's see if it works properly. Yes. Decided not to scroll through everything. So you have the table of uses and the table of dimensional standards are separate PDFs in the zoning. And the idea is that these would be added to those tables. And so all of the uses that you see on the left-hand side, starting with A, residential uses, this is the structure of your existing table. And this table includes both the uses and the existing parking requirements. What we're showing here is what each of these districts would be, the MS1 through MS4. And then where you see yellow highlighting, and this is true throughout the zoning changes, the yellow highlighting indicates the things that we have changed since our last draft. So you're seeing, for example, here that a three unit dwelling is not allowed in all of these districts. A multiplex is now allowed in MS2. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of the screen, just remember that the first column on the left after the description is MS1. then two, then three, then four, because that header is going to disappear as I scroll through. So I'm just going to scroll through slowly and just note that in the parking column here, it's not that the number of spaces has changed. What has changed here is that there is now a footnote number four. So we'll see that as we go through the end. You have quite a long table of uses, so I will scroll slowly. MS1 and MS2, you can see townhouses are not allowed in here. Historic conversion is allowed everywhere. We've got a footnote on the spaces. Community center, adult recreational center, nonprofit is allowed in all of the districts now. Just sort of scroll to the next yellow, public entertainment or recreational facility. I just mentioned that. Yellow, yes in all districts. Again, slowly scrolling through to the next one. Bank and other financial institution we have as a special permit by the community development board. And I think that is in part also to help control drive throughs. So that's something to consider. Neighborhood retail allowed in all of the districts. Adults use marijuana not allowed in any of these districts and the same with doggie daycare. And again, these all came out of comments that we heard through the process to date. Parking garage or parking area or garage not accessory to permitted principal use. In other words, this is now its own. A principal use is allowed, you see, not allowed in MS1, allowed in the others by special permit. There's a little footnote for MS2. And then the parking area or garage accessory to a principal use within 500 feet is allowed everywhere, but we actually have standards later in this district. I think this will become part of a cleanup in terms of how to deal with parking throughout the city on that particular use. And then yes to everybody for an accessory use. Municipal parking area garage as a principal use depends on the district. We do have an outstanding question for city planning staff on that. Research and testing laboratory allowed by special permit just in the MS3. Just note that Atrius, for example, is located in MS3. Some footnotes added to two of the uses. Light manufacturing allowed everywhere. Family daycare home large is allowed everywhere. Swimming pool, this actually is going to be recommended, it's allowed, but this needs to be addressed within the table of uses and the cleanup. Kinos, same thing, and we have a question on that for city staff. And then mixed use community, this is actually the neighborhood commercial nodes that was part of an earlier discussion. It's not appropriate for something that's already a mixed use district, so it's a no there. Then you see in yellow the footnotes that we've added to the table of uses. So parking as a principal use in MS2 is only permitted in a particular area. That's to do with the current development pattern and composition of the existing parcels. Light manufacturing is actually restricted in square footage. And then footnote four allows the parking requirement for residential units to be reduced to 0.8 per dwelling unit if and only if the requirements in section 94.6.9 are met. And those are new requirements that you will see in yellow. For the table of dimensional requirements, again, this is a separate PDF in the zoning and this would be added to that table. So here's where you see that we've added the feet in height as well, or the height in feet, sorry, I let that go backwards. We have the stories, now we're adding the height in feet as an additional restriction. You'll see in for the historic conversion, we have changed the methodology for calculating the number of allowable units by reducing from 900 square feet to 600 square feet. Again, we would like to keep an incentive for people to do conversions. High street restriction where the max, maximum base height in the particular district is six stories and the maximum incentive height is two stories with some restrictions there. some additional ability. We had had a question about making sure that certain, that we weren't overly restricting development and building coverage came up. So again, if the development achieves the minimum green score, then we can address, increase the maximum building coverage. That will actually be quite a help to buildings that are historic. Green score, just clarifying that either of these apply, not both. Here are the new definitions that we add. So this is to section 94-12.0 definitions, which apply to the entire city. So we have, we're already planning to do building coverage and the change to the building height. We've also added historic conversion multiplex pervious surface and open space landscape. And then this section 94-9.6 is the, so those were the other sections of the zoning. This is now the Medford Square District as a whole. And again, I'm going to scroll down to the yellow places or yellow highlighted text. So this is where we've changed the name to Medford Square 1, 2, 3, and 4. Side and rear setbacks, just change the number of unit it applies to. Again, looking at what actually exists and responding to comments. Height step back requirements. So this gets into the protection of the existing residential districts from new development. There are two methods, three here, the height step back requirements. And six here, the transition to adjacent residential districts. Both of those govern the height of the buildings relative to the side and rear lot lines from a Medford Square district to an adjacent residential district. They actually work, depending on your perspective of what you're trying to build, either work together or against each other, but they do further restrict the height. And if there are questions, I can show how that works. Some modification on adjace, on the engaging ground floor for ground floor active frontage. And then here is where in waivers. So we split there, it used to be waivers and dimensional standards. We've split it to the standards and this new section on waivers. This is where we've introduced eligible historic building and created the waivers for dimensional standards, parking. How an eligible historic building is defined, linking that to the Medford Historical Commission's practice for demolition delay. And what happens if a building is not deemed to be eligible by the Medford Historic Commission, such that a building that is not eligible is also not now subject to demolition review. Then we've added the new use standards. So these are, if you are doing a historic conversion, you have to meet these standards here. And so it goes into how the building can or cannot be modified, how dimensional standards apply to the historic building, what needs to be happening with parking, and what happens with fire escapes and other additions. We then move into the development incentives. This is 9.6.6. changes here, so community amenities, we dropped down to a half story, added the community solar installation, added the incentive for public parking, having heard from many, many people about concerns about parking in the area. added incentives for rehabilitation projects. So this is a pre-construction rent. So to help with existing tenants, a rehabilitation project maintaining the pre-construction rent for existing ground floor tenants for two years. post construction certificate of occupancy. A new development rehabilitating an eligible historic building or integrating all of the facades visible from a public right of way. And then a new development rehabilitating the principal street facing facade or key architectural elements. And then modifying the environmental resilience incentives. There's no change to the design guidelines or standards. Adding that sidewalk materials need to meet the city's standards. Modifying open space to allow for feasibility of contiguous space. Important to add that feasibility in a downtown area. Adding the daylight minimum. So we had talked about this before, but this is the actual text to make sure that Sunlight is, a building is not completely blocked by having sunlight for it. And this is for existing residential buildings. And so that would apply, just to make sure everybody does know this, that that applies whether the residential building is in Medford Square or is in one of the districts, residential districts outside of Medford Square. So one of the adjacent districts. And then fire exits, as I mentioned, making sure that the language is more specific about emergency access and where it can be on the building. And then 9.6.9 is a reductions to parking space requirements. So there's the purpose. This section two is how the parking requirement for residential use can be reduced. And so all of these things have to be met. There's also dual use for mixed use developments, and the ratios that are allowed here, that's this table, and the additional standards. And then 9.6.10 is allowing shared parking across multiple buildings and how that would work. Distance, joint units agreements, the shared parking agreements, and the signage. And those are the greater detail of the changes.
[Zac Bears]: All right. That was more detailed. Do we have questions for members of the Council on the changes that have been proposed in response to the motion that the Council and the Community Development Board submitted on March 3rd? Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Yes, I would just like to thank Inez very much for all of these, for taking into account and incorporating the feedback taken from the Council and the Community Development Board at the joint meetings and boiling it down to uh, some very actionable, um, items and, uh, specific recommendations. So I just would like to thank you for all of your work on that. I'm really liking what I'm seeing in these slides. Uh, I would like to ask about the change of the name of the districts. Um, I could see it's, um, the districts, uh, were all changed from, uh, MX1 to, et cetera, to the Medford Square districts. Um, and I can understand that, The purpose of that is likely because, you know, there's a lot of Medford square specific changes. Is that a pattern that you think would be necessary for the rest of the for the rest of the zoning? Like, when like, when Tufts Boston Avenue comes up, will there be. Tufts Boston like Boston Avenue specific districts or do you think that Medford Square is unique enough of an area to merit its own classifications of sub districts.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. I think we could go either way on this. The changes here was, I think there were, originally we were hoping that the districts would, you know, if you were in an MX1, you would broadly, throughout the city, you would have broadly the same dimensional standards, although some of the uses might change. I think as we were working on Medford Square, we realized how much more fine-grained we had to be. It was starting to get too confusing for people with the 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B. So I think with Tufts and Boston Avenue, we would step back and have a look and see, does Medford Square now provide a precedent? for the additional areas and those two additional areas? Or do we want to go back to something that was used in the previous two districts? And I think it will very much depend on the level of tailoring that we need to do for those. But certainly, that should be part of the conversation for those two districts.
[Matt Leming]: Okay. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. Do we have other questions from members of the council at this time? All right. Seeing none, Chair Clark.
[Doug Carr]: All right. We're going to go down the list here. John Anderson, do you have any questions? I can't imagine the answer is no.
[John Anderson]: Thank you. You know, I just took a moment to unmute there. I'll start with something really simple. What's LC? in the usage tables.
[Zac Bears]: You know, one person. That's the loading code requirement for any property. But Emily, if you want to explain it further.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah absolutely. So loading code just means you know the typical terminology and zoning is parking and loading. So parking is people who live on the property people who work on the property visitors the property depending on the type of property. I'll see the loading portion of that is having spaces available for deliveries moving vehicles whatever the use of the property might require for loading. So some will have it and some won't.
[John Anderson]: Okay, thank you. I noticed also in that table, for example, a single family house is not allowed in any of the districts, but there's still a parking definition there. What does that mean in that context?
[Emily Innes]: Good question. So again, this is the table of uses for the entire city. We are just adding these columns. Once a zoning, any zoning amendment is adopted, it is integrated into the rest of the zoning ordinance. So this table already exists and should the city council adopt this zoning, these columns would be added to this table. We're just showing for ease of reference the existing parking and loading standards for the existing uses in the table. And then the purpose of this table is to say which of these uses are allowed or not allowed or allowed by special permit in these four districts.
[John Anderson]: Okay. Let me just get back there for a second. Okay, yeah, I see the point, although these are all for Medford Square only districts.
[Emily Innes]: Correct, but the columns will be integrated into the larger table. So we need to show how, so when this is updated, again, assuming city council adopts it, and it's integrated into that PDF, which is the table of uses and parking standards, What that means is that the left hand side the list of uses is already existing. And what we're saying is detach one unit dwelling which is a use that is allowed in some parts of the city is not allowed here. So that M.S. 1 M.S. 2 M.S. 3 and M.S. 4 column will now be those four columns will now be added. to that PDF that is the table of uses and parking standards.
[Zac Bears]: Essentially, we're looking at a snippet of the whole use table. All of the zones in the city are in the use table. It's a very wide table. It's 30 or 40 columns and we're just looking at the four of them that are applying to this zoning amendment.
[John Anderson]: Thank heavens. Let's see, what else? I noticed somewhere you went over historic conversions and I looked as though, if I read it correctly, historic conversions apply to one unit buildings.
[Emily Innes]: I'm just scrolling down. Yes, that was the original definition is it is a historic conversion that was something we talked about last spring, but the idea is that it is a conversion of an existing structure that was originally designed for one unit use to a unit or a multi-unit dwelling. That is correct.
[John Anderson]: Are there any single family dwellings in these districts?
[Emily Innes]: Yes, there are a few off Salem Street. I think Governor, I'd have to check which of those are single, but I believe both Governor's Avenue and Salem Street still have some single unit buildings.
[John Anderson]: Okay.
[Emily Innes]: There's zone C1, but they are, I believe some of those are still single unit, yeah.
[John Anderson]: Pre-existing.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, exactly.
[John Anderson]: I noticed that you, somewhere in here, there's also the definite, you talk about design guidelines. and that the Community Development Board, by majority vote, I think, could implement design guidelines?
[Emily Innes]: Yes, that is correct.
[John Anderson]: OK. Now, are design guidelines something that actually have teeth, or are they more sort of suggestions to the applicant?
[Emily Innes]: So just so that people know where we are, we're on line 227, which is on page 21. And you'll see design guidelines and applicability of development standards is the title. So these design guidelines are used in two ways. They are, generally they are advisory in the site plan review process. site plan review is requires that the board look at very specific topics. And that's where the development standards, which is mentioned in number two down on line 238. The development standards are all based on the criteria for site plan review. So design guidelines can act advisory in that section. And then at the special permit level, where there is a higher requirement for a public benefit and Unlike site plan review, the use is discretionary. They have more teeth at that level. And the goal is that they be used in either of those processes.
[John Anderson]: Right. What does more teeth mean?
[Emily Innes]: So they become an integral part of the special permit process and they can be required at that point as opposed to advisory.
[John Anderson]: I did a little bit of research in other communities and they make reference also to design standards, design guidelines, and then there's also something called design review. Is that just the same thing with another name or is that something different?
[Emily Innes]: That's a great question. So some communities will have a separate design review board and that board then is an advisory board to the planning board of the city's case, the community development board and what they do. They do the design review according to the design guidelines that have been set up and then they provide an advisory recommendation to the planning board. Other communities would have their planning board, or again, in this case, their community development board, do the design review as part of their regular permitting process. So I think that is an open question for the city of Medford as to how they would like to do it. The way we have set it up here is because there is not an existing design review board, that it would be part of the community development board's review process.
[John Anderson]: Now, something I noticed, I believe it was Boston. This was the Boston permitting process for what they call small developments, which is like anything less than, I forget whether it was 20,000 square feet or 50,000 square feet. Above those thresholds, the process is extremely complex. But the sort of simplified process, one of the things it said was that if the applicant needed a zoning variance, then the design guidelines, well, let me put it this way. If the zoning board granted a variance, it would be conditional upon the reviewing body, whether it's the CDB or the design review board, it would be conditional upon them approving the design, which in effect gives it teeth. Am I correct in that? I mean, I don't expect you to know every rule of every city, town, and commonwealth, but does that seem logical?
[Emily Innes]: So Boston's Article 80 is a very different zoning structure from the rest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Not to say that we can't learn things from how they do it, but the entire is kind of set up differently. They have different bodies and boards. There are certainly other communities that have different structures for reviewing things. For example, there are many communities that, or some communities rather, that have an administrative review for projects that are under a certain threshold. We did some for the city of Pittsfield, established an administrative review process and then thresholds that kicked it up to their community development board. So there are multiple ways of changing the way this is done. We haven't, I think we've already got some administrative review thresholds in the zoning that we did last year, the overall zoning that came through from, I'm trying to remember what it was. But at any rate, it's it's not something that would be changed by the Medford Square District. We're keeping your existing permitting processes in place and approval processes in place.
[John Anderson]: Yeah, I know in certain site plan reviews that have come before this board, there's been some confusion about who signs off on what. And, you know, it may sound like I'm trying to set up a kind of more hoops for developers to jump through. And in a way I am, but I think we also need to simplify it at the same time and make it very clear who signs up on, who signs off on what, and that there's a clear path through the myriad of reviews and restrictions. So I was very interested in the idea of a zoning change actually meaning that the community development board in our case would have to approve the project because there was a zoning change that was needed to move the project forward. That's kind of my thought on the subject. Let's see, what else? Oh yeah. The other thing is with the map. I really appreciate the fact that It seems to have settled down and it's much more readable now with the color change. In walking around Bedford Square, it would be very useful in trying to figure out how these changes will affect what we see as we walk around. If I were able to look at the map and see what actual parcel that is, parcel or address, sort of like what we had on the, you know, back some time ago, we were doing residential rezoning and there was that interactive map. I found that very useful in trying to assess the effects. And I wonder if we could do something like that for Medford Square.
[Emily Innes]: We do have an interactive map set up. We just have to confirm it with the working group. And fortunately, we're having a meeting tomorrow. This is the logistical group where we talk about the information that's needed to be presented and the dates. So we just have to confirm that layout, and that can be released once that's been done.
[John Anderson]: Okay. Because, I mean, I guess I'm just speaking for myself, but I bet a number of other people have the same problem. It's very difficult to look at these tables, look at the map, and figure out what that really means, what that's really going to mean five or 10 years from now. I guess that's all I have to say for now. Thank you very much. You're welcome.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, John. John Biggan, you're next. OK, thank you. I have a couple of notes.
[Sean Beagan]: OK. Do I have to press this button to hold it down? Okay. All right, thanks. Thank you, Emily, very much for all the work you're doing here. I had a couple notes. First, while we were sitting here, I noticed that on our map for the zoning, the Medford Square 4, the map has it as five incentive floors, but on the table in our Proposed regulation, you have four incentive floors, so I think we just have to bring that consistent. I don't know if it was meant to be five or four.
[Emily Innes]: Sorry. Forgot the rule. Thank you for bringing that up. I thought we had corrected that so they were the same. So we'll fix that.
[Sean Beagan]: OK. And then on footnote four on the table of uses that deals with the parking requirements that if you hit them, you would get a reduced parking. So my question is, how does this interact with the high frequency transit definition that's already in our regs, wherein if you're in a high frequency transit area, you can get down to 0.8 anyway? I know we had discussed that Medford Square may very well fall into high frequency transit. in which case I don't think an applicant would need to meet any of the requirements in 94.9.6.9 that you've drafted here. And I guess my next question is if we agree or if we want to put into these regs that Medford Square is a high frequency transit zone, which would automatically pull it down to .8, can we keep your requirements in and maybe say, if you hit these requirements you go down to a .5 or something like that as an extra to keep the incentives there because I do like the incentives that you have in there but I think people are going to, applicants are going to run right over it because they're going to say we're high frequency transit. And maybe we need the building commissioner to weigh in on that. He did for us on Salem Street and if he, if we think Medford Square is high frequency transit then maybe we do something else with that footnote. So that was one thought.
[Emily Innes]: If I can answer one at a time, it'll make it easier than me trying to remember everything. So in terms of the high frequency transit, the discussion was there's kind of two things balancing out. There is the desire to allow flexibility on parking because some of these lots are not particularly deep and it's hard to park them. But there is also an understanding that many people have expressed a concern in the, the lack of parking in the square already, right? So we've got sort of two different ideas happening. So the idea was, we're not talking about high frequency transit at all in this zoning. That is a discussion that needs to take place during the cleanup process that we've referred to before. This is looking at the entire zoning ordinance. And seeing what things need to, to be changed. And my understanding is that, is that high frequency transit definition is part of that cleanup. So what we're saying here is the 0.8 parking per dwelling, or the spaces per dwelling unit, you're getting that. You don't have to worry about the high frequency transit definition now at all. However, because there is a concern about the amount of parking in the square, we are going to require that you make some other provisions for multimodal transit, including bike parking and the other things in there. So that is trying to balance those two needs. Yes, you get some relaxation. Yes, you can have the 0.8, but you also have to do some things to make it easier for people to have other methods of transit.
[Sean Beagan]: So I guess is the suggestion that we're going to get rid of high frequency transit as a definition in the zoning.
[Emily Innes]: We don't have a suggestion on that yet. We know that is another conversation. The recommendation here is that we not apply it to Medford Square, which does have plenty of buses going through it and is likely to have increased transit. So the, the thought was that if we take that out of this discussion to say you're, you're eligible for the 0.8, we just want to make sure that you're making provision for these other requirements as well.
[Sean Beagan]: Okay. I'm still, I guess I'm still confused as to if we pass this version. Yes. And then we stick with the high frequency transit definition that we have, doesn't that get us back to the same problem that I'm talking about?
[Emily Innes]: No, because it wouldn't apply to Medford Square.
[Sean Beagan]: Oh, you're going to say high frequency transit will not apply. Right. In the new definition.
[Emily Innes]: The high frequency transit allows you to have 0.8 spaces per unit. We're saying we're not applying that. You can have 0.8 spaces per unit. Just please add these additional amenities.
[Sean Beagan]: So when we change the definition, we're going to change it such that it doesn't apply in Medford Square.
[Emily Innes]: We are not applying those same parking requirements. Medford Square Medford Square has its own parking requirements. I think what we're hoping is that Medford Square could be a model for other parts of zoning but we haven't had that conversation yet.
[Sean Beagan]: Fair enough. Yeah I get it.
[Alicia Hunt]: um and then can i interrupt on this specific point i apologize madam chairman mr chair my apologies i'm home sick so i'm a little woozy um but nowhere did i read in this language that the general requirements of parking that are in the other parts of Medford zoning don't apply. And so maybe I missed that. But if the other Medford parking standards don't apply, we literally need to say that here.
[Sean Beagan]: I agree with you, Alicia.
[Alicia Hunt]: That's what I think Sean is getting at. That was my concern.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, and I thought we, I'm sorry, I thought we had added that. Yeah, we did. Page 384, page 25, line eight, 384, this section supersedes 954-6.1.9, shared parking of the city of Medford zoning ordinance. I will double check and add that we need, I thought we had covered all of it and had added that somewhere else as well, so I'll just double check that. Thanks for calling it out. We did one, but not the other.
[Alicia Hunt]: Okay. Thank you. Sorry. I just, that's really important if it's not going to apply. It needs to be extraordinarily clear. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah. I agree. Sorry. I thought we'd hit both of those.
[Sean Beagan]: I suppose you could also get around it by just changing the definition of high frequency transit very quickly in the near future. And then that would get around it too.
[Zac Bears]: I think we are looking at that as part of the cleanup zoning amendment. That might be what Danielle is about to say. So I'll let Danielle say that.
[Danielle Evans]: Actually, that wasn't what I was going to say. I was just going to add on to, we want to make sure we're not waiving or not saying that the entire parking regulation isn't applicable because it has lots of the minutia, like how large the stalls should be and drive aisles. And unless you want to repeat all of that into the Medford Square zoning, we can't say that that whole section doesn't apply. But we could say, you know, subsets of that. So we'd have to call out specific sections.
[Sean Beagan]: I suppose you could just say high frequency transit definition doesn't apply to Medford Square, right?
[Danielle Evans]: And that the shared parking that's what we're getting at. But yes we also do need to update the high frequency transit so it's more black and white.
[Doug Carr]: But Sean, to your point, I think we're trying to avoid what we experienced on 360 Salem where we had to basically pause the process for the better part of several weeks to get a clear definition from the building department where if we had a clear definition going in and we could be more forward looking, we would have saved. Developers need surety. They want to know the road map. Unknowns are not great for any development. So I think that's part of what we're getting at, is clarity. Clarity helps.
[Zac Bears]: We discussed, we had a meeting. Two weeks ago, I can't remember when the last planning and permitting committee meeting was, but we had a planning and permitting committee meeting with Director Hunt and Commissioner Van der Waal and Planner Evans going through the, what we're calling the cleanup. And there's kind of three tiers of cleanup. And some of it is Scrivener's errors. Some of it is some error, like just things that have, as they've applied in practice, need to be adjusted. And then there were a few kind of high-end kind of major policy changes. And one of those was the high frequency transit definition for the whole rest of the zoning ordinance. And if I understand Emily correctly here, there are some provisions of the parking section of the entire zoning ordinance that we do not want to apply here, including the high frequency transit definition. And we're just missing some language to say in these districts, The basics, how big is the parking space, et cetera, that will continue to come from the main ordinance but things like shared parking, potential parking, parking mandate reductions, that kind of stuff will be written into the Medford Square District.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, that is correct. And so we had accepted EX, the superseded the shared parking portion and added our own. We just missed the superseding of the high frequency transit. So we'll add that language. Thank you for the reminder.
[Zac Bears]: There should be something similar to line 384 also in the following, in that between lines 384 and 400. for 471 and the rest of the document. Yeah.
[Emily Innes]: Okay. We'll add the appropriate language.
[Zac Bears]: Got it. Thank you.
[Sean Beagan]: Okay, thanks. So my next comment is in regards to footnote three. So on the table of uses which allows for food production and light manufacturing, up to 15,000 square feet before you would have to go to Community Development Board. That strikes me as a large operation, 15,000 square feet. I think that's bigger than most of the lots in the square probably. I know I had commented on this specific use in a prior version, and I had said maybe 1,500 square feet. I don't know if my 1,500 got changed to 15,000 perhaps, or I could be way off, perhaps 15,000 is there for a reason but 15,000 seemed big, like a big manufacturing even if for a light manufacturing to be in Medford Square. So that was another comment and then a couple of comments in regards to the development incentive bonuses. Incentive to under community amenities where you get a incentive for shared parking. And it says 20% if you share up to 20% of your parking. Should we have a number or like a minimum there in addition to the percentage? 20% could be 20% of 5. Yeah, I know that's not the intent and that's not what we're thinking, but should there be some minimum number there perhaps? And then. These are just thoughts. You don't have to comment, Emily, on these. These are just thoughts I'm putting out there. Incentive for vibrant neighborhoods. So there's two incentives there in regards to rehab of historic buildings. One gets you a full story. One gets you a half story. You can't get both, right? You can get one or the other. Just I think maybe we should make it clear that you can't get both of these somehow. You get the full one or you get the half one. on, let's see, the two incentives dealing with ground floor tenants. I like the spirit of those incentives, but I think we just need to wordsmith it a little bit more to define some of the terms in there and just make it maybe a little bit clearer. One of it talks about market rate, and my first question is, well, who's going to determine what that is, right? So just some wordsmithing I think we can do on those two incentives to make it clearer. I do like the idea of it. And then finally, on the multi-building shared parking, I'm not familiar with either a joint use agreement or a shared parking agreement. I'm wondering, Emily, if you have any actual experience seeing these in practice and how do they actually play out? I'm, you know, kind of putting on my attorney hat and seeing just a myriad of problems with a shared parking agreement when someone decides I want to sell the property or someone decides I don't like I don't like you parking here anymore. Can they are they stuck with this forever or how does how do they work in reality.
[Emily Innes]: So I was on a planning board a long time ago and we did actually require as part of a special permit that a new building have a shared parking agreement with a Another property owner that had a lot of excess parking and they had to and the way I have seen it and we could certainly add it in here is that there has to be you know a. makes it an additional administrative burden, so we put it in if the community wants that. But they have to certify on a regular basis that that parking agreement is still in place. You can put a time limitation on it. So I think the way that we did it, and it's been a long time ago, so my memory's not perfect, but I think that they had to submit annually for X number of years. that they still had access to that parking. And obviously, if property number two was sold and they no longer had access, they would have to come back and prove that they had that.
[Sean Beagan]: So the agreement would be more in the form of a license as opposed to a lease, like it's not a 99-year, I guess it could be either way. It could be, yeah. But I'm just thinking the person who's giving up the parking or sharing the parking wants to be able to get out of it somehow, right? They want to be able to get out of it if they need to.
[Emily Innes]: We didn't determine the provisions between the two landowners. We just said that, you know, if we give you relief on parking on your own site, you have to show that you have control of an equal amount of parking on another site. So different communities have set it up differently, but we weren't going to get into the negotiation between the two property owners.
[Sean Beagan]: Fair enough. You just put the risk on them. We're not telling them we need a certain type of agreement. We just need an agreement with certain parameters.
[Emily Innes]: You need 10 extra parking spaces. You need to show us that you have control over those 10 extra parking spaces somehow and prove to us that that is, you know, within a reasonable amount of time of the lease. So there are some additional things. Again, try not to make it too wordy, but also make it as that balance of tightness and flexibility in the language. So we can certainly add some if that's of interest.
[Sean Beagan]: Okay, great. Thank you. That's all the comments I had.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, Sean. Appreciate that. Paige Poldini, you're next.
[Zac Bears]: Should be good.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you. Can you hear me? Emily, thank you for changing the colors on this map. We really appreciate that. I appreciate my colleagues who spent a lot of time, the city councilors and the PD office, because I know a lot of changes were made on this. So thank you, Emily, for doing that. I just have a question in regard to a section of the map, if that's okay. Better? Thank you. Better? Awesome. So that I also don't have a voice right now, so I will speak louder. The magical seat. Excellent. So in the section of the map from St. Joe's, I do know that that is one of the higher zones. And as many of my colleagues and probably the city Councilors, and I know the PD office does, we walk the area. So I walked it yesterday and I talked to a couple of residents. And so when it comes to the setbacks, the front setbacks, especially like where Grace Episcopal Church is, there's a significant, it's pretty much street level, but then there's a huge drop off. So I do understand why the Mystic Valley side of that would be higher, because it's like 11, I mean 11 stories, but it's really like four stories. My concern is, especially being a part of the community meetings up at Tufts, And listening to the residents specifically speak about height, wind tunnels, high street is two lanes, it's tight. There are single family residents across the street. To be mindful of that, it seems just really high. And I would just like to know your thoughts on that. And if there's thoughts, if we could bring that down lower. Or, and I know it's tricky because those parcels technically aren't necessarily split parcels, but if you look down on the Mystic Valley Parkway side, obviously St. Joe's has like five, but those ones are significantly lower. So I could see that, but I do know if it becomes an issue with, you know, the ownership of those parcels. So could you just share with that? Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: I'm just, as you were talking, I was pulling up the language so I would have it in front of me. So just so people know, the St. Joseph's School, which is marked on the map, and the parcels on either side of it are MS2, and then the parcels going further west towards Winthrop Street, that's Medford Square 3. So you mentioned the drop-off, and that's obviously the reason for the change in the definition of building height. The other thing, so just to call out what the dimensions are in the MS2, it's five stories as of right, could go up to two more stories, so a total of seven in the incentive. And then in the MS3, it's seven stories by right, and then two with the incentive zoning. MS3 also has a footnote number two, which is along High Street, the maximum base height shall be six stories. So in other words, you can't have that seven stories along High Street, it has to be at six. And the maximum incentive height's another two stories. So instead of going from seven to nine, you would go from six to eight, potentially. Then the other thing that we need to think about is you know how we're doing the base height understanding and I don't know that I have the diagrams with me but there was a diagram that showed the number of stories that you could get below you before you even get to street level. So I think it was one or two there and then what it could be at street level itself. So. I think that because this has changed since we last did those diagrams that, you know, we could look at those again.
[Zac Bears]: Emily, could you hold on a second? I think we may have had a technical issue.
[Emily Innes]: Oh, sorry. Did we?
[Zac Bears]: Kevin, are we all good? That's fine. All right, great. Sorry to interrupt you.
[Emily Innes]: No worries. So, you know, if looking at that is a concern, we can discuss with the working group in our sort of logistical meeting if we need to provide some more diagrams on that. And just make sure that it's doing. That's the advantage of the diagrams, right? It shows us whether or not it's doing what we think it's doing.
[Page Buldini]: Sorry, I'm like. So to kind of echo what John Anderson said at one point when we are talking to the developer on Salem Street. It was hard because there are so many options. And so I'm not a developer, but I'm trying to envision who we want to develop this area. I'm not a planner, but I want to be forthcoming to the developers we want. And is that, does that feel right to have this map here, but yet really truly, like we would just have to really continue to explain, but actually that's not really true. You know, but not to say it facetiously, but you know what I mean?
[Emily Innes]: So a couple of things that come into this is, you know, we talk about height, because as I mentioned before, it's super easy for people to visualize height, right? They walk down the street and you can see it. You're not as good at being able to visualize setbacks or building coverage or something like that. And so it's an easy proxy for what else is going on. But it's important to remember that height is not the only restriction. When we did those section cuts, so section cut is basically looking at the street and the buildings and kind of cutting through everything so you can see what's going on. And we've showed those before, but we did those in the shadow studies to see if you put the height on this side of High Street, what would that do to the sun and the shadow on the other side? And obviously we took One angle, there are other angles. So the setbacks and stepbacks do have, sorry, the stepbacks. There aren't that many setbacks in an area like a downtown, but there are the stepbacks that the back of the building or the side of the building as it approaches a residential district, that is shortened. We could do setbacks. Danielle and I were actually talking about it earlier today, but the trouble is if you have stepbacks from one side and then you've got stepbacks from another side, you start to get some really strange upper stories. And to your point, now the developers aren't quite sure what they're getting. So it's been a balance trying to figure out what are the appropriate levels and so to date we have been privileging what does the building do when it abuts a residential district rather than necessarily privileging what it's doing on that downtown street. The idea of a zero front setback is very common in a downtown. So as I said, we've been reducing the impact on the other side, but happy to re-look at it in diagrammatic form again, and discussing what the next steps in the logistics are. Thank you. Can I ask a comment to the chair?
[Page Buldini]: Is it appropriate, and Janelle too, to ask the CD board members how they feel about the height in this area?
[Doug Carr]: I don't know the protocol. It's been a huge issue. I know that Dean and I have talked about this. I think it's been an issue I think for the last several meetings, so absolutely it is.
[Zac Bears]: We also have a comment from Councilor Lazzaro, maybe some other councilors. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I have a question actually just about what Paige mentioned about the area near St. Joe's. The buildings that are actually, they're actually on the other side of Grace Church. Do you know how tall they are now?
[Emily Innes]: I think they're a little bit higher than that, but why don't I just jump on Google Earth and have a quick look, and I can tell you.
[Emily Lazzaro]: My impression has always... My kids went to daycare at Graceworks, so I drove over there a lot. And I also know two families that live on High Street across the street in single family houses, and it's just the current... My impression was always it's the current state of the That neighborhood and there are already multiple like taller buildings with with condos and my impression of this diagram here is that it's it's mostly matching in some respects what is is built there now. And I just wanted to draw attention to that. But I, yeah, but I am curious about how tall they actually are and what is my impression of it versus the reality.
[Doug Carr]: I would challenge that a little bit because the Florida floors for those buildings, they were built in the late 70s, early 80s. They are, and my parents lived in that building for 25 years. They're the one closest to the Mystic River. The floor-to-floors are really, they're much lower now than they would be for a new building by several feet. You want a nine-foot ceiling clear for any apartment or condo, and those don't even have nine-foot floor-to-floors from floor-to-floor. So the same number of floors would actually be, I think, significantly taller.
[Zac Bears]: I think it's fewer floors, though. I mean, some of those are 10 or 11.
[Page Buldini]: One's 11.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Right now. Yeah.
[Emily Innes]: I'm looking at a seven and a five.
[Zac Bears]: We're talking about maximum of. Eight or nine?
[Page Buldini]: The one to the right's five. I literally was there yesterday.
[Zac Bears]: Seven or nine.
[Page Buldini]: But then there's two little residential units as well behind the church.
[Emily Lazzaro]: But they're existing there now. I mean, they're already built, right? So those people are... Anybody who's there now would have already understood that, right? And nobody's saying, like, this is something that's being placed upon them. Additionally, it's, you know, it's what exists. I'm just, you know, for whatever that's worth.
[Zac Bears]: I mean, I think the abutters in those towers, right, like the best you could probably do is build another tower on one of these, maybe on the, for the southwestern, but I'm guessing that the condo owners wouldn't even want to do that. Maybe if there was some sort of, I've never seen something like that. But but I do think in this case if we're looking at those those three parcels I have doubts that given the ownership structure that we're going to see significant development changes. But I don't know. Emily Emily doesn't seem like you maybe had a response or Danielle.
[Danielle Evans]: I just want to add, thank you, President Bears and through the chair, that some of those buildings are rather tall. I went through two, and so they're technically eight stories, but they're actually six stories because there's these huge retaining walls. And then they excavate, so they're over their parking garages. But they're also set back quite far. Some of them are, I was just kind of measuring it out here, it's like 40 feet, whereas with the new zoning, it's proposed to be zero. So the way that our zoning even currently is written is that not in all of the districts, but your height was a function of how far you were from the lot line. So you could get a building permitted higher, but that meant you had to go back further. So there's a lot of that weird development pattern in the city. I would be advocating for step backs if you want increased height and walkability. So a zero foot setback is completely appropriate, but to have the human scale and to have some light and not have a wind tunnel and crazy microclimate that makes it not desirable to walk around. Having some kind of step back at the fourth floor maybe would be appropriate, but it should be a function of the width of the right of way and how tall the building is of what would be right and not feel, you know, overwhelming. Like, you'd still have that sense of enclosure, of walking down a, you know, a small city downtown, but not something that just feels horrible, like Assembly Row, where it's just. Yeah. I think we, we just, we can incorporate step backs. Like, you don't have to fear the height.
[Zac Bears]: I know we have step backs in other parts of the zoning. They're not here they didn't get pulled over. Oh sorry Daniel and Alicia I mean Emily.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, you know, you have quite a few, the difficulty of going on to Google Maps is now I want to stay on Google Maps forever. But you do have quite a few three to four story buildings already in the square sort of as I zoom through. You could, for example, consider that you go up four and then you step back on the fifth floor. That could, that could be an interesting way of thinking about it. I will say that. Again when you get to the residential districts you know just something to consider when you step back from you go up four stories you step back and then if you're next to a residential district you're stepping back potentially from the side and the rear. That ends up being a very weird story and you may well have a developer that says well I don't want to go up that high or it's not worth it for me to go up that high. And that's fine. This is this is you know the zoning imposes limitations as well as permissions and it may be that if you're. lot is a certain depth, then you can't make it to that fifth story or that sixth story because of the step backs. And that may be what the community wants on those particular lots that are maybe shallower in depth on some of these larger lots. they could accommodate those step backs without it being a problem. So that's something just, you know, be aware that adding the step backs in all directions does impose that limitation, but it may be a limitation that you want. So that's. We like to give the implications, right? I'm not saying go one way or the other, but the implication of doing that is that you may not get that extra floor and that particular building or that particular lot might not get developed to what otherwise looks like a higher level.
[Doug Carr]: Emily, what I've seen where we've had setbacks is we sometimes just put like studios there that don't have the same depth, you know, like this is a two or one bedroom. I've just, the sections you had which were very helpful along High Street especially, I don't think showed any setbacks. I think they just showed the five stories, I think, and it was clear that the shadows were reasonable. But if it did become seven and there wasn't a setback, I do fear for the houses across the street that they would have a reduction in natural light, you know, for a good part of the year, like, you know, for like the last three or four months, that they wouldn't, obviously wouldn't happen after. May, June, July, you know, the summer. But I think it's worth considering, because I think it's a very sensitive, because it's the only part, as several people have mentioned, that we have single family homes right across the street, you know, that that just doesn't happen in most of the square. You know, it's just that stretch. And it's a unique situation that I think requires or calls for a somewhat unique solution, or at least a flexibility to be able to protect those houses.
[Zac Bears]: That was going to be my question. How does this interact with the daylight minimum? Excellent question.
[Emily Innes]: So then that's another limitation that comes into effect, right? Is that, again, we have created with these dimensional standards, there's something called a building volume, right? You have your parcel of land, you've got, in this case, your setbacks aren't particularly restrictive, but your stepbacks might be, depending on what you're abutting. And then on top of that, you have the daylight minimum, which also may change things. So there's a certain amount of mathematics, the architects are gonna love this, right? There's a certain amount of calculation that they're going to need to do to make sure that these work. So the daylight minimum might work perfectly in one condition, they may all work together, but in another it might act as an additional limitation onto the building. That one is a little harder to model easily. But certainly, you know, as I said, it may, it may, because some of those step back requirements only come into play if you are abutting another residential district. in which case they wouldn't act as a limitation for those buildings that are not abutting a residential district. They would if they do. So there's an interplay happening here depending on which parcel you're on.
[Zac Bears]: Right. And so that's like my, my understanding of this was with the, with the abutting a residential district on the rear of the side plus the daylight minimum, you're basically gonna have whatever the height, the maximum allowed height, which who knows if anyone will ever build to it, plus incentive. you'll still have, there'll be lines like this and your boxes will get smaller when you move higher to maybe oversimplify it. But that that would be changing based on site condition. And I guess what you're saying is maybe the reason that that wouldn't be the solution here or isn't quite right here is because these are across away, it doesn't count as abutting a residential district.
[Emily Innes]: I actually have a question for the building commissioner on that one. So we didn't get a chance to answer it, but Paula and I were talking about it earlier this week. So we do want to double check the definition of the abutting, because it may cover the buildings across the street, in which case the step back on the front facade might not be as much of an issue at that point.
[Zac Bears]: Right, because that would be my preference. Either if it doesn't say that, then we clarify that in this specific area it does mean that. And then you're not setting a mandatory step back that you know, but instead allowing that to align to the site conditions and the other requirements. Because I would, the thing I would want to avoid is that we say, well, it has to be a 15-foot step back everywhere, but actually, you know, 100 feet east or west of somewhere, maybe you only need seven, and maybe somewhere else you need 19, and that actually allows for more flexibility and specificity to the site location.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, and I think the other thing that was very clear, and it's with the name recognition, or the name changes I think becomes clearer, is that Medford Square does have differing conditions depending on where you are in the square. And that type of, maybe there's a micro tweak, it's why you're seeing some slightly different standards depending on which sub-district you're in, is to try and address those conditions. So it may be that we say, And it's already true, for example, of where we're allowing parking as a, or we're proposing that parking be allowed as a principal use. It's actually in a very small section of MS2. The same thing could be here. We could say in MS2 and MS3 and this piece, we've already got a height limitation in there. That height limitation could maybe get lowered. And that's something that we could look at to address these very specific current concerns along the stretch of High Street.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Emily Innes]: So.
[Zac Bears]: Okay. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, I think it seems to me that as long as we can confirm that. the daylight minimum applies to an abutting residential district across the street?
[Emily Innes]: Oh, the daylight minimum absolutely would apply to that. Okay. Yeah, that is not a question.
[Zac Bears]: Oh, okay, great.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah.
[Zac Bears]: What is it, the abutting?
[Emily Innes]: I think it was if we do a step back, does it count? If we say an abutting, because we have already a step back for abutting residential districts, if that counts across the street as well, that's what we wanted to check. OK yeah the daylight applies to I believe any any residential building period.
[Doug Carr]: So yeah Emily I guess my concern if I was the developer and I was starting to plan this site I wouldn't want to get down the road so far to where I've done a whole bunch of studies. But I haven't done the shadow studies in the daylight, and then I find out that that blows up my whole scheme. I know that's not the intent here, and I don't think that would happen, but that shouldn't be the only trigger that would prevent someone. They should know earlier in the process, I would think. about what they can and can't do broad picture. And I think they do.
[Emily Innes]: They would just read the zoning. It's already in the zoning. So I'm assuming that they would go through, any developer who was wanting to develop on a site would read the zoning section that applies to it. They would see the development standards and the daylight minimas there. It does apply that, let me just read this. So this is line 309 on page 23. The minimum daylight standard requires that any existing building, it's specified as existing residential buildings above, will change that, impacted by a new development. So it's not limited to residential buildings in a residential district, it's any residential building, so.
[Doug Carr]: Okay, thank you. Yep. Paige, other questions? Okay. All right. Dina, you're up.
[Dina Caloggero]: There I am. They asked some of my questions. OK. OK. So Emily just for clarification can you please describe the distinction between shadow and daylight minimum. And I'm thinking in particular the residential area behind Salem Street which is Ashland. So if I'm a resident behind there right. And it looks like that is going to be like four stories or could be five. What would be, what would be the requirement? What is the difference between daylight minimum and shadow studies for butters?
[Emily Innes]: Oh, sorry, now I'm on, I apologize. So the daylight minimum is what would apply. Shadow studies were just what we were doing in response to some community questions about shadow, but it's the daylight minimum that is the requirement. Also, those on Ashland Street, so that has, that district along Salem that's bounded by Salem, Ashland, and a little bit of Oakland, that has been moved down to MS-1, because it was MS-2. So it's now MS1, so it's the, the shorter level. Also, all of the, that, those parcels, I think all but one of those parcels, yes, all but one of those parcels abuts a residential district. And therefore, the step back requirements and the 45 degree plane requirements would apply to those, the buildings developed on those parcels.
[Dina Caloggero]: So again, it would be the same type of situation. A developer would say. Well, if I consider the daylight minimum and if I consider the setbacks, what am I really building here? Right. Exactly. Okay. So I noticed that on Salem Street, it was dropped down to MS1 now. And my question is, I'm going back to High Street. If I look between High Street and Forest Street, that area is still in MS2. So my understanding is the height level would be 98 feet. Right? But they would still, those buildings, if it, they were, the maximum height would be 98 feet. They would still need to meet the setback requirements, the daylight minimum requirements, right? And the shadow study as well. So, knowing that High Street is only two lanes, and Salem Street is three lanes in one direction. Why don't the area between High Street and 4th Street be dropped down to an MS1.
[Emily Innes]: So just, first I want to clarify, shadow study is not a requirement in the zoning. The requirement in the zoning is a daylight minimum. A shadow study is something that you would do to, it's a technique. It's something that you would do to show something, but it's not, show whether or not you're meeting the daylight, but it's not a requirement in and of itself. I think you had said something about a shadow study requirement. I just want to make sure that we've got the terminology clear there. So the, right now, the area that's bounded by Ashland, Salem, and Forest, is that what you're talking about? Okay. Is MS1, which I, which I think is. No, no, Ashland, sorry, Ashland, Salem, and Forest Street is MS2. Is that what the question you were asking?
[Dina Caloggero]: Yes. Okay. So the, so I'm going on the other side of the square between, on High Street, between High, High Street and Forest Street, looking at a lot. Knowing that's only one lane in each direction, why would we have the height level of MS2 in that area?
[Emily Innes]: So this is the area just for High Street, Bradley Road, Forest Street. That little section there.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay. I'm going across the street.
[Emily Innes]: That area and if you actually look, you know what, if everybody doesn't mind, I'm actually going to show this on screen because I think probably anybody listening at home is very confused. Unless you're all following along from.
[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah, if I could point to it. Yes, exactly.
[Emily Innes]: I don't want to confuse everybody.
[Zac Bears]: So let me just bounded by governors have Bradley like yeah. OK. That's where.
[Emily Innes]: So governors high forest and just to call out because I'm not sure the text is completely clear on screen. This is a post office. This is the Chevalier. So one consideration going in here is this is also the only section of MS2 that allows parking as a principal use. Because of the discussion of where a parking garage, I guess in the past parking garages have been discussed for one of these areas. So that's the other reason for having MS2 in this area. We are not, and I believe the Chevalier and the former high school may already be at the high limits. We're certainly not expecting those to change use anytime soon. So in some ways, just thinking about the fact that these height limits are also trying to respect, in some cases, what's there. I would have to go and just double check because it's not necessarily the stories, especially for the Chevalier, but it might be the now height and feet. But yeah, it's a parking garage that's allowed in those two areas as well. Or surface parking, sorry. Parking as of right use could be either surface or parking garage.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay. So the reason why it was NIMAS 2. One of those, yeah. It's linked with the parking garage.
[Emily Innes]: It's linked with the parking garage, but also the other possible uses that could happen on High Street. There is, for example, just zooming back in here as well, you see there's no building on this lot. There could be a situation someday at which, you know, vacant lots, we always look at vacant lots and buildings next to them and see, you know, could something happen. I don't have the historic assets map with me today, but some of those I believe may have qualified as historic buildings, so they would have other incentives. Again, zoning isn't necessarily about a specific parcel. It's about what the possibilities are in the different areas over time and just making sure that we are treating one side of the street perhaps in the same way all along the street. So you see you have this sort of contiguous area of MS2 as well.
[Dina Caloggero]: I guess in the building height, the building height maximum would also address if the building was on a hill or a lot.
[Emily Innes]: Right, because we now have this definition of the average area and how it's, yeah. And to your point, the topography goes up there, right? It's quite steep in parts along there, so that will also have an impact.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay. All right. Let me see, I have another question too. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Okay, I think you handled it all. And you also discussed the requirements on the transition to adjacent and residential areas in which the daylight minimum. The only thing about daylight minimum I wanted to ask is are there other communities that have applied this, the daylight minimum? And if so, which have?
[Emily Innes]: So I had done a it was a slightly different requirement for Arlington probably six years ago now. And that was based on a couple of other communities around the country that had done it. It is. The definition was a little bit trickier to deal with. And so this particular one, I believe, actually comes from the Netherlands. And it was a, seemed to be an easier calculation for developers to have to work with than the one that I... did for Arlington. I'll have to check and see if they're still using it or not. But that was, it was a perfectly valid calculations. I said it was used from other ones around the country, but it was a little bit clunkier to deal with. So this seemed to be a simpler one to use.
[Dina Caloggero]: And thank you again for putting the, the definition in there. I appreciate it. Much needed. A lot of, a lot of research by Paula. Very, very good. Much needed for the residential units that will abut these buildings. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: All right. Ari Goffman-Fishman, please go ahead with your questions.
[Ari Fishman]: Thank you. Thank you as always to Innis Land Use for your hard work on this. I appreciate the amount you've been able to take all the feedback, some of it conflicting and put it into operationalized terms. We did a lot of the discussion already for my primary question, which was how kind of wanting to get more detail on how we were allowing for parking off of a given lot. That's something we had discussed in past meetings, and I think does substantially benefit the walkability and overall kind of character and nature of A walkable vibrant downtown. I don't know that I have any lingering questions from that discussion that we've had, but kind of that's something that I'm keeping an eye on. I have a very small question, which was about historic conversions. John Anderson had asked to confirm that it was only for single family houses that want to convert to multiple. I don't know if there are many that will be in other situations, but thinking of just the house that I live in, it's a condo that's already been historically converted from a single family to a two family. We have no interest in moving it to a three family, but is there any for if there's say a two family that wants to move to a four family or something like that, where would that go in? And then the last one is even smaller confirming that fountains are out as an incentive.
[Zac Bears]: Ari, I asked myself, they took them out. Thank you. That was the first thing I asked.
[Emily Innes]: So you're like the biggest priority. No fountains. We did leave the outdoor sort of dining terrace, et cetera, but no fountains. You could, you know, the original impetus for the historic conversion was, I think, a discussion last year about larger single family homes and just making sure that those weren't torn down. by giving the flexibility to add additional units. If the joint entities here tonight wanted to relax that to allow single and two family or any residential building under X number of units, maybe something, maybe a historic house that was already converted to three being allowed to go up subject to that 600 square foot Calculation, I see no reason just here now not to do that. I think that's a policy decision from all of you. But the impetus was in the original conversation was existing single family homes. Medford had so many beautiful ones that seemed appropriate to try and give an incentive to conserve them.
[Ari Fishman]: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it does that. And this is kind of not wanting to lose additional houses with a kind of overly strict line. I think there's a lot of beautiful old houses that could be very productively converted if given the incentive that otherwise there could be an incentive to tear them out and start from scratch. So I think it would be worth allowing more buildings to be eligible for those incentives. I'd be curious to hear other opinions on the board and in city council.
[Doug Carr]: Okay, are you all set? Yep. Okay, thank you. I have a few follow-up questions for myself. First of all, I want to thank you for doing a great job of putting in, I think, pretty robust historic protections into this zoning as incentives and otherwise. I think tying it to the existing process we have in the Historical Commission is a great move. I know that you and Danielle kind of put that together and I think that really is successful to plug that into an existing process that we already have. And for any building that's on the National Register of which there are several in the square, those will automatically have those protections without doing anything. So that's an important thing. I think there's some language tweaks that need to happen about the treatment of historic properties and the Secretary of Interior's standards because I was looking at that. We've enforced that a few places on some buildings like Chevalier and others. But it's some of the things that we propose doing like if somebody wanted to say for instance wanted to save a facade of a building but build from a two story to a four or five story behind it. That's not allowed by that standard. I looked that up and poked around on that. It's a good standard, but I'm looking for a way to tweak that language so that it's flexible. Some buildings, like Grace Church, don't touch them. You just leave them alone, right? That's easy. But there are many buildings that we want to be creative. We want to allow some creativity. We want to keep some parts of the building. But generally, just keeping the facade, it's kind of like a last step, if you will, you just, somebody really wants to tear it down, but you won't let them. It's not a great, we want to try to do a more integrated approach, you know, additions and like in the Medford Square Cinema, add on and behind, things like that. So I think there's some, just some language adjustments that would achieve what we're looking for, but we can't, I don't want to tie anyone's hands for buildings that, that don't need to be. Like St. Joe's, for example, if St. Joe's becomes housing at some point. We might find, I think we're going to find that a significant building, the original school. Probably not the rest of the buildings on that campus or not many of them. That will allow a lot of freedom, but we don't need to have it be like, you know, you have to live within this bubble here. We want to allow a little bit of creativity, I think. So we'll have to work with you offline and Danielle and others to kind of come up with some language that gives the protections but is, but still allows some flexibility for developers. That's, that'd be my big takeaway on that. Because otherwise I think we're in a really good shape on the historic protections with all the incentives that we have and the parking. So I think that's in really good shape. The other piece I wanted to, first of all, do you have any thoughts or suggestions on that?
[Emily Innes]: So I think, first of all, thank you. We were pleased to be able to work with everybody to find a method and a pathway for helping to incentivize the adaptive reuse. I think in terms of other standards, obviously the Secretary of Interior Standards is generally a great one to point to because it does have standards that are kind of universally accepted. As with all the comments on tweaks to language, we'd love to, you know, to work with you to make sure that the language is right. So I would say that anybody who has suggestions, if they can either forward them to the particular chair of the specific entity or to Alicia and Danielle, so we have one sort of way of collecting all of the comments that also allows us to figure out whether or not there's any conflicting comments. It's always a balance. But, yeah, that'd be great.
[Doug Carr]: Yep. Okay. I appreciate that. I don't, I'll have to dig into that a little bit. I thought, you know, maybe some of your historic resources can, can find us that because there's a big difference between the Royal House and the Peter Tufts House and the Brooks Estate and something else that is just a historic building that is significant. You know, there, there are different animals and they want to have, I think the city board wants to have that, that flexibility to be able to shift. Maybe it falls back on design review. Maybe it's the Historical Commission that could be part of that. There might be a few ways of doing it.
[Emily Innes]: You know, one possibility that just occurred to me, so it hasn't been truth tested yet, is you could allow the dimensional standards and or the parking waiver to be allowed whether or not it's rehabilitated, but reserve the incentive bonuses for the Secretary of the Interior's standards. That might be one way of it, setting up two tiers saying, You can have this for keeping the building and the adaptive reuse, but if you want to do an addition or you want to retain the facade but build behind it, now we want you to make sure that at least what you're retaining is brought up to the standards. So that might be one way of dealing with it.
[Doug Carr]: The standards literally say, don't do what they call facadism. Don't treat it like a movie set. They reject the idea of facade treatment, just basically.
[Emily Innes]: You could put in your incentive that you're waiving that portion because obviously you're giving the incentive to at least retain that. So there might be some modifications around that as well. You're using it as a base of understanding a standard to which you're holding somebody to. With that, you could certainly put in the language that you're waiving those things that would not be applicable.
[Doug Carr]: Very good. Thank you. Another question.
[Zac Bears]: I was just gonna say, I think that makes the most sense, right? This is the framework, but we're not saying you have to, if there's a piece of that standard that we think doesn't support the larger goal that we're seeking with the project, that would be also part of that waiver process. I think it gives some clarity and flexibility.
[Doug Carr]: That's what I'm looking for, okay. Go ahead, Danielle.
[Zac Bears]: He's stressing me out up here, I guess. Do you have, like, a treadmill back there? You want to give 10 push-ups or what? No.
[Danielle Evans]: Was that your, like, your blood pressure?
[Zac Bears]: That's some people in the city's dream on camera, I'll tell you that. Moving on.
[Danielle Evans]: Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I'm trying to figure out, so this only applies to the existing floor area, and I'm trying to figure out how would this work for adding units above an existing building that's historic, that has no room at all for parking. So this wouldn't help them. What can we do to incentivize adding some housing over single story commercial buildings now. I'm trying to think of a scenario, or is it, would this be helping converting offices into housing? There's some, yeah, so I'm just trying to figure out how can we, because I am concerned with not being able to add up on Riverside and stuff like that.
[Emily Innes]: Okay, so just so everybody knows, we're looking at line 175 on page 17, and it says these waivers apply to the existing gross floor area of the eligible historic building, any addition, expansion, or new construction that increases the gross floor area of the structure shall not benefit from the waivers. So we're back to that balance again. The idea is you give the incentive to keep the historic building. You recognize that there might be some additional expansion, but again, going back to that concern about not enough parking in the square, this allows the balance. So say you have a four-story historic building that would normally be required to provide the parking for All of the uses on those four stories. Now we're saying you don't have to provide the parking for those four stories. If you want to go up to a fifth story you do have to provide the parking for that fifth story. But if it's residential. And you do these other things, you put some bikes down at the base level, there's bike storage, there's some other things. You can also go to 0.8, which you couldn't do before. So really, the idea was that the incentives would apply to that historic building. They wouldn't be prevented from adding on. To your point, Chair Carr, we're going to relax that bit about not being able to add on, not being able to keep the facade. But if you keep the building, you're getting a significant benefit by not having to provide the parking for the rest of that building.
[Zac Bears]: So this is my question. Let's say there's a four-story, they're in MS2. I don't even know if there's a building in the city that really actually in this district that this is like a hypothetical that's not real. But let's say MS1, there's a couple of like two and three-story stuff on the south side of High Street. Let's say they want to do the incentive, they want to go to five. Would they be able still to access the shared parking and other elements for the new construction. So maybe it's off site parking for floors four and five.
[Emily Innes]: Yes absolutely. So now you've got your two story building. You're going to add three more stories on it. Floors 1 and 2 are the historic building. They don't have to provide parking floors 3 4 and 5 have access to the reduction in the residential or say it's going to be all office even if it's office and residential so they can reduce the residential and they can provide the shared parking for anything else they can't meet. And I think even the MS1 properties, there's a couple there that are shorter than the base height. That would give them a lot of flexibility to maintain the existing two stories and then add on. Now, Those buildings, those existing buildings might not be structurally sound enough to add on a couple of additional stories, but this is where the incentive for at least retaining the facade comes in. So if you can't save the building, you want to add the two, you can retain the facade. get an incentive for that. You still have at the street level the same feel that you've had all along. But now with the facade just being retained, you wouldn't get the incentive of not having to provide the parking. because you're only retaining the facade. The community is not getting the benefit of the entire building being retained. But at least you have the flexibility to meet the requirements in different ways depending on what you're trying to do.
[Zac Bears]: Is there an interim? Is there some middle ground there? Obviously, if it's truly just the facade and you're just attaching the facade to a brand new building, that seems to me to be facadism. But if you're doing some sort of structural improvement to the structure of the building to maintain, to be able to structurally have a higher building. But you're retaining some of the original materials or some of the original layout, like something in between keep the whole thing, keep the facade where they would get maybe even progressively or maybe it's simple, maybe it doesn't have to be too complicated. retain more of the benefits of keeping the whole building, or in my opinion, even lean towards receiving the same benefits as keeping the whole building, that would be my perspective. Doug says yes.
[Emily Innes]: I was going to say, I think at this point, however, I might need to go to a spreadsheet and calculate out the different options. But yes, I'm sure there is a way that we could collectively structure instead of an A and a B, an A, B, and a C, or something like that.
[Doug Carr]: I think that's right, because every one of these existing buildings is going to be a completely unique structural system, facade. I mean, everything about it will be one-off. It won't be repeated anywhere in the square. You just have too much range of architecture, too many lot sizes, frontages. There's no way to do that. We just need the tools to make good projects work. and to kill the ones that are trying to knock over buildings for no good reason. There is definitely a way forward for that.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Yeah, I think that third option to me would be about flexibility to say where they're making a good faith effort to keep as much historical part of this building as is possible to make the rest of the project also possible. That would be my principle of it. Same.
[Emily Innes]: And you can tell from the menu structure for the incentives that I do like a good menu of you can do, you know, pick the five out of the 10 or the, you know, the six out of the eight, whatever it is. I think it's just a matter of setting up the language so it is clear to everybody. And this is always the key with zoning, is it clear to the community development board what they're making the judgment on. Is it clear to the applicant what they're applying for? Is it clear to the people listening in what the options are so when they come for public comments, they know, you know, these are the parameters under which I can make my comment. So, but yes, I think we can do that. It's just working through the language.
[Doug Carr]: If we could just drill down a little deeper, can we go back to the ability for the shared parking and the travel distances to that shared parking from within the square? Can we just revisit that for a minute? I think we're talking about 500 feet, right, typically. Does that change for commercial versus residential? And we're talking about parking, public parking garages in the square at the moment, right? Or any parking that could be shared.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, so the 500 feet is actually in your existing zoning that's in your existing table of uses. So we've just kept that. I know that with Danielle, we've had conversations sort of throughout the zoning process about the idea of there need to be pick up and drop off spaces for buildings that, you know, that's a whole curb management discussion. But we just kept the 500 as is and without changing it because it was already a city-based standard and it is not differentiated residential versus commercial.
[Doug Carr]: OK, and is there, I guess maybe Danielle, you could answer this. Is the logic there that that's a five minute walk, that's reasonable versus something that could be a little bigger? I'm just curious. Because the reason I ask is when I actually drew on the map, and Danielle has this, where I think the potential future garages can be, and I drew a 500 foot radius, there's a big gap between them. It covers a lot of the square. but there's a gap there that I worry that it would penalize potentially buildings that could use that advantage because they don't fall within that radius potentially. And I was wondering if we could just put that on the screen, Danielle, and we could just look at that and see if I'm on base, see if you think it's worth perhaps increasing those by a couple hundred square feet to capture more of the square, more of the historic, resources that are between what I think are the two logical places where a potential new garage could be.
[Danielle Evans]: My measuring tool is kind of glitching on me. I'm trying to like figure out where these like really dense, you know, small lots that are built out that can't conceivably add parking. if they could take advantage of that 500, something within 500 feet. I'm not logged into the Zoom.
[Doug Carr]: Oh, okay.
[Danielle Evans]: I'd have to log into the Zoom and then share my screen. I think.
[Doug Carr]: I think I can share it here. Yes. Do you see it on screen now? So I just decided, you know, again, behind Colleen's potential future garage, over by Route 93, assume there's a garage there as part of that. And I drew the 500 square foot circle. And it really does a lot of good things, I think. But it's that there's almost 500 feet between them that I feel like they just want to be expanded to capture both of them so that everyone, as many properties in the square could do that. Now, if I've missed something, please let me know. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
[Emily Innes]: No, I don't think you missed anything, and it's really nice to see this. I think there's a couple of things that I would call out, though, is to the left of your circle in the middle, obviously, those are the deeper parcels. Now, we did just talk about the fact that they might not change anytime soon, but they certainly would have an opportunity, especially with the incentive that allows for public parking. To add a space that would a serve themselves and possibly serve the others. And then I think in your gap in between you know there is a parking garage there already. Obviously that is a private garage for private use.
[Unidentified]: Yep.
[Emily Innes]: But should one of those uses change, again, we're talking zoning, so we're talking about a long-term, that would certainly help with some of them. And then again, some of the parcels that are a little deeper in that area may actually be able to park themselves. So it wouldn't necessarily need that. So I also have heard, I remember working with a community like 15 years ago, And I think their distance was 750 feet rather than 500. That would sort of push your two circles a little bit closer together, but you would still have a gap.
[Doug Carr]: Yeah, I was actually going to propose that because I thought it would do no harm. It's reasonable still, and yet it would help because I think there are a lot of parcels on the edge here. that are large enough to park themselves. I think St. Joe's could do that. Anything over by Wythe Street and Circle, I think they're big enough. With the podium sections that you drew in your section diagrams, they clearly prove that they could have a couple levels of parking. Anything that goes down to the river, like St. Joe's, can obviously find a way to park and terrace down with elevated courtyards. So I feel like maybe an adjustment of that number would, would try to cover more and it would kind of have those two meets where it almost became essentially two-thirds of the square could take advantage of that ability. And I don't think it would really do any harm to somebody to walk an extra two minutes to get to their parking spot, assuming we can get extra so-called extra parking because that's, you know, that's a tough ask, you know, to try to get a garage that is viable economically, that is big enough to serve not only with the square needs now, but future needs or bonus needs that we're adding hundreds of apartments. So that was just something I think it's worth putting on the table. If you could take a look at that. I didn't see any downside to it, but I wanted to play it out. I mean, if you had any other comments, appreciate it.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, we'll be happy to take a look at that.
[Doug Carr]: Okay, thank you. Any other follow-up questions from anyone on the city board? Very good, hold on a second. What number is Dina?
[Zac Bears]: Dina is gonna press the button and then it'll show green. I think Dina's five as well, if you just wanna go for it.
[Dina Caloggero]: There I am, okay. So I just wanna make sure that I see on the table on page 13 the setbacks. And the setbacks is 0 to 20, all right? And that's just the guide, that guideline. But for the, for any of the buildings that are on High Street that would want to go up to the 98 feet, right? They would still need to meet the definition of the height setback requirement, the 45 degree angle, right? And then I, another quick question after that and then I promise I'm done.
[Emily Innes]: Yes, so just so everybody knows we are looking at the line 103 on page 16 that is the height step back requirements and this is the 45 degree angle beginning at the third floor and extending to the highest floor of the building. There is one little typo there where we have MS1 in one place, but not in the other. We'll fix that. But that 45 degree angle limits where the floors can be placed. And so it pushes from the fourth floor and above. So, yeah. And that is the diagram that I believe will be sent out to you. It's in the presentation. We have an explanation of what that looks like. So.
[Dina Caloggero]: And Danielle, you're happy with that? To address the setback issues.
[Emily Innes]: This is on the side and the rear lot lines, yep, and that's from a residential district.
[Dina Caloggero]: And the other question, I was Googling, I was asking Sari, I was going back to my geometry on daylight minimum, and I was looking at the 10 degree angle. So two hours, two hours would be direct sunlight on the building. Doesn't that seem, I don't know. Short. Could you explain? I'm trying to think. If I was next to this building and I only had two hours of sun.
[Emily Innes]: So that's just February 19th through October 21st, which is eight months of the day. So we're looking at, again, this is coming from If you think of the winter sun, that's what's coming in low at the 10 degrees. Yeah, exactly. It's very low, right? So we're measuring at the winter sun. Any other time of the year, that angle's... I can't do it with my arms. I'm sorry. I can only demonstrate so much with my arms. You can... That angle is going to be higher coming in. So, you know, if necessary, we can look. And it's also, if you note that the surveyed area has to start at over three feet above grade. Again, we're on, just for everybody following along, we're on pages 23 and 24. So that means that most residential windows would be starting above three feet above grade. So you can't, you can't count the sun hitting the bottom of the house is what I'm saying.
[Dina Caloggero]: No, you have to count to greater than ten degrees.
[Emily Innes]: Exactly. So the idea is that you are trying to maximize the calculation for the sun coming onto the building. Two hours is low, but I think also because of our climate and how the sun hits at the 42 degree latitude, it's a little tricky to calculate. Yeah.
[Dina Caloggero]: I was going back to my geometry. Yeah, exactly.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Director Hunt had a question or comment.
[Alicia Hunt]: The way you just described it, it sounded like you meant this to say in the winter it needed to be at least two hours. because you said, oh, the rest of the year, it would be more than that. So do you mean on February 19th and October 24th, on those two dates, it would be? Because I was reading this to say, like in the summertime, you'll only, as long as you get at least two hours. And I was also questioning whether this was kind of a small amount, but I was waiting to see if any of the members reached it. So maybe it's not clear enough in here, because it really sounds like almost nothing to me.
[Emily Innes]: Okay, so two things. One is, because I double checked this as well, I had the exact same question. This calculation is from February 19th through October 21st, and it is the sun hitting the facade, not the yard. That's where the shadow studies came in. was to understand whether or not the buildings would be shading the yard. This is the sun hitting the facade and therefore the windows, right? This is about sun being able to reach windows, which is a different calculation than whether or not the sun can reach the ground. So this is specific to daylight hitting the windows and therefore entering the house. That's why it's a slightly different calculation. Beyond that, I will say that I am not the person who did this research, so if there are further questions, I would direct it back to Paola and we could get you an answer in writing. Okay, happy to do that.
[Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, thank you. I think it would be helpful.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah. Yeah, it's a very specific calculation on the facade, which, as I said, is different from how it hits the ground, which we also studied back to the shadow studies that were mentioned earlier.
[Alicia Hunt]: So what I think is actually really important is that any reasonable zoning lawyer reading this will understand what what it is, how to calculate it, what that means. And so, however, Paula researched it and intends it is wonderful. But we need to now put it in language that everybody else understands, too. So because we won't have her on staff to interpret it every time we need it interpreted.
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, and if I may, I think the question becomes the one of intent, right? Is did we really mean to say the period of February 19th through October 21st? Did we really mean to say, you know, altitude exceeding 10 degrees? Did we really mean to say that it should be measured over three feet above grade? Yes, all of those are what we actually meant to say. Whether or not we all collectively understand them, I think is different from whether or not the language is correct. Having said that, there are certainly plenty of zoning ordinances out there that have diagrams that further illustrate what is meant by this. And since I can't demonstrate clearly with my arms, I think this one might call out for an explanatory diagram. And then obviously also the additional text to make sure that we all collectively understand what is meant by this.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I think a diagram would be helpful. Oh, then we'll have to figure out how to put diagrams in MuniCode. We can do it. Great, thank you. Yes, please. I think that would be helpful just since it seems like, I think I get what you're saying. We want Windows to have light. for some period of time. I think the other thing, you know, and this is a complicated perspective, is I just wonder what the impact is, like, you know, of a higher standard. I mean, two hours feels low, right, instinctually, but I wonder what the, you know, the impact of four hours might well be, you know, you can't build anything more than a story anywhere, right? Like, that's the kind of the, So I bet Paula could kind of walk us through that or just show us a picture, you know, that we can kind of include that might be helpful. Yeah. John Anderson.
[John Anderson]: Thank you. I just want to say I support chair Carr's comments about increasing the radius, the walking radius to parking, because no matter what we say, ultimately it'll be determined by what people wanna buy and what developers wanna build. I mean, there'll be some people who say, I don't have a car, I don't want a car, I don't care about it. And there are other people who will say, if I can't park underneath, if I can't park in the building that I'm living in, I'm not interested. So I mean, the market will sort of work that out for us. That's all.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you, John. Back to the council.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Do we have questions from the council? Further questions or comments? All right. Then I think we should open up to the public hearing and public participation. Are there members of the public who would like to speak for the public hearing on the proposed Medford Square zoning? And thank you, Emily, for reclaiming the microphone. If you care in the chambers, you can come to the podium. If you are on Zoom, please raise your hand on Zoom. We will alternate between the chambers in person and on Zoom, and each person will have three minutes. Name and address for the record, please.
[Nick Giurleo]: Good evening, Nick Giurleo, 40 Robinson Road. So I appreciate the cover letter kind of highlighting the changes that were made between the last draft and this one. It's very helpful because sometimes it's hard to track between drafts what has changed. So hopefully we can do that going forward. I'm going to start kind of broader and then focus on some narrower things. So broadly speaking, I'm very glad we're reconsidering uses. I noticed there were a number of changes made to the table of uses. It seemed like before we weren't devoting enough attention to them and it also seemed like we were focused like entirely on residential. Not really on commercial. And I honestly think we should be focused more on commercial because as you all know, Medford Square is the commercial, one of the commercial hubs of our city. So let's think about ways we can incentivize commercial development in the square, bringing people to the square, spending money there. On some narrow things, I was very happy to see that change requiring special permits for banks. I think the square has far too many. the tragedy of Salvatore's comes to mind. But also I would ask yourselves to think what other industries maybe have oversaturated the square, uses that could be restricted. I'm tempted to name a few, but I won't. support keeping the marijuana establishments out. I would also suggest changing, I think the neighborhood medical offices are all allowed in the sub-districts. I would consider maybe a special permit requirement for those given the whole Salem Street fiasco. I think that would be worth it. More generally, you know, I think you can maybe add some uses to the table uses for the commercial side of it. You know, things I would want to see would be restaurants, diners, cafes, boutiques, bookstores, maybe a small independent movie theater, other retail. You know, again, the goal has to be getting people to go to Medford Square and spending money there. Of course, you got to think about parking as well, and I know you all are. If you can't park in Medford Square, how are you going to visit it? And then kind of wrapping up here, I'm also a little concerned, you know, I think, you know, because we're focused so much on residential, the idea is, well, with these mixed use projects, you know, there'll be ground floor retail. I don't think that's always adequate. And I do think there are restrictions with that. So, you know, in terms of bringing new business to the square, I don't want our parameters to be limited to just through mixed use. I think there are other ways you can do that as well. Just some thoughts for all of you. Appreciate your time on all of this. Thank you. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: All right, we will go to Caitlin. Caitlin, name and address for the record, please, and you'll have three minutes. Caitlin, we can't hear you, but you are unmuted.
[Kaitlin Robinson]: Can you hear me now?
[Zac Bears]: Yes, we can. All right, name and address. You'll have three minutes.
[Kaitlin Robinson]: All right, perfect. Thank you. My name is Caitlin Robinson, 31 Everett Street. And I've spoken at several of these meetings before about my concerns around parking minimums. And I'm concerned that we continue to have the government mandating parking for housing units. And I did hear some of the concerns about like, well, you know, developers are going to want to build less, but developers do want to be able to sell or rent their units. And there was a comment regarding the garages about like the market being able to figure it out. And I'm wondering why we can't allow that to happen. particularly because the city could set policy, as it already has done with some buildings, about not allowing on-street parking for buildings. And I think that that's something that should be considered for Medford Square, because if you don't allow people in those buildings to get on-street permits, then it still has, like it functions as a de facto parking minimum. except that it's shifting the burden from having parking for each housing unit to having parking for each automotive unit. So the burden would shift from everyone having to subsidize parking to the people who need to park their cars having to pay for their own parking. And yeah, I just hope that we will consider that because I It's just upsetting to see like how parking basically stops development because it's so hard to provide parking and then we end up with units that are going to be like larger and more luxurious because it's the only way to be able to meet the parking minimums or now we're going to be looking at garages and that's fine if we have some garages. I do agree that 500 feet is too small an amount. for people to walk, like it should be people's choice. I think that people should be able to make their own decisions about their transportation needs and about their parking needs. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. Are there any other comments for the public comment section of our meeting? Seeing none in person, anyone on Zoom, please raise your hand on Zoom. All right. I'm going to close the public comment for tonight. It doesn't mean we're closing the public hearing quite yet, but I do want to kind of go through some next steps that are available to us. It sounded to me that there are not like significant you know, disagreements between the direction here, more of tweaks and maybe a couple of follow-up items. I am wondering, maybe Christian or Danielle or Emily, if the comments that you've heard tonight, any chance you wrote those down? Great, wrote them down, awesome. And I'm wondering maybe if we wanna go back through them. Summarize, like maybe go back through the list, summarize them. And then we can, I think there's a few points that we could take right now. If we're all generally in agreement that the tweaks and comments that we've heard tonight are things we all want to incorporate, we could choose to close the public hearing and then You could and we could vote collectively or the community development board could vote to say that list is our list of recommendations for further amendment. Those could be incorporated and then those could come go to the council. Another option is we could say incorporate these changes. We'll have another meeting and then we close the, you know, we close the public hearing let's say next week and then those could move for a final vote. And then a third option, obviously, would be, you know, if we think that we're going to get more public comment, I think we've noticed that the public participation has been dwindling pretty significantly. But we do have a joint meeting next Tuesday to discuss the transit overlay district, and, you know, this could be continued to that meeting, and at which point then either there's a refined list that constitute recommendations and that can have further edits. I'm going to let Doug talk, then I'm going to let Emily talk, and then we can kind of all collectively talk about next steps.
[Doug Carr]: Thank you. Yeah, I think it would be, I would like, I think having a recap of the major points, the major refinements, because I think the fundamentals are strong here across the board. I think having that but leaving the public hearing open until next week is the right approach. But I do want to talk, I do want to kind of pull the city board and see if they agree or not, just if we could. So if anyone would like to, you know, opine about that. Sorry.
[Zac Bears]: Sorry. Just before, because I want to check with both bodies. Go ahead. I just want to see, it seemed like Danielle and Alicia maybe had an opinion about it or I saw Danielle nod or I just want to.
[Doug Carr]: Raise the eyebrow.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I just wanted to see kind of. And I don't know if that's working, but we'll get that back for you. Thanks, Emily. But I think, you know, both hear about that and then I think also I kind of want to hear from Emily. And maybe this is what we talk about after we hear the revised comments, just about kind of what we could maybe expect in the next six days based on that list. I have some thoughts, but Daniel.
[Danielle Evans]: So basically I do want to see like a section with the heights and the step backs just to make sure that we're going in the right direction regarding shadow and just The whole, like, public realm feel. I don't know if those changes would be significant enough that there could be public comment that is. I mean, I, I would err on the side of just continuing this, the public hearing to the 31st, just to be on the safe side. Yeah, I don't know what the, the consultants can turn around in a short period of time.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, and Emily, you had some diagrams. I don't know that we looked at them. Are they relevant for us to maybe take a quick look at or, yeah?
[Emily Innes]: I'm just pulling the diagrams up. They are not the diagrams for the daylighting, but they are diagrams that show the, Hang on, Zoom's not behaving itself, so I'm trying to do 12 things at once. Okay, here we go. So first of all, these are the diagrams for what happens next to a residential district based on, on two different things. One is the step back requirements, and one is the transition to adjacent residential districts. So this could be, this green line could either be a rear or a side lot line. This shows you going up, you know, the 45 degrees. And so the fourth floor has to be stepped back. And that is a 10-foot buffer between the residential district and the building in the Medford Square district. So you go up three stories, you do your 45 degree. Now what is interesting and I'm not sure is fully visible, so let me pull it in. You see this fifth story doesn't go all the way out to the 45 degree here. That is because we also have a 20 to 30 foot transition zone. So if the building is in it pushes into that transition zone it means this upper story can't actually go it can go the fourth floor can go up but the fifth floor cannot. And that is a function of the base height versus the incentive height. And then this just shows the MS. So that was MS1. So this is the MS2. And it's the same thing. You can't go all the way out into the transition zone. So this one shows the building itself going all the way back and, and stepping up the way we talked about it. And then option two actually keeps the entire building out of the transition zone. And then all it has to do is meet the 45 degrees. So it's two different ways for developers to meet those requirements. They have different impacts. So the sun would start. So you know then the sun angle starts to come into. How is the new building relating to the old building in terms of where the sun is actually hitting during the day? If this building is on the north side, if the new building is on the north side, it's probably not going to have as much of an effect. If it's on the south side it would. Now the daylight minimum standard kicks in. So, and I think that's the diagram that you want to see collectively is how does the daylight standard work and what impact it would have. And so we're going to need to show that to you. In terms of turning it around in six days, you'll note that Paola is not here because she is at a conference. She gets back to the office on Monday and we have a major other public meeting on Tuesday night. So we are not going to be able to turn around diagrams or additional text between now and next Tuesday.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Helpful to know. And I think that does, in some ways, inform our process here. We don't have another joint meeting for a month after Tuesday. And I don't personally think, if we're generally in agreement about almost everything here, that it makes sense to wait a month for a single diagram. One of the things that the clock starts when we close a public hearing is then the CD board makes recommendations to the city council. You know you guys have some meetings I think much sooner than the end of April. I think you have what do you have April 8th first or eighth. Fifteenth. Okay. So, you know, that is something I think we should talk about. But maybe we can go through the other list here. And the other thing is we have to get started on the Tufts and Boston Avenue process. So I just want to make sure that we keep all of our ducks in a row here. Emily, do we want to go through the list of items that Grant took out?
[Emily Innes]: Yes, so I'm actually going to go backwards and then Grant can catch what I've missed. So the historic conversion for existing, raising that from a single family to maybe a two or three unit. Off street shared parking, the distance going from 500 to 750 feet. adding section diagrams. We talked about the daylighting, possibly the, we could add the ones that we just showed you could also be added in as supplements to the text. And again, MuniCode will allow diagrams. We've done it before. Looking, re-looking at the incentives for historic preservation and figuring if there's a better standard than the Secretary of Interior is one. And two, if there's a, This is too hot, this is too cold, this is just right. Section for allowing maybe not just all or a little bit, but a medium and actually how to preserve the historic buildings. Daylight minimums, just the research behind it, plus the diagram. And then the last one is the parking. Just making sure that the parking requirements are explicit and what is allowed and not allowed. So I think that was a language tweak. Did I miss anything? Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thank you both.
[Zac Bears]: Great. So I think at that point, like to me that when we do zoning, If you were to send us a recommendation that said let's fix those things, the only piece that to me feels really like maybe you guys probably need a little, you want to look at the diagram before you make the recommendation about daylight minimum. Yeah, that would be my guess. But procedurally otherwise, I mean we can go around in a minute. I personally think that that would be a fine set of community development board recommendations to come to the council after a public hearing was closed and then we would, you know, look at them and adopt them and pass a zoning amendment. With that, I'll go to Chair Carr and then go to members of the council and the community development board to talk further about kind of how we want to move forward. Yeah, we could do that. I'm going to go to Councilor Leming.
[Matt Leming]: Thank you very much. President Bears and chair car. So I think that yeah, I think that. Going with, uh, continuing on until the 31st would have been. The best option, but I think you're, you're correct. And that the fact that they can't make any turnaround that. Puts that leaves that off the table, but that that takes that that makes that option. No, go I also strongly agree that we. Cannot. Um, delay this another month we do need we have. A set number of meetings in the contract within us that they can that they can attend to work on. Uh, what we promised the public would be worked on, uh, before, uh, May or June and so we do need to get to, uh, Tufts and Boston Avenue. So I, I think. There are two options in my mind. The first is to have the CDB make a recommendation tonight pending the changes that were just read out. So saying that Inez will, at a regular council meeting, fulfill the changes requested by the CDB that she just read out. The second would be close the public hearing and allow the CDB and have NS submit those changes to a future CDB meeting. in which they would then go over those changes and consider them. And I should note that at that CDB meeting, I don't believe that NS would be obliged to attend that as well. With regards to whether to close the public hearing or continue it, That's my personal recommendation mainly because I don't really hear a whole lot in these changes that any sort of new ideas coming from the public. I think that in terms of public comment, all of these changes have sort of been informed by the months and months of comments and input sessions that we've already have. that we've already had and this sort of seems like tweaking at this point. And so it seems more like a conversation between council and members of the community development board and staff as well. So unless there's some substantial part of that zoning that would benefit from public comment, then yeah, that's what I think. The cleanest one would be to refer everything out tonight with the caveats that we still need to make those minor tweaks or continue it to a CD board meeting. But I really do think that we need to continue with the process and it can't wait till the end of April. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Leming. Yeah, so I actually wanted to go to Director Hunt on this. You know, my understanding of the process is they, we collectively would vote to close the public hearing. I'm not necessarily saying tonight but just the next steps in the process. We would collectively vote to close the public hearing. Community Development Board would make a recommendation to the council and then the council would consider those recommendations at the vote to, the final vote on the zoning, right? Like those are the next steps and the question is when do those things happen? The list that we heard tonight, it seems like, something we ran into in the past was a recommendation was made and the council said, we'll take 10 out of 12. And that created some contextual, you know. for lack of a better word.
[Rich Eliseo]: I'd rather have consensus.
[Zac Bears]: Right. It seems to me that if the recommendations are here, we just list it out, right? Like if we were to go from tonight and say what we're coming out of this meeting is the things that need to change here are the things that we talked about that we've just listed and reviewed and those would constitute a community development board recommendation, I'm not hearing objections from members of the council to adopting those recommendations, right? So that eliminates the tension point. And I really think that that's just the only, that's the only, that would be the fundamental difference, right? If we close the public hearing tonight, and then Ennis had some time to bring back and send a memorandum saying here's the adjustments to the zoning based on your discussion, and then you guys made those recommendations, like took those and made them the recommendation of the council, then the council could incorporate them and approve them at a council meeting. I'm gonna go to Director Hunt. because you have your hand up.
[Alicia Hunt]: Thanks, Mr. Chair, Presidents. I contemplated that it might come to the fact that the City Council, that you would have felt that you've heard from the public that we've exhausted public comment, which personally, I agree, given the lack of public comment that we've been hearing, both written and oral. But that the boards wouldn't be totally satisfied or that the city council might be and the city board not. So I discussed this with our attorney or zoning attorney Robin Stein. Actually, two weeks, couple weeks ago and so I've gone back to my notes. And what she said a couple of things. You don't have to close it jointly, the city council can choose to close it tonight, and the CD board can continue to keep it open to their next public till their next meeting or till whatever, it must be a date certain. The city council has 90 days to vote after they close their public hearing. So that would actually start a shot clock. I don't think any of us imagine that this would still be ongoing 90 days from now, but I do just want to say that, that that is a shot clock if the city council closes their public hearing. The CD board has 21 days to publish their recommendation. Once they close their public hearing the city council could choose to grant them longer than that if it became necessary but if the CD board close their hearing, then they have 21 days or the city council can just say we're tired of waiting we want to vote. So I was just read, sorry, I am reviewing my notes, like three times as I say this. One thing to be clear, if you close the hearings, you can't take any more public comment, except for the caveat that the city council has a rule that you take six days of written comments after you close a public hearing. So you should just be aware of that, that the city council could take written comment for six more days, or you need to waive that, that thing. So I just wanted to make this clear that those two things plus, it must be wildly clear what it is that the city board is recommending, and what the city council is voting on. So at the time that the city council actually is voting, not tonight to close. But to accept the zoning, you need to have a clean copy of the zoning that you are voting on. So, for example, just say everybody wanted to close tonight, and you wanted to then vote on the zoning next Tuesday, you would actually need a completely clean version of the zoning to vote on. And we do have some typos, some spelling language, a couple of things, some formatting. For all of you, when we wanted to change formatting before as like clerical error, we were told no, that needed to go in front of the city council. So we've provided a bunch of that to Emily so that the final version that goes on the city council agenda when it's time to vote is the absolute clean final version. So I just wanted to make that all clear. My personal recommendation giving this is that the city council should vote to close the public hearing tonight. That's fine. The CD board should continue to a date certain, which we haven't contemplated another date. So for now, it should be April 15th, because if you then choose to say hold a special meeting the week after, you could do that, right? You just couldn't hear it before April 15th and that we have a meeting that night. And then the CD board could look at all the final changes and then come out with a final. And that would also give in as plenty of time to get a clean version to the city council. So vote on at the city council meeting after the 15th, which I noted is April 28th. So that would be my recommendation.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, what I was going to say is that there's no way that the final vote is happening until April 28th either way, right? So that, you know, that's just what that is. I guess my question, Alicia, you're saying that don't close the public hearing. that the council could but the CD board couldn't be, not because it's necessarily, my question is about making sure that we're being clear about what the process is. And I think if we, if people maybe necessarily hear we're not closing the public hearing then that's more about public comment than it is about that 21 day recommendation shot clock right.
[Alicia Hunt]: So there was something, wait, and I just want to make, because it had to do with changes and stuff, like you can have deliberation after a public hearing is closed, but the six days of written comments, we'll take those comments as part of our deliberations. Sorry, I'm reading my notes to myself to make sure. Honestly, I met with her March 6th to get this all out. I think the thinking had a lot to do with, as things are changing, you want to just make sure you didn't close the public hearing before there were changes being contemplated. Um, And that was sort of my concern with it. But the city council then can get the recommendations with those changes and they can vote on a version that is changed from what you saw at the end of your city council. It's just that the CD board wants to like go back and forth and we added that. The idea that you wouldn't be allowed to take any public comment on the revised version that comes out might be a little concerning.
[Zac Bears]: Well, this is what I'm kind of getting at, like, these are kind of technical, in my mind, these are largely technical adjustments to an existing, like, I think we're all basically in agreement, this is good. We want to see these six things change, because these are the concerns that we have. I don't know if it was six or eight or whatever. And that is deliberation on recommendations, not another draft. Like, obviously there would be a clean document at the end of things, but it's not another proposal, another iteration. It is an adjustment to this product that we agree is good. Right? That's my, and that's the thing that I'm trying to avoid is giving the, like, I want the public perception to be clear that we, both bodies say this is a good product. There's a few things that need to be adjusted. We're taking the time to adjust them. And then there will be probably a vote, one more vote by the Community Development Board on recommendations. They will deliberate. It's not that you can't take public comment. It's just like this is no longer the public hearing. This is no longer like a new proposal. This isn't a third proposal.
[Doug Carr]: No, it's not a new proposal. But I think the timeline, I want to give Emily and her crew enough time to get a really clean product and not be rushed. We really rushed her the last month a lot. And to her credit, she's done great. But it seems like if you close it for the public. But I think what I see potentially happening is we close it and vote on it on the 15th because we'll have it well in advance of the 15th. And I think it will basically be a formality that night to do that because we'll have already solved the problem over the next, that's three weeks from tonight, right, essentially. And I feel like that's enough time to fine tune this language and not be rushed and make sure that when we close it, we're actually closing on what I think is the finished product. And that the 28th is your date, I think that's a completely doable date.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. I mean, yeah. And that's your call. It just sounded to me like it was more about this 21-day clock. What I was, and it also sounded like Alicia said that there was flexibility there. So my, I was just gonna, if that's the plan and that's what you guys agreed to, that makes sense to me. And you wanna pull them. I was also just gonna say, we could vote tonight to close it. And we could say that it's 30 days instead of 21. And that gives you, you know, that gives us until the agenda deadline. The agenda deadline for our meeting on the 28th is the 24th. 30 days I think is, basically the 24th. So that was just my other suggestion. And then it's not what Alicia said, right, was the raising that question of like. another round, another product and then you guys are looking at like a third product without us and then we're no longer doing the process that we've been doing, right, which I think is different than we agree on the product, we agree on the changes and you guys are looking at the changes as recommendations on the 15th. So I know that's kind of semantic to be quite frank but. I just wanna, we've done a good job. And I don't wanna go back to the year meeting, we're meeting, what version, debacle.
[Doug Carr]: I don't wanna slow the process down either. So let's, what if I just. So if I could go, maybe starting with John Anderson. John, what are you comfortable with that approach that we just described in terms of logistics and dates?
[John Anderson]: I have to say, I don't really understand it. What I understood was that the way this works in theory is that the city council comes up with a zoning proposal, votes on it, sends it to the CD board. The CD board can say, that's great, it's perfect, goes back to the city council, final vote, or the CD board says, well, we recommend the following changes. Then it goes back to the city council, they can accept some or none of the recommendations and then vote on it.
[Zac Bears]: Or all.
[John Anderson]: What's that?
[Zac Bears]: Or all.
[John Anderson]: Yes, yes. Have I got that right? Is that how the process is supposed to work?
[Zac Bears]: I think that's how, that is a version of the process. I think we are taking, that's what we were doing last year. And there ended up being some breakdown on the recommendation If the council doesn't accept all the recommendations, what does that mean for the process? And that's why I think that we've taken this joint hearing approach instead, which is to say we all meet together. You know, we'll start, the council will start it legally. We have to start it. Basically, certainly for this amendment and Tufts-Boston Ave coming up, we have work that was done. And I think that's what we've, that's the difference. So, you know, to me, the process at this point is, you know, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data, we're going to look at the data. We are starting from the baseline of our work in the past, technically, legally, the city council is referring that to the community development board, but then we are sitting down as both groups in joint meetings and reviewing different versions of the, basically, the initial version, having discussion about what should be changed, reviewing an amended version, and then agreeing both bodies, like this is basically the amended version that we want. And then, again, the legal process is still, The CD board makes a recommendation and the city council reviews it and can adopt all some or none of it. But I think the difference is it's not council writes it up, sends it to CD board. Like what we're not doing is that the council writes it, CD board says we want to change it and the council says yes, maybe no. I think we're saying let's sit down and review it together.
[Doug Carr]: I think I agree that's the whole point of this process is not to have it be a cafeteria style. We're trying to have consensus.
[Zac Bears]: Right. And it seems to me and this is the thing that I think, I think because we're trying that different approach, it doesn't necessarily fit the legal parameters in the same way, right? Like we're talking about these deadlines and things because it contemplates that sequential process where we meet separately and we've actually changed that by meeting together. And I think that what I'm positing tonight is that we agree on this, both we agree that what the product we got back, we like all of those changes. All of us agree, I haven't heard objection that to the essentially the amendments and the requests that we've made to amend this. And the only thing that needs to happen is we need to give the folks who are going to write up what we discussed tonight the time to incorporate them into the final document. And, you know, that could constitute, you know, there's probably another, essentially that's what I'm saying. And that we could vote tonight, the council and the community development board to close the public hearing and, We agree this is the thing. There's some amendments, some adjustments that need to be made. We know what those are. We've all discussed them. We've all agreed that those are the adjustments that need to be made. We'll both close the public hearing and the council can say. We have, you have 30 days. Instead of this 21-day clock, it sounded like Alicia said we can just set a different timeline that we could vote and say the Community Development Board will return its recommendation in 30 days. And that gives you, gives Innis enough time to make the changes. You guys can meet on the 15th. If your 15th meeting goes along, you could meet on the 22nd. You know, I don't want to schedule for you guys. That's on you, but, you know. Yeah, and then, in that 30 days, then we have it back, a clean version for approval You know, to look at those amendments, adopt them, and approve them on the 28th.
[Doug Carr]: And the 28th is just your meeting. We're not here.
[Zac Bears]: And that's just us. Yeah.
[Doug Carr]: That's what I thought. Okay. Very good.
[Zac Bears]: That's the one where we adopt some, all, some or none. But in this case, I think we're all in agreement. It's all.
[Doug Carr]: I would agree with that. John, any other comments before I move on to Sean?
[John Anderson]: Basically, what you're saying is that the official thing is what you said to us, I don't even know when, a month or so ago. And what we're doing is we're jointly discussing the recommendations from the CD board. And the gentleman's and lady's agreement is that since we've all discussed this and agreed upon it, the city council is going to go along with these recommendations.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, I would say that's essentially. Yeah. Yeah.
[John Anderson]: OK.
[Doug Carr]: I think that's what we're saying.
[John Anderson]: OK. The only two things that are still I feel a little uncomfortable about I don't think we've quite yet addressed the community development board's role moving forward in approving projects. You know, the design standards, the design guidelines, that's still a little bit nebulous to me. And I would like to see the community development board have more power than it currently does. I know we've had proposals before us where the lawyers for the applicant have taken the position that the community developments board is simply to review the zoning and see whether it applies to the project and anything else beyond that is out of our scope. So to me, clarifying this, I think is important.
[Doug Carr]: John, let me chime in on this because I agree with you. Yeah, I believe that the next step for the city board after this, there's a couple of things. One is that we need to start developing either design guidelines or design standards and beefing up that section of our process, which is very weak now and has been historically for decades. We don't have a design review board. It was rejected decades ago, but we can become one and we should become one in my opinion. So that's on us to organize ourselves and to raise the bar for how we evaluate projects so it's not just parking and trash and lighting, but true design guidelines, true design standards. We can drive that process and that doesn't need to happen to approve the zoning. We need to do that regardless of what we do here. The second is that the template that we're establishing in Bedford Square And my mind goes both forward and backwards because we are going to some of the principles we're talking about are going to apply to every neighborhood in the city different ways. And I think they'll apply to Salem Street as well. We've already seen that being tested. We've seen its flaws. We've seen its benefits. And we want to make that better too. So I feel like. It's on us to move that process forward. We're going to need some staff help. We might even need some professional help to design those standards on the design side so that we can have a better dialogue with products that are coming before us on just design beyond the basics, the nuts and bolts of zoning. you know, water and sewer and mitigation and trash and all that, which is very important, but it's, it's sometimes in the parking seems to overwhelm everything at sometimes, obviously. So I feel like it's, it's, it's alluded to in zoning, but ultimately we ultimately need to drive that forward ourselves with the, the, the, the help of the city council, with the help of the planning staff. That's my take.
[Zac Bears]: And Danielle.
[Danielle Evans]: I just want to say that if it's a special permit, there's a discretionary review where if that says by special permit, that doesn't mean it's by right. You can say no to that. This doesn't change any of the site plan review section, which I would like to update anyways and modernize. So there is, you know, more, you know, discretion and just, and then design guidelines as well, so. But those won't be in Medford Square, so I don't want to bog down the conversation too much, but.
[Zac Bears]: Emily?
[Emily Innes]: So I have two things. The first is just to address this, is the Community Development Board's role is unchanged relative to the site plan review process, where the use is allowed as of right, but the board has site plan review authority, or the special permit, which as Danielle just said, is the, a discretionary use and a higher level of standards. So that role is unchanged and it would have to be reviewed citywide as you already alluded to. The other thing is we did forget one thing off our list and we just want to make sure before this goes too much further and everybody agrees that we remind you all that we were going to look at the front step backs along High Street and that should be on the list as well. So I just didn't want to lose that.
[Zac Bears]: That was west of the, essentially west of the church. Yeah. I think we're, I think we're there. I think we're in agreement.
[Emily Innes]: I just wanted to make sure it was on the list before we came back with something and everybody said, wait, we either forgot or we didn't forget. And now we're surprised.
[John Anderson]: So yeah. Yeah.
[Doug Carr]: John, any last comments, John?
[John Anderson]: Yeah. The other thing I wanted to comment on, And I would be afraid to bring this up if I were in the same room with you, because I think you'd all throw your water bottles at me. But I'm concerned by the fact that sometime next week, we're going to find out about an overlay district that impacts about half of MS4 and a good slice of MS3. And I'm just hoping there's nothing in there that makes us want to reconsider what the zoning is. in Medford Square 3 and Medford Square 4. That's all.
[Zac Bears]: We do have it on the agenda. I put transom on the agenda tonight for discussion for a reason, which is that reason. So if we do want to get into that after we've made a call on this, I think we can. But we can have an early kind of preview discussion. My understanding and Alicia, Danielle, feel free to jump in and add or correct me is We don't, that is not the perception that the overlay is going to conflict or have an issue with the underlying zoning. Is that, like do you see, I don't know, Danielle or Alicia, like what's the interface here?
[Danielle Evans]: Basically, the overlay was just going to be a stripped down version of the zoning. They don't want incentives, so we don't need to belabor that. I think they wanted some waivers for the sidewalk width because it wouldn't make sense in certain areas. But it was pretty minimal. It didn't make any material changes to the zoning. It's all the minutia and the details that we're like killing ourselves over are just like not relevant on these vacant lots, you know, so.
[Rich Eliseo]: Yeah.
[George Scarpelli]: Agreed. Okay.
[Doug Carr]: All right. Thank you, John. Sean Bacon, give us your thoughts on the process and the timing.
[Sean Beagan]: Sure. In terms of the process going forward, So our next CDB meeting is the April 15th, correct? Yes. All right. So my preference would be that we leave the public hearing open until the 15th, because then that's the next time this board is going to see essentially an updated clean copy of what we're discussing tonight. With the intent that we would have discussion, anyone from the public who wanted to comment could comment one final time, then we would close our public comment on the 15th with the intention that we would make some recommendations and have it be heard on the April 28th. Are we having a joint session on the 28th? No.
[Zac Bears]: The 28th is just the council.
[Sean Beagan]: Okay. So that we were referred for the city council to vote on the 28th? That's correct. That would be my preference.
[Doug Carr]: Okay. Paige, what's your thoughts?
[Page Buldini]: I agree with Sean. And I think if I heard Alicia correct and maybe Danielle too, that was perhaps recommended as well. So I agree with Sean. Thank you.
[Doug Carr]: Dina.
[Dina Caloggero]: It's going to be a ditto for me too. I agree with that timeline.
[Doug Carr]: OK. And RA Online?
[Ari Fishman]: I'm happy to agree with Sean, Paige, and Dina. I think that sounds reasonable to me.
[Doug Carr]: Okay. As do I. I think that's obviously, that's unanimous then.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. I mean, we'll have to take a vote on it. I just want to, I'm, that's fine. You know, that's, but I think like the open question there that I think it leaves a door open for, it'll be our first meeting talking about this not all together. And you know, we've agreed right now that everything we've talked about tonight is something that we can move forward on. And I just like want to, insist that we don't reopen doors. That's the only thing, because if we're not there, if we're not all sitting together, it's a lot harder to have the conversation. I think that's fair.
[Doug Carr]: Just like we're asking you to take it on faith that when we all agree the recommendations that you're basically saying we will do it. I think we're committing that we're not going to reinvent the wheel between now and the 15th, that it's just going to be a final clean product, continue the public hearing, review it, close it, and I think vote on it that night. That's our commitment.
[Zac Bears]: All right. I'll ask members of the council how they feel about that as a next step. Councilor Malauulu?
[Liz Mullane]: Thank you. Well, first, I just want to thank everyone for all the hard work that's gone into putting this together, and I think going through each of these different pieces was really helpful. And I do agree, I feel like we're at a place right now where it's really just little tweaks that we want to make and I do kind of, I am just a little bit worried about the fact if we continue with the public hearing that if anything major comes up again or if there's any big changes. I'm not quite sure what else we would need from that since we didn't get as many comments this time around. But as long as I think we're all kind of in agreement with just really sticking to kind of some of the answers that Ennis has promised to get back to us on the tweaking of that and we can move forward, I think that would be comfortable for me. I just, you know, I feel like we've done a really nice job, all of us together, working through it and having these conversations. So I'm just hopeful that if we do continue with the public hearing piece of it, Nothing major or anything really comes up from there. It's really just sticking with those tweaks and if anyone has comments on them, fine, but that those would be kind of the main things that anyone would be discussing at that point.
[Zac Bears]: Recognize Councilor Callahan.
[Anna Callahan]: Thank you. I also want to thank everyone. I really want to thank the consultants who have done so much work in integrating a lot of the changes that have been suggested over the last two years, right? It's not just the last few weeks, but also, you know, they have been working with us for a very long time. I really want to thank all of the residents starting seven years ago. who began the process that we are in now, which was to really envision what they wanted Medford to be. And I don't want us to forget that we have these many planning documents that the city worked very hard on, and thousands and thousands of residents were engaged in that process. That includes the housing production plan, the climate plan, the comprehensive plan, and really creating a vision for our city of a vibrant city that did allow for more housing, that was future-looking and walkable, all of the things that you can read in those documents. So this is the, you know, we cannot have those visions of our city become a reality without updating our zoning. And I really appreciate so much the detailed work that people are doing now so that we can go ahead and move forward toward that vision that so many people here in Medford work towards. I really have faith in the Community Development Board that through this process we are all acting in good faith and that they will not be making a bunch of changes at their next meeting that they will then hand to us. You know, this is not like we are reaching out. Going outside of the normal process that cities do, including the city board in these joint meetings where we can all discuss together. This is unusual and I think it shows an incredible amount of collaboration. So I really am putting my faith in you guys that you also are, you know, we are all on the same page of wanting to make this vision happen. And so I am looking forward to receiving something from you that is basically what we discussed here tonight. Thank you so much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Callahan. I'll go to Councilor Scarpelli and then Vice President Lazzaro. Councilor Scarpelli.
[George Scarpelli]: Thank you, Council President. First, I think that, you know, from where we were a few months ago, I think it's important that the big void was people felt they weren't being heard. And I think that this process and the collaboration with the CD board, I think, has been a great partnership and I appreciate our partners in Ennis and our team at City Hall. I think that we've come to a consensus tonight that I do feel comfortable where we are, but I would stand with our partners and the CD board in going in the path that they've recommended. Because in the end, The steps are there will still be on time. Everything will be in place. And I think we'll have a clearer picture. So, um, you know, I've, I've, I've been the unlucky city Councilor to always hear the negative, um, input and have to share that. And I'll be honest with you. I haven't heard. heard many negative comments when it comes to this process. So we've had ample opportunity for residents to share their opinions, and I think you know, with the two top chairs in the city. And Doug and Zach, I think that we maintained great order. And I think that there was a lot of collaboration and a lot of movement. And I think we're in a good place. But I would tend to, if we can, Mr. President, follow the lead of our CD board and go with that timeline. So thank you very much.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you, Councilor Scarpelli. Vice President Lazzaro.
[Emily Lazzaro]: Thank you. I appreciate the feedback of the professionals who have been working hard on this and the volunteers that have dedicated their time as well. And I agree that, well, I would prefer to move along tonight, but I understand that that's not happening. And I think that that is also fine. Thank you.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you yeah and I think for me it's really more about how do we keep the train on the tracks and what signal are we sending and to me like the 2 processes that we were like it's. I propose an idea and it's basically the same idea, right? It's we agree tonight that this is what it is. You guys meet on the 15th and send us something back and we look at it on the 28th. And the only difference is keeping the hearing open or hearing closed. And to me that's more about the signal to the public about what they can expect at the meeting and less about like the trust and faith in the process. I think leaving it open sends maybe a different signal to the public otherwise. I think that's fine. I just think, you know, that's more what I'm getting at. And then Sean's heard me in meetings just talking about that, because that's really where I think the process, that's been a lot of my focus, because I think that's where the process went off the rails last time. And so I'm very, I'm highlighting that. It seems to me that we're all on the same page either way. But I just want to make sure that if you're watching tonight, And you go to the CD board meeting on the 15th, you know, and you think, I'm going to come up here and speak and the whole project's going to change because of the words that I say. That's not really what that meeting's going to be about from what I'm hearing.
[Doug Carr]: And it's not, but I think it's worth emphasizing that the changes that we saw tonight are pretty significant. Yeah. And I just want to give, not everyone can evaluate both the map and the zoning table. I just want to give people a little more time to think about it. So, you know, I don't think it's going to change much, but I just, I just want to make sure they get more than one bite at the apple. And I think that extra little time is going to be enough to make sure that no one feels blindsided by major changes to the historic or some of the daylights, which has been a huge issue on some of the projects we reviewed. You know, I think Paige pointed out that we had 1400 units This, you know, in the last, was it eight months that have been approved? It's been, the train is moving fast. And this is only going to accelerate it. So I'm feeling really good about this. So I just, I don't think it will change anything, but just having one more chance for a commentary I think would be helpful so people can get their questions answered. I know Emily's not coming to our meeting either. So, but we'll have a product there that will be essentially finished, which I think is important.
[Zac Bears]: I want to give another idea. It's not so much a change as an additional. We could both continue tonight to next week. If people want to come and talk next week, if they haven't had time to consider this, they want to come speak next week. We don't need NS here, but we could continue this public hearing one last time. time collectively on this proposal just to address that concern.
[Doug Carr]: That was my original thought as we discussed when we talked Friday last week that next week would be it. I think we're okay with that.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Okay. So that's an option too. You know, we can have one more bite at the apple for public who may want to comment on this proposal. next week and then obviously at that time, council votes to close, city board wants to keep it open to the 15th, you know, that's your call. If we both want to close and you meet on the 15th to deliberate, that's your call. But it gives one more chance for us all to hear from the public if there are more people who haven't been able to speak yet. And it doesn't change the timeline at all. We're having the meeting and you guys have to meet on the 15th anyway, so.
[Doug Carr]: I agree. Okay. All right.
[Zac Bears]: Any objections to that? It really doesn't change anything other than it lets us hear from people one more time next week if they want to speak to it. We already have a meeting 6 p.m. Tuesday to discuss the transom, so it would be the same, just it would be another agenda item for that meeting. And it's a joint meeting of all of us, so. If there's anyone who hasn't heard yet, come speak to us.
[Doug Carr]: All right, so do we have a motion to continue the hearing?
[Zac Bears]: Yeah, we'll do that. I just want to on the record, just for the record, on the proposal, on this Medford Square proposal, there's essentially three more meetings. Next week, we will hear more public comment if you'd like to speak on the revised Medford Square proposal. On April 15th, the Community Development Board is going to make its recommendation based on the feedback from Innes Associates on what we've heard tonight. And then on March 28th, the City Council will consider the Community Development Board recommendation and the final adoption of the Medford Square zoning. April 28th, that's what I said, right? Yes. All right. That's the plan. Is there a motion to continue the public hearing until next Tuesday's joint session for the City Council? On the motion of Vice President Lazzaro, seconded by Councilor Callahan. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Yes. Councilor Leming?
[Matt Leming]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Maloney? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli?
[George Scarpelli]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Tseng? Still absent. Vice President Lazzaro? Yes. We got them both. Yes.
[Zac Bears]: Seven in the affirmative, none in the negative. The motion passes for the City Council.
[Doug Carr]: All right, same motion to continue to next Tuesday night, March 21st. Very good. OK, we'll call John Anderson.
[John Anderson]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: John Began.
[John Anderson]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: Page Buldini. Yes. Dina Colagaro. Yes. Ari Goffman-Fishman.
[Ari Fishman]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: And myself, Doug Carr, yes, the motion passes six to nothing.
[Zac Bears]: Great. All right. So again, next Tuesday, we have a joint session here. We will hear any further public comment on this draft of the Medford Square zoning. On April 15th, Community Development Board will meet and review the adjustments from Innes Associates to make recommendations to the City Council for a vital vote on April 28th.
[Doug Carr]: But most of the agenda next week will be about
[Zac Bears]: Yes, well, that's what I wanted to get into next. We have it on here now. Do we want to add all? I know we've been going for a while. It's 907. We probably want to, but do we want to take. 10 minutes just to talk about what we're going to do next week.
[Doug Carr]: I think that would be a good idea.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. So I'm going to move us to our next agenda item which is motions, orders and resolutions, paper 26058 submitted by Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn, proposed amendments to the Medford Zoning Ordinance, Medford Square City Hall Overlay District for discussion only public hearing on March 31st. So this is the transom project on the City Hall Overlay District. There's some pages in here.
[Doug Carr]: Might be worth putting the map up again.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah. Do we have a, I think we have a proposed zoning map for the transom project maybe that we could put on the screen. Let me see what I can do here. Director Hunt, if in the meantime, you might want to just quickly walk us through what we're looking at for next week. That might be helpful.
[Alicia Hunt]: I was starting to become afraid you were going to say that, Mr. President. We're getting a habit of putting me on the spot here with no warning. I should have realized it though.
[Zac Bears]: My apologies. It's just who's going to vamp, you or me.
[Alicia Hunt]: So tomorrow or tomorrow this next week, Valerie more who is the lawyer for transom is gonna basically walk us through this zoning amendment, which is as you all have mentioned a stripped down version of the zoning, but puts in place a couple of waivers that we. uh that we're recommending that we give to transom because we're working very very closely with them on this project and their sites are different from other sites in medford square so we were not recommending that those waivers go into the full version of the zoning um and some of them include things that we hadn't truly contemplated like the parking garage on that they are contemplating will, in fact, be fronting on two public ways, one of which is Clippership and one is I-93. But that is, in fact, a public way, and we would actually like to treat that side of the building differently and not hold them to our public way standards. It's a very easy example. She'll walk us through it next week and explain the details on it. It is just these three parcels. that the city put out to bid that they are being employed or contracted with to develop and would not apply to anywhere else in the square. That's what we're going to be looking at.
[Zac Bears]: Great. Alicia, just one thing that wasn't in the enclosures that we got from the mayor's office was actually a map. It does describe the parcels. It describes actually the individual lots that comprise the parcels, but doesn't show them visually. And I'm just wondering if that could be something that we could be able to look at next Tuesday. I mean, I think we all know where they are, but I think it's helpful.
[Alicia Hunt]: We all, we will. And honestly, I was just looking to see, I couldn't talk and look at the same time. If you want to meet here, I've got it. Did you want me to put it up? Hold on. I'm trying to think that one of these is because I printed it out for the city council last week. But you know what? I think I took a photocopy of something off of physically sitting on my desk. And that I don't know that I can come up with it in 30 seconds to put it on.
[Zac Bears]: That's all right. As long as we have it next week, I think that's fine. And I'm getting a general sense that people would like this meeting to be over. So, you know, I just wanted to give a quick preview of what we can expect next weekend. And I just wanted to say for The group as well, one other thing that I'm hoping to discuss tomorrow with the chair of the Community Development Board and Alicia and Danielle and Ines is our remaining schedule. You know, we do have a time limited contract with a limited number of meetings. We had reviewed the schedule previously I believe at the March 3rd meeting or maybe even the meeting before that and, you know, We're pretty much on track which I think is really good. You know the substantively we've basically completed most of the Medford Square work tonight. There's still some stuff outstanding. The other big thing on our plate is within us is Tufts Boston Avenue and we have a public info session on April 30th. And we have some city council planning and permitting committee meetings to meet at least one of those associates to take the portions of the other corridor. Formerly this was part of the other corridors section in the last part of the zoning project. Now we're focusing specifically on the Tufts and Boston Avenue. So, we have to meet in April, and we need Ennis to be able to meet with us in April to draft that so that there's something to start talking about on the 30th, and then something that we can refer to another joint meeting in early to mid-May. So, I just wanted to, I'm going to kind of work with you guys, you know, work with the planning group internally. tomorrow so that next week I'll put something on the agenda just so we can talk about what the meetings in April, May, and June will look like on the Tufts and Boston Avenue project. And I just want to make sure that we just want to let you know that's another thing that we'll start taking a look at and why I'm kind of being a little bit of a stickler about timelines.
[Doug Carr]: Right, but we don't need to actually complete Medford Square to start Boston Avenue.
[Zac Bears]: Correct. And I think, right, so we're mostly We're done with the substance. So we can start with the initial part. But we're not going to have overlapping public hearings. And I think that's really the main goal. Right. So that the public knows when to come to each section anymore. Yeah. Councilor Laming.
[Matt Leming]: So to the point about not needing to finish Medford Square before we get to Boston Avenue, that was in the joint press release that we would finish one part before we got to the next. And that was something internally that the mayor did insist on. Obviously, we'll need to get to that. Like, we'll be discussing that tomorrow in the working group. But another reason that I've been kind of a stickler about wrapping about timelines is because of that component. So I think that will be, you know, we will get to that tomorrow. But that is something that the mayor did has previously insisted on that we sort of finish up one before we get to the other.
[Zac Bears]: And I think on the substance, we're there. And, you know, I'm sure. With all of us in agreement, that'll be all right. But we'll talk about it tomorrow. But I just wanted to kind of preview that as well. So next week, if there's any more public comment on the Medford Square, that'll be our last opportunity to hear it together. We'll talk about the overlay district for the City Hall parking lots project from transom. And we'll go over the timeline for April, May, and June around the mainly Tufts and Boston Avenue and our meetings with Innes Associates on that so that we get that done in that time frame. All right, there is actually someone over there. Is it Sean?
[Sean Beagan]: I just had a comment in regards to the proposal from Transom for their overlay.
[Zac Bears]: Yeah.
[Sean Beagan]: So the version of the Medford Square zoning that we got today from Innis is somewhat different than what I think Transom was using for their overlay to the extent that there's anything in the revised Innis draft that they might want to include. Perhaps we should send this most recent version of Innis's draft over to them. I don't know if, they may be perfectly fine as is, but perhaps they want to add, you know, for example, the minimum square footage on unit sizes went from 900 down to 600 in our current draft. I don't know if that's something that they want in their overlay, if they need it in their overlay. might be worthwhile sending it to Attorney Moore to see if there's something she wants to incorporate.
[Zac Bears]: That's a good idea. Alicia and Danielle, I don't know, you know, would you be able to forward that over to Attorney Moore, the updated draft?
[Alicia Hunt]: Put it on my list for tomorrow.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Do you have any expect, you know,
[Alicia Hunt]: We don't have to talk about it. So I'll tell you that the overlay is written for what they need in order to do the project. And so even though we might be letting them do more or less of this or that, they don't need it. They didn't need all the height, for example. So I don't think it matters to them. But I will send it over to her.
[Zac Bears]: More units. Yeah.
[Alicia Hunt]: I mean, you know, is there any well, at this point, it's probably way too big to spend so long, but that's helpful to understand 600 minimum was about historic conversions, though, not all apartments in the square.
[Zac Bears]: It sounds like you'll be able to send it over. And if there are elements that that they want to incorporate, then that'll be Yeah. Okay. All right. And you know, I think when you send that over, it may be helpful. I think it may be helpful for us to hear from them, and maybe Attorney Moore could speak to it, why they made the project decisions that they made, even knowing that zoning could have allowed some different things. I think that might just be helpful for us to hear.
[Doug Carr]: I think the city board definitely wants to know the logic, like how they're thinking. So when we encountered that on Salem Street, it helped us understand their motivations. It was important.
[Zac Bears]: All right. Looks like you got it, John.
[Doug Carr]: All right, John, we're about to close the hearing here. Sorry, the hearing.
[John Anderson]: I know, I know.
[Doug Carr]: Go ahead, John, one more time.
[John Anderson]: Yeah, I would just like to expand on that request a little bit. And perhaps someone could give us a five-minute, 10-minute overview of the transom project before we get into the zoning details.
[Zac Bears]: I didn't mean tonight. Next week, yeah.
[Doug Carr]: That'll be the introduction next week.
[Zac Bears]: Right, yes.
[Doug Carr]: Let's do a design introduction before we get into zoning.
[Zac Bears]: That makes sense, yeah.
[Doug Carr]: Okay.
[Zac Bears]: All right, thanks, John. Thank you, John. Do we have a motion from a member of the city council to adjourn the meeting? Motion to adjourn. And the motion to adjourn by Councilor Millan, seconded by Vice President Lazzaro. Mr. Clerk, please call the roll.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Callahan? Yes. Councilor Leming?
[Matt Leming]: Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Councilor Maloney? Yes. Councilor Scarpelli? Yes. Councilor Tseng?
[Zac Bears]: Oh, he's for some reason he can't unmute himself. Yes.
[Rich Eliseo]: Vice President Lazzaro? Yes. President Pierce?
[Zac Bears]: Yes, I have an affirmative. Chair Carr?
[Doug Carr]: I'll accept the motion to adjourn the meeting for the Community Development Board.
[John Anderson]: So moved.
[Doug Carr]: Second. Don't all jump at once. All right. Roll call. John Anderson.
[John Anderson]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: John Began.
[Sean Beagan]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: Page Buldini. Yes. Dina Colagaro. Yes. Ari Goffman-Fishman.
[Ari Fishman]: Yes.
[Doug Carr]: And myself, yes. Thank you all. Appreciate the excellent work tonight.
[Zac Bears]: Thank you. On those motions?
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