City officials and consultants hosted a public information session to present preliminary research and gather community feedback on proposed rezoning for Boston Avenue and the Tufts University institutional area. Residents raised concerns regarding building heights, tree loss, shadow impacts, neighborhood buffering, and meeting notification.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Let me just do a brief sound check there. All right, so we're good on the zoom as the sound's coming through very nicely. I've been told by Judy that I'm talking very soft right now. So I need to, you know, project a little bit more. All right. All right. Well, first off, thank you all very much for coming out here today. My name is Matt Leming. I'm a member of the Medford City Council, the chair of the Planning and Permitting Committee. I'm joined here by Alicia Hunt, the Director of the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability, as well as Emily Innes and Paula Ramos-Martinez, who are consultants that are working with the City as part of the Innes Land Strategies Group to give us expert advice and work on the ongoing Medford rezoning project. So what we're going to talk about today is some proposed rezoning work and preliminary research that has been done on areas around Boston Avenue as well as the Tufts Institutional Zone. In the Medford square or sorry in the Medford rezoning we're the idea of this is that we're going through different areas of the city different parcels and rezoning them one by one and then having these neighborhood meetings, these community feedback sessions, mainly to hear from folks who are abutters to the area and really get an idea of what y'all are looking for in your neighborhoods, what y'all would like to see.
[Unidentified]: Recording in progress.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Okay, starting the recording now. And really what you're looking for and where you want to see the neighborhoods go in the next 10-20 years and therefore where we should take the rezoning project. We finished rezoning Medford Square this past Tuesday. The final drafts for that were passed and ordained by the city council. And now we're going to focus over the next couple of months on these areas, Boston Avenue, the Tufts Institutional Zone, joined here by one of our partners at Tufts, Rocco DiRico.
And yeah. Yeah, just once again, pleased to have everybody here both on both in person and on zoom, you can expect to have another one of these meetings, June 1. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Emily and as to talk about some of the preliminary work that has been done on zoning so far, and then love to hear from you all after.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. I am just sharing my screen, so hopefully you all can see it. Of course, I realize that now I can't see it unless I turn, so let me do that a little bit. Good evening. My name is Emily Keyes Innis. I'm president of Innisland Strategies Group. I recognize some of you all from previous meetings, so it's nice to see you all again. What we're going to do today is start off with a little bit about the process, and then we are going to talk about the research we've been doing on Boston Avenue, some of the discussions we've had with the Planning and Permitting Committee about boundaries, and then we're going to chat about Tufts and some of the conversations we've had around boundaries for that. And then we're going to open it up to hear comments and questions from all of you, and that includes the people both online and here in person. If we can't answer a question today, we are going to take it down and do our best to answer it later, but primarily we do want to hear about what you're interested in for these areas, what you're hoping for for the future. So this is a breakdown that you see here. We are in phase two of the second zoning process. So phase A, as Councilor Leming mentioned, was focused on Medford Square, and that is now complete. We're now focusing on the Boston Avenue and Tufts Institutional Zoning. It's critical to know that this is the first of two public meetings. So really, this is the initial listening session. After this session, we'll be working on draft zoning for both areas, probably starting with Boston Avenue first. and then work that through planning and permitting. There will be some more joint hearings with the City Council and the Community Development Board. And then as Councilor Leming mentioned, we're going to come back in June 1st with a full draft for more public comment at this time. So think of this as stage one of this process.
So let's talk about Boston Avenue and what we see here. So this is the entire area that we're looking at. You can see a dotted line that goes around the whole area, two different colors, one around Boston Avenue. For ease of reference, we're going to call this temporarily Boston Avenue North and Boston Avenue South, even though they're not quite North and South, and then this other line around a draft boundary for the Tufts area. Within that, you're going to see a bunch of different colors depending on which map we're showing. In this case, this is the existing zoning and you can see the lines down the side. And then you're going to see some solid lines that represents the areas that we're actually looking at for the new zoning. So the boundary lines are what we would call our context area. Last year, they were the area that we started to look at. They are not the total area now. So that looked at the existing zoning. Zoning, of course, are the rules of what you can do, what the law, the zoning allows you to do in terms of development. This is what's actually there in terms of land uses, and these land users come from the city's assessor's data. This is what the assessors assign as the land uses. And you can see in our Boston areas, north and south, there's quite a mix of uses, including residential, retail, and residential at different levels of density, so different numbers of units per parcel. There's some industrial in there, and then there's obviously the Tufts campus in the middle.
So we broke it down into two areas based on feedback that we heard from the planning and permitting committee. So we're talking about the hillside Boston Avenue neighborhood corridor to start with. This is our northern area. So you can see the dotted line again that is our contacts line. Now one of the things that we did notice is this area right in here. is primarily residential. You'll see that as we go through this. So this is not part of what we're talking about in terms of rezoning. For this rezoning effort, right now our draft boundaries are this green line here and this green line down here. And that's because those two areas are more of those mixed use areas and less of the residential zoning or residential only areas. And what we did was we looked at the dimensional standards and the land uses of the existing zoning to try and understand a little bit better the relationship between what's actually on the ground and what the zoning says can be on the ground. It's the existing built environment versus the zoning regulations. So this is what we call our total count of non-conformities per lot. And what you should know is the more intense the color means the more non-conformities there are. And the reason that this is important is because if a property owner has a building or a lot that's non-conforming and they want to do something, say they want to put a back porch on it, but their lot or their building is non-conforming. they would have to go and get a variance in order to do that. They have to go through the ZBA instead of just being able to get a building permit. So it makes it more expensive for property owners to be able to invest in their properties. So that's one reason we look at non-conforming conditions and they could be conforming because of lot size, because of where the building is on the lot relative to required setbacks and yards, because of the height. because of the use. And so the other reason we look at nonconformities is when we are looking at what people want to do with their property, what the neighbors and the community as a whole want to see in that area, we want to know what our baseline is. We want to know what's there now, what the zoning allows, and how that might be different from what people want to see. And so that's part of what we want to hear from you tonight, is as you're thinking about the future of these areas, what would you like to see? And then we go back and look at what the zoning allows. So I'm going to take you relatively quickly through the non-conformities, because our real focus is there's a lot of non-conformities, and we need to think about that when we're thinking about a zoning change. As we go deeper into how we change the zoning based on what we hear from you, what we heard from the comprehensive plan, what we heard from some of the others, we might delve more into exactly how these are non-conformings. So this one is non-conformity by minimum frontage. So frontage is the area, the length along the front lot line, that's the line between the lot and the public right-of-way. There's a minimum requirement, and these are all based on the existing zoning. And you can see there's some. We looked at the non-conformities in the entire context area, even though we're really only looking at the area within the green boundary for changes, just because we wanted to get a sense of the characteristics of the whole Boston Avenue. This is nonconformity by maximum building coverage. That's how much of the building covers the lot at ground level. It's important to understand that for purposes that when you have a building on a lot, it takes up a certain amount of that ground level. So does parking, so does open space, so understanding if a lot has Too much building means that it might not have enough room for parking or open space, so that's one of the reasons we look at that. It's quite common because of the smaller lots. You can see the parcel lines in these areas dividing the lots. Quite frequently, smaller lots also have a higher building coverage just because of the ratio of the building to the ground. This is lot size, so getting back to the smaller lots, many of these lots do not conform to the current zoning based on lot size. And that's quite common in New England, mostly because a lot of areas were built out before zoning was put into place. I worked, for example, recently with a community who didn't have zoning until 1967, but they'd been settled into the 1700s. And so when the zoning gets put into place, A lot of times people might have had different reasons for putting different dimensional standards there. In some cases, it was aspirational. They wanted something different. In other cases, they said, well, this is what we have. We don't want it to change. So let's make those zoning things nonconforming, not thinking about what that might mean in terms of future investment in their properties. So this is not uncommon to see that. This is setback. So this is setback. We look at the front setback. So this is how far away the front of the building is from the street. Often that area is called the yard. So you'll hear a front yard or a front yard setback. This is really important because how the building relates to the street governs how people feel when they walk down that street. If you think of a downtown, the buildings are quite frequently at the sidewalk. If you think of a suburb, they're probably 30 to 40 feet back. If you're thinking of a rural area, you might not see the buildings at all because it's on a much larger piece of land. So what your experience is walking down or driving down a street is very much governed by where the buildings are. And if we're trying to reach a walkable neighborhood, we might want to have buildings a little bit closer to the street. If we are thinking again about those more rural areas, we might have them further away or suburban areas. So that's important. Again, in an area that was already built out, not surprising to see the front building setbacks. We're talking at planning and permitting. One of the other conversations we had about the idea of the trolley lines and people going down the street and people's relationship to trolleys. Now, this is the non-conformity by use, and you can see there's a couple of... And what that means is that the use is not actually allowed by the zoning. The technical term is pre-existing non-conforming, which is quite a mouthful. What that means is that if the use was there when the zoning came into play, that use can stay. But if it's ever abandoned, then the property owner would have to come into compliance. So for example, if a property goes vacant for two years, that's considered an abandonment of the use. And so any new use would have to be conforming with the zoning. So we look to see what that is and why that is. Are we looking at commercial in a residential area? Are we looking at residential in a commercial area? And again, this is in our context area. We've got some three-family residential in this zoning district. I should say all the zoning districts are up here. Three families aren't allowed in that. So and again, this is all the data from the assessors. So that's an initial exploration. Other explorations that we do when we're looking at zoning is obviously to go to the area.
Now that we have some green and less feet of snow, we'll actually get some pictures this time. Frequently, anything we start in the spring, we have to wait until the snow goes away before we can get our official pictures. But we typically look at that. We'll look at the history of an area and see what that's done. But that's a snapshot of what we look at. So let's look at our South Boston corridor here. Again, we've got the dotted lines for our context lines here. And then this green boundary is what we're thinking of as our actual change zoning. This is interesting because, as you'll see, we go through this. There have been a lot of changes in this area already. So in some cases, we might be looking to capture what's already there and others anticipating future changes. Again, this is our total count of nonconformities. So, you can see some of these parcels down here with the more intense colors have more nonconformities. Some of these other parcels have fewer nonconformities. So, this is our frontage again. So, just a couple of these smaller parcels kind of clustered in this area, one lone parcel up here, nonconforming by frontage, and that means it's too small.
Quite a lot by lot coverage, as we already talked about. Not really surprised. And you can see most of those are actually outside our area. And the ones that are outside our green boundary are primarily residential. Looking here, lot size, again, you're going to see some consistent patterns in this area. Obviously, the zoning was applied, was not very consistent with what was on the ground at the time. This is the front building setback. Almost all, but not quite. Nonconformity by use, so this here is an industrial area. You can see the gray slightly off screen on this one. Sorry, no, there it is, right there. So this gray here is the industrial zoning, and these parcels here are within that industrial zoning, but they're actually residential, so they're nonconforming because of that. So I'm going to stop here with the Boston corridor. We'll come back to it. But just to let you know that we have the maps over there. I know some of you were looking at it before we came in. And we'll be gathering when we get to the end after we talk about Tufts. We're going to talk about how we gather input from you all today because we've got people in person plus people online. But for the next slide, I'm going to turn it over to Alicia. Alicia, just let me know when to move slides. Great. Thank you.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I'm going to talk a little bit about Tufts and I'm actually going to acknowledge that I think, I'm not sure if it's just me, but the slides on the Zoom are a little bit delayed. Sorry if it's a little disconcerting. One of the things that we heard throughout this zoning process is that we should be going out and talking to the people who own the property. When we did Mystic Ave, we mailed all the property owners in Mystic Ave. We held a meeting for Salem Street down at the Roberts School. We've been trying to reach the property owners involved. So in this case, the property owner is Tufts University. So we wanted to hear what are their future views? What is their vision? What do they think about with respect to the property? And I also thought that I should point out, because people always say to me, why are you talking to Tufts as if they're the enemy? They're actually the largest employer in the city of Medford, and they employ 414 residents in Medford. So actually, they contribute a lot to our economy. just because those people can now buy things in our city. But also, this is their land that we're talking about. One of the things that we have been discussing is that they've proposed that they could do an annual plan update to us where they would present to the Community Development Board annually about what are projects that they see coming down the pipeline, what are things they wish they could do if they had the funding for them. A good example like that is a year ago, they might not have told us that the Tufts Aquatic Center was going to come in front of the CD board this year. That's because they would not have known that they had that funding. When that funding became available at some point this year, they said, oh, now this is on our radar. Now this is something that we're going to do this year. So sometimes they know about things or long-term plans or buildings they'd like to see done. And there are other things where they have to figure out what the funding is before they'll ever move forward. So one of our things is to talk about doing that every year. I will just pause and say that I think my computer just completely dropped the zoom. So somebody else just became the host of this Zoom, so be aware of that.
And you'll have to make me a co-host again. I reconnected. Sorry about that. So next slide. If you can flip the slide and make me a co-host. So one of the things that we wanted people to notice is that As many of the people in our room know, and I'm sure some of the people online know, Tufts is half in Medford and half in Somerville. We can only zone the part that is in Medford, but we have to understand the full context of the property. One of the things that's very interesting about this is that the part that's in Medford, almost all of it is just one parcel, which makes it really weird when you have rules like our zoning has a rule that says you can only have one building on a parcel. It becomes complicated when buildings don't align to the parcels at all. Next slide.
I'm not sure I'm on Zoom again. I'm reconnecting again. Sorry. So this slide shows us the current zoning. So the athletic side of Tufts is actually currently zoned general residential, which means that what's basically allowed there are houses. And like, and sorry, I'm disconcerted by the zoom dropping and picking up on my laptop. And it only allows two and a half stories and 35 feet. However, our zoning is by use. And so the use is for residential. So there isn't actually a use for athletic buildings and how tall they're allowed to be. But if you were a house that is allowed in that zone, that's what you're allowed to be.
Across the street is an apartment zone. I believe it's the apartment two zone. In the apartment two zone, it allows apartment buildings up to six stories. Then it says, all other buildings can be up to 15 stories in height. That is one of the things that we ran into because people go, well, what's all other buildings? I'm like, well, things that are not apartment buildings for one thing. So starting to look at what should the height be there, and you can see the lower section, which I believe is a lot of science buildings, although I'm not an expert on what's in every building in Kicktoffs, is an industrial zone. And so that allows commercial industrial buildings up to two stories in height. It doesn't actually allow residential. It doesn't really allow a lot of stuff.
So if you'll flip the slide. Yes. So even the area... So, it's stuck on mine. If you go back one slide, even the area that's, yes, this one, that has a lot of houses and has some private ownership, we'll mention that in a minute, that's zoned apartment two as well. All right, next slide. So, this is actually the slide that shows us what is owned by TOPS and what is owned by their nonprofit, Walnut Hill. And so you can see, I really want to stand up and point, because that's going to cause a problem for people, that this area... I didn't bring a pointer. Yes, up there in the corner. Yeah, I should use your mouse. So we're not proposing right now that that be in the tough zone. And if it's not in the tough zone, then it would be controlled by the residential zoning that's in that area. We could talk about Dover, but their default zoning would be whatever else is allowed in that neighborhood. And we are actually, at this time, here, I'll point to your screen, you can point, proposing that this area there be within the Tufts zone. And how do we handle that? A large proportion of the buildings in that area are actually owned by Tufts, but not all of them. And if I understand correctly, we have one owner-occupied house in that entire corner. And then if you look across the street where the commercial buildings are, we're actually proposing that that be in the Boston Ave zone.
But in theory, that's something that could be discussed, right? Is that part of the campus or is that Boston Ave zone? And I believe a lot of that is actually owned by Walnut Hill. All right, so next. So these are some of the things we want to hear people talk about. And what we're proposing is that the zoning in this area not be residential zoning, not be apartment, not be commercial, not be industrial, but be campus zoning, something that's designed for a campus where you might have different things happening in the middle of the zone. than you have on the edges. Because what happens on our streets that face our neighborhoods and face our businesses is one thing, and what happens in the middle of the campus is something else. We look at it from a distance, but we actually don't care what your setback between your buildings in the middle of the campus are. That's for the students and for them to handle.
We do care what the setbacks and the heights are on the streets that are facing our houses in our neighborhoods. And so that's some of what we're asking people to think about. And how do we treat this as a zone? And that we also want to think about some of the things that are different on a campus, like parking. Technically, our zoning requires parking at every building, and that makes sense if you have an independent owner who's developing an independent building somewhere. However, on a campus, if you have parking at every building, then somebody drives over to that building, because that's where they're going, they can't find parking, so then they drive to another building, and then eventually they drive to the campus garage, and they have just done a lot of extra driving, and that's unpleasant for everybody. And if there isn't parking by those individual buildings, they have central garages, people, visitors navigate to the central garage, they park there, and they walk to where they're going. And I understand that there would always be some accommodations for ADA spaces, handicapped spaces throughout because that's a different situation, but your average regular visitors, average everyday people who are going there. So that's something to think about and how do you zone that and how do you regulate that differently? And one of the things obviously we want to talk about and hear from you is about heights and that the heights should be different more. If they have some tall buildings facing some of their tall buildings up on College Avenue, the Somerville border, how much do we care? I'd like to understand that. And how is that different from the buildings that are on Winthrop Street directly across the street from homes and neighborhoods? So let's talk, we need to talk about these different areas in context and the area that's further down that's industrial, that's next to a neighborhood. How is that different from the area that is by the science buildings, for example? and talking about setbacks, that we care. Maybe the setbacks on College Ave, on Winthrop, on Boston are different from each other. What do we want? Do we want buildings right up to the street where there's a store and you go from store to store? That's how the new dorm design is, is that there's a wide sidewalk, but then those are restaurants and stores. If you had to cross, 50 feet of green space to get to that restaurant, would you go to it? But it's there on the sidewalk, now you're going to use it. So what do you want? But if it's an area where it's just their campus buildings with no public facing spaces, maybe we'd like them a little bit set back and there's a little bit of buffer. So that's all the things that we think about when we're talking about campus zoning that's different from neighborhood zoning. Then we've started to implement development standards in a green score. And how does that apply on a giant campus like this? And what's important for us? And what are the things that we want to talk about? And how do you look at that? Because right now, it's one giant parcel, pretty much. And so it's easy for the green score. We also have stormwater standards and regulations that are pretty strict in Massachusetts that we'll also be applying. And they have green goals as well. And how do we incorporate things so that we can work together at giving a more pleasant environment for everybody without putting unusual or undue burden on anybody, right? Like, how do we get what's best for our community without squeezing the life out of them?
I think that's it. We're going to wrap this up. One more slide and then we're going to hear from everybody and we have a timer and we'll spend the rest of the day peering from people.
[Emily Innes]: So just to help with the conversation about thinking about the different parts of the campus and the different parts of Tufts, we have broken it up into basically initial subgroups. So for those of you in the room, we're going to take comments in a couple of different ways. Obviously, you're welcome to speak to us, right? That's why we're here is to listen to you. If you have any area-specific or geographic-specific comments you want to make, there are little three-by-three stickies. Feel free to write on those at any point during the conversation and put them on the board. If you've got something to say that you want to write down, some people are shy about speaking, and it's longer than what will fit on a 3x3 sticky, there are also some larger comment cards there. So at any point in the conversation, help yourself to those. I think what we're going to do now is switch between anybody in the room who wants to speak. We have a mic. Aha, we have a mic over there for people to use so you can also get picked up for the cameras. I'm going to stop sharing in a second. And then for people online, what we'll try and do is go back and forth between who's in the room, who's online. You're going to run the timer? Okay? And then, as I said, we'll do our best. If it's a question that we can answer, happy to try and answer that today. If it's not, this is, of course, being taped. There's several of us taking notes. We will figure out a way of getting an answer to you during the process. And if it's just a comment, we're happy to take the comments. So with that, who would like to speak?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: online we have the Q&A turned on if for any reason people this isn't a public hearing you can in fact send us a written comment through the Q&A and we will take that we'll read it out loud if you prefer it Or you can direct message me comments that we'll note if you prefer to share them privately. And that's why we also have the comment cards if people want to write. I was actually going to ask if we had AI turned on. I was trying to determine to help track the comments that came in. Oh, we do. There we go. Meeting questions, meeting summary. Great. Yes. Okay. It is generating a summary. I hadn't checked.
So for today, Judith is asking if we're just want like first the Boston Ave comments and then Tufts are separately. And I think that's not, it's helpful if you're clear about what you're talking about, whether it is specific a campus comment or a street comment, that is very helpful to us. But we're prepared to just hear in the order that people feel they want to share their thoughts on this. So and if you don't know what to say, we'd like to know what's working for people. What do you like in Boston Ave and on the campus? And what do you don't like? And what would you like to see differently?
[Rocco DiRico]: Absolutely.
[Rita Donnelly]: So we have our first comment. So my name is Rita Donnelly, and I live on Charnwood, which I am not in your little block. However, what you do on Boston Ave does affect me. When the Green Line came in, I was on the Green Line committee. I was a loser, but I'm happy it's at Tufts. They cut down every tree, every single tree. They told us they were going to replace the trees. They have never replaced the trees, which impacts the neighborhood. Now, I abut the tracks, so it impacts me directly. I had to kill a maple tree because the wind tunnel, the branch fell and hit my neighbor's house. Now, you have, I don't know what it is, but I'm going to call it a power plant that was built for Tufts. And then you have that monstrosity that you just built.
Nice that it's going to have restaurants and it's going to have a nice sidewalk and everything. That's all beautiful. But it blocks out the light for the people that are on the other side of the tracks. So just because you have a nice outline here, of what you're looking at, you need to take into account the neighborhoods. And all this redistricting, we're losing our trees. I don't know where the green people are. I was never a green people until now, but all the trees are being killed in Medford. That's wrong. There are no kids that play on the street anymore because There's transient people just coming and going. There's no neighborhoods anymore. That's really unfair to the people that live in those neighborhoods. So I wish that you would just keep that in mind. It's not just the outline that you have. And I will say that Tufts has done a really good job. I want to say something positive. Those kids are not wild like they were 10 years ago. I can hear them on Friday and Saturday nights, but it's much more reasonable. There's no more 3 o'clock in the morning screeching and drunken people up and down the street. So I think they're doing a really good job and they're trying to be good neighbors. My kids play basketball there. They really outreach the community. So I don't want you to think that I'm against anything. I just think that you need to keep neighborhoods in mind and not change everything to be a skyscraper. And it's just not a nice environment anymore to live in. And I love my house. I love my neighborhood. I've been there forever. So I just would urge you to think about what's happening and not just in the squares that you have listed here.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: And we appreciate that. Something that I actually want to flag that we didn't mention, nothing in Medford's I want to say current zoning, but I want to say like the old zoning, right? Because we've started to pass some new sections. Had ever said how much green space, it hadn't had a green score, it hadn't said anything about trees or like environmental things. So we've created, with the help of Innes Associates, a green score. And so in our new zones as we're implementing this, we're requiring a green score. And this is the first time where we've actually had developers have to tell us how many trees they're planting, how many bushes, how much grass. And they could do green on their roofs as well or green walls or a bunch of different things. What's pervious pavement versus impervious or whether the water can go through or not. That hasn't been in Medford's old zoning. So part of what we're doing here is bringing these new ideas to it. So we really appreciate that. And we hear you.
And actually, and I'll point out, the new dorm is 12 stories. We've started this conversation. Maybe the rule should be eight, because it has been 15. Well, this is my problem. The zoning was 15. So what we're trying to say is, how does eight sound? Like, does that sound like everywhere, somewhere? Like, that's the talking point right now. So great. So I saw Janie had her hand up next. And if I call somebody by a name and I get it wrong off the top of my head, please forgive me.
[Janie Tallarita]: You're correct. Thanks. And I just wanted to follow up to your comment, because I completely agree. I also live on Charnwood Road. it is 100% true that anything that happens on Boston Ave, anything that happens on the hill, which is all owned by Tufts, impacts us down below on the downside of the hillside. So when you're talking about zoning in the center of the campus potentially being different from the edge, and the edge is Boston Ave, You put that monstrosity that's being built on Boston Ave right now, which is impacting us badly enough, up on a hill, and the entire city of Medford is going to be in shadow. So you've got to think about that, too, when you're talking about the center of the campus and how that might be different than the edges. You've got to think about the topography. You've got to think about the fact that there's a hill there.
And you mentioned Emily Walkability, which is really important to me. I'm a pedestrian first, a cyclist second, and a driver way at the bottom of the list. I put gas in my car for the first time since January and was shocked at the price. It is really important that the built environment is welcoming. The built environment is huge to me. I don't care who's in the buildings. I just don't want them to be overpowering. I don't want them to be a wall. I don't want them to be unwelcoming. I don't want wind tunnels as a pedestrian.
big blocks of shade and I want trees also and green space and I want a welcoming environment as a pedestrian and that's really critical and there's a ton more that I could say and haven't quite gathered my thoughts, and I look forward to giving more comments down the line, and I'm hoping that there's going to be more opportunities. But, you know, think about size. Think about the impact. One final thing I want to say is that we have already in the hillside area, on Charnwood Road, on Brookings Road, on Burgett, on all of these adjacent streets, we are already being so impacted by what's happening up on Boston Ave with that construction and with those two giant buildings. And so anything that happens From now on, you've got to think about that. You've got to think about what we've already absorbed, what we're already absorbing, and the impact that it's having on us, both when you're thinking about the campus and Boston Ave and the zoning of our neighborhoods.
So I think that's it for now Thank you very much.
[Emily Innes]: I do want to add those are excellent statements. I think they're they're very helpful for us to hear I do want to add that although that green boundary showed where the zoning might change. We are very very aware that there are neighborhoods that are adjacent to that. And so we talked a little bit today about kind of our first level of analyses that we do. Once we start thinking about what heights could be where, we have done in the past height studies to see what it looks like on either side of the street, where are the shadow lines. At the level that you do them for zoning, which is a little bit different than the level you would do for an actual project. Zoning studies buildings tend to be a lot blockier and less architecturally formed.
And certainly when we're doing those, they may be a maximum build out as opposed to something that somebody's actually going to build. But I think it's important to understand, A, that we will be doing those. We haven't done them yet because we haven't come up with the exact heights to test yet, but also to understand that we have been looking at the topography. We're very aware of how that's going to have an impact on different parts of this corridor, depending on where you are. So I'm glad you brought it up in this, but just know that that is something that we've been looking at and really appreciate your comment on that. And we do have somebody online. Do you want to go to online now? Can you unmute? So this is Eunice Brown. And I think we are just asking you to unmute now.
[Eunice Browne]: OK, can you hear me?
[Emily Innes]: Yes.
[Eunice Browne]: I agree with everything that's being said. I live on a green leaf, and it all affects me as well. But my question is more about the scheduling of meetings. Most people know I tune in to as many as I can, and today I was marking some of the upcoming city meetings on my calendar and noticed that Several of the City Council planning and permitting meetings, the CDD meetings, and the joint meeting you guys are now having are also scheduled on the same nights as the Medford High School School Building Committee meetings. And the two hottest topics at Medford right now are zoning and the building of the new high school, And a lot of people want to attend both of them. And there's an awful lot of overlap. I get that there's a lot going on and only so much time in a day. But if there's any way we can take a look at that schedule and take a look at it with the Medford High building committee schedule and try to avoid the overlap so that people can attend, you know, one or the other and not have to catch a replay because people want to be there live in order to, you know, pipe in with their comments in either case. So I'd urge you to keep a look at the schedule and see what you can do. The May 27th meeting, I think there's some type of community development and CC meeting together. I think that the school building committee is starting to talk about tax implications.
And then a similar one on June 10th, where I think they're making their final design decisions. And there are others, too. So I just give you a friendly recommendation to take a look at your scheduling and see if the people we can coordinate to try and avoid an overlap. Thank you. Thank you.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah. No, I can take this one. Jeez, Eunice, I'm trying my best. No, so with the schedules, the story behind that is that Emily and Paola are working on a contract that ends June 30th, and we wanted to have some predictability both for them as to the number of meetings that they would attend way ahead of time, as well as something to tell the public, like this is the plan at this point in time for the meetings ahead of time. Because a lot of the feedback that we got last year was just that these very important meetings, people would only learn about them the Thursday before. A lot of the reasoning for that is because you never really know what's going to happen in a meeting, you never know how people are going to vote. And whether something's gonna be referred out, but what I what we're trying to do with this and I'm the one who I'm the one who Originally drafted the schedule and discussed and we've had to change it like twice by now due to some other conflicts with the CD board is Just because people like yeah people wanted to know ahead of time what they would attend what the schedule was and like what the overall plan is until June 30th and you know, we're trying to We're trying to get there in order to do that. We do need to have quite a few meetings from now and then. I will say that typically, city council likes to keep our meetings on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. That's just for the sake of predictability so that people can know when to expect those city council meetings. conflict that we were working around is the community development boards meetings. In the original draft that I had of these, it turned out that I'd scheduled on top of community development board meetings. I was telling staff that they had to be in two places at once.
I understand that Medford has a lot of important things going on right now, a lot of big projects. Between City Hall and the school system, we have this rezoning project going on now, which is a ton of public meetings, and the high school building committee, which is also a ton of public meetings on their own. I will be totally honest, I didn't really touch base with the building committee on what their meeting schedule was just because I was really trying to make sure that we had enough meetings between now and June 30th in order to make that. I will, yeah, I will go back, I'll look at that, and I'll try to figure out what is the best, what's the best way to sort of coordinate between the two bodies while recognizing that, yeah, doing this and kind of fitting everything, like working around every single event does, is kind of a challenge. And yeah, it ends up becoming like a mathematical impossibility to not overschedule two things at once. Thank you very much for the for the feedback Eunice and I'm seeing Okay, yeah, okay I'm only I'm only seeing the one about we also have Okay, are we gonna are we alternating between in person and online? All right, Marianne. Yep But you need it for the recording so As far as the meetings go I didn't know about this meeting tonight.
[Maryanne Adduci]: I was not notified by the city about this meeting I don't know what kind of communication you did, but I was told by somebody who got a text message or an email I've talked to eight people in my neighborhood none of them knew about this meeting tonight either and So your communication needs to be improved going forward because you aren't notifying everybody in the hillside about this. The only way, Rita who spoke here tonight, I saw her Sunday, and I told her about this meeting. She didn't know anything about it either. So you have to do better because you're going to have a very limited amount of people who find out about this, and you're going to base all your decisions on a handful of people. So that's not the right way to do it. I've heard that about it.
[Dina Caloggero]: Are they still called the Catherine Clemente calls?
[Angela Murphy]: Yeah.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah. Uh, I just- I just ask that folks, I don't- we can't have this be like kind of a internal discussion. It does need to be like a Q&A so that folks on the recording can hear what's being said. But, uh, we- so in doing this, uh, you know, we- we have a committee that meets once every two weeks. Um, and it was- it's- it's typically the administration who has a staff that end- that handle communications. My understanding is yes, we- we put out, a robocall to the abutters to the area. I believe, Alicia, would you be able to speak to what other communication was done or did Steve?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Communications office managed it.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Okay. Yeah. It was managed by the communications office. Okay. Neighborhoods and here at the library and City Hall everywhere. Yeah. No, that's noted. One thing I will say is that all of the consultant's contracts end June 30th. We did put out a new RFP for which we've gotten some offers on that for a communications consultant specifically. And so that will be a role that is working full-time on this after June. Yeah, Marianne?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: So I also want to point something out this is so first of all Marianne wait none of the 30 people on zoom can hear you so if you wouldn't mind raising your hand and letting us give you the mic that would be really helpful to the process. But also, this is for us to get input in the listening before we craft the zoning. We didn't actually go into this in detail, but with zoning, what happens is that we first hear from people, we have ideas, we have planning and permitting committees, we put together. Once we have a draft, that draft then gets circulated. Then it goes to the city council as a solid draft of we think this is what we want to pass. And then starts the public hearing process. And then we have literal public hearings that are then advertised where we do mailings, where we do additional kinds of outreach. that what we've found has been working is that the CD board, the Community Development Board and the City Council meet jointly and hear from all the public jointly on their comments on the drafted zoning. I have to say that at the rate this is moving forward, I can't imagine, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to have those public hearings in June. might be tough with the city council's budget schedule, but that is our goal. The mayor has asked us to not have public meetings during July and August because she feels that people go on vacation and want to take a break and don't watch. I have to work all summer, but I will be taking some vacations. So it's not just these two meetings. This is to draft something. Then it goes to the public hearing process, and those public hearings will go on until the boards feel they have something solid and they feel they've heard from all the public as well.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Mary Ann, just out of curiosity, you have received one of those robocalls in the past for other meetings, haven't you? Just not this one? Yeah, well, you can just answer it. It's a yes or no question.
[SPEAKER_13]: So tonight, I got a message from the mayor about coming events.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Okay. Okay. So she said tonight, she got a message from the mayor about coming events for this. Okay. So I, given Yeah, you live you live on North Street. So given that, I think you should have I'll bring that up with Steve, because I think you should have gotten a call. Really? Okay. All right, well, I'll talk about that.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: We talked about doing just an area, but he told me he did robo the whole city for this meeting. So we also have four hands up on Zoom.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah, we got to get to those. Let's go to Laureen.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Laureen, I'm sending you a request to unmute.
[SPEAKER_22]: Got it. Oh, hi. Sorry, I thought I thought you already automatically did that for me. My name is Lorraine Singanelli and I also live on Shawnwood Road. I think the concern is the proximity to where we live, but I was confused about some of the maps. So I understood you had one with zoning that was being redistricted. And then the last one was, it said Medford Tufts University, and it showed the areas which I believe were owned already by Tufts, but they were all different zones. So there was one zone, the red zone. By the way, it would be easier if these were compared. You know, you can see two maps together. Yeah, that's the 1. okay. So what happens over here in that? What does that red zone? 1 mean? Is that the current zone or is that a proposal?
[Emily Innes]: So all the zones are there for at the moment is just to indicate that these areas have different characteristics from each other and to aid in the discussion. There's nothing proposed for any of them. It's just if somebody wanted to say, hey, I have a comment about zone one or I have a comment about what's going on in zone three. It allows us to place the comments more precisely as people are looking at it. But other than the fact that each zone kind of has its own character, there's nothing else different about them at this point. It's just aiding conversation.
[SPEAKER_22]: What happens over in the areas that you're actually planning on redistricting, rezoning? And I noticed that along Boston Ave, there are some areas where we currently have convenience stores and a little pizza place. I mean, what happens to all of those businesses?
[Emily Innes]: So existing businesses stay existing. That's the thing about a zoning change is it applies when somebody wants to change something. So if you're an existing pizza place and we change the zoning, it's unlikely that we're going to change the zoning to not allow pizza places, but let's just assume for the moment that we did. That pizza place could stay in existence as long as it wanted to. where it might run into a position of a problem is say it wanted to expand and the new zoning didn't allow it to expand. Now, that's highly unlikely in this area. Pizza places and student-run areas, not to mention I'm a fan.
see now that's a great question because a pizza place and a sub shop are both restaurants but let's say it went to a yoga studio so the pizza place gets sold it becomes a yoga studio now we don't allow yoga studios in the area that owner would have a problem but as long as it stays a pizza place if the zoning changes it's fine. I think what we're hoping to see, and your question is an excellent one, so I'll reiterate for today, what we're really hoping to understand from you is looking at these different areas, whether it's the Tufts areas or our two Boston Ave areas, what would you like to see there? Is it something that's already there? We don't actually have to change that much. Maybe the uses stay the same and we're changing dimensional standards. Maybe some of the dimensional standards are fine and we're changing others. Maybe what we really want is more of those development standards that give us that green or that relationship to the street. So this is really that initial, you know, have a little dream with us today of what you'd like to see there, and then let's see what we need to do to the zoning to make that happen. So I know we have one, two, three in the room, and we have one, two, three online. Did I answer your question, or did you have a follow-up before we move back to the room?
[SPEAKER_22]: Just one follow-up question. You're assuming that the pizza place owns the building. Based on what happens with the zoning in that area, you know, investor could potentially all of a sudden it's great zoning and they can build seven stories. You're going to come gobble that up. They're going to make their condominiums or whatever they're going to make from there. And then that pizza place is going to end up being closed as well as all the other little shops. They don't own those buildings to the best of my knowledge.
[Emily Innes]: So, you know, that's another excellent question. So let's think about how how could we use the zoning to not. prevent that, right? We are a society in which the market works, and we have to recognize that there are market forces in here. So one of the things we did in Medford Square, for example, is that there's what we call incentive zoning. And the incentive zoning says you, the developer, get more stuff if you do something for a public benefit. One of the public benefits in Medford Square was providing reduced rates for local businesses for a period of time. Is that incentive appropriate in this area? Is that something we want to see? We had other incentives. Yeah, exactly. So we had other incentives in Medford Square for the preservation of historic buildings, for affordable housing. So are these incentives also appropriate in this area or should we be looking at different incentives? That would also be helpful to hear. I think that might be something that we also hear as we go forward with the process, too, as people get a chance to look at that draft.
[SPEAKER_22]: I just have a suggestion, and I'll let you go to the next person. I'm sorry I'm taking up so much.
[Janie Tallarita]: No worries.
[SPEAKER_22]: But being a realtor kind of gives me a different perspective, too. So when you're on Boston Avenue, you decide to do the rezoning over there. I think it would be valuable to force any investor to allow or actually make them maintain mixed use so that the lower level can be stored and whatever they do above is up to you.
[Emily Innes]: All right. Mixed use, that is a great suggestion. Thank you very much. OK, we're going to go back to the room.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Let's move. Elizabeth?
[Elizabeth Bayle]: Thank you. I'm Elizabeth Bale. I live on Emory Street, which is one street up from Boston Ave. And I cannot say strongly enough that that 15-story height thing has got to go. It should have gone years ago. I've been asking about it for years. What was the origin? Why was it there? Why can't we get rid of it? Get rid of it. I'm really concerned about height, that area on Boston Ave that contains hillside hardware, for example. We don't know what's happening with hillside hardware. I'd love to know. But even if it was like eight stories, it would be appalling.
It's heartbreaking to have to have high-rises down the street from us. That's not the character of this place, and now it is suddenly, and we have to live with it for the rest of the time that we live here. I don't want that to happen anywhere else. I want it to be stopped. I don't know how you're going to determine it, but Emory Street, for example, has a lot of homes that were built before 1900. That should be of some value, I would think.
I guess that's enough to say. On this map right here, I was just wondering if you could explain what the optional boundary is. I'm not sure if I understand the proposed boundaries and the optional boundary. I also was going to ask about the zones, but thank you for answering that preemptively. So that's it. Thanks.
[Paula Ramos Martinez]: Yeah. The optional boundaries where it's basically that we are still studying in Medford Tufts is if those should belong more on the Boston Avenue or if it belongs to the Medford Tufts. Basically, the one on the upper left, we see that is where we have the zone one. That one has a lot of Lots that are owned by Medfair Tufts, but others not. So should we apply a campus style or it should be something different? So that's one of the proposals. And then on the lower part, because those are residential buildings, some of them, that are on the Boston Avenue, should that belong to the Boston Avenue South area exploration, or should belong to Medford Tufts? And this is basically so that we make sure that the character of the Boston Avenue is more continuous, and we make sure of what type of uses are going to be there, then more of that campus plan. So we are just asking you, what do you think about that?
[Emily Innes]: Yeah, we were going back a little bit back and forth in the office and also in planning and permitting at the last meeting about where exactly is the line. All right, we have somebody online. Dina, I'm going to ask you to unmute and you are able to speak.
[Dina Caloggero]: Yes, this is a very interesting discussion. I'm talking about that. I have a couple of things. I'm looking at the zone map for Tufts University. And so it's the idea to set up campus zones, like Campus Zone 1, Campus Zone 2, somewhat similar to districts. And within each of those districts, there will be requirements for the height, parking, setbacks, building coverage based on what the unique characteristics are from each one of those different zones? That's my first question.
[Emily Innes]: So in answer to the first question, possibly, and I don't say that to be facetious, but because we, you know, we looked at the fact that there were different characteristics in different areas, we're looking kind of today to see if other people are seeing the same thing that we're seeing, or if there's a difference, as Paola said, that idea that some of these might bleed into the Boston Avenue zoning rather than the Tufts zoning. So yes, sub-districts are certainly a possibility, but they're not a definite possibility at this point. They're still just part of the discussion. And I had a second question.
[Dina Caloggero]: Okay, so along those lines, zone 5, interested in that area, the Elliot Pearson School has been there a long, long time. It is embedded right within a residential area. There is housing on the left, housing on the back. So in an area like zone 5, where let's say that we would put restrictions on height of the building and there would be setback requirements as well, take into account some of the comments that people have already made regarding living on the other side of the green line and being affected by the dorm. the dorms that are going up. Would we be able to implement those specific zoning requirements even in Tufts University property, even with the Dover amendment?
[Emily Innes]: She wanted she wanted to know if we know we She wanted sorry just to repeat for everybody. She wanted to know if we were could Implement specific zoning requirements, even though Tufts is subject to the Dover amendment
[Director Alicia Hunt]: I'm looking at our graduate student who wrote his thesis on the Dover.
[Dina Caloggero]: I know, he's in the room.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: He's in the room.
[Dina Caloggero]: And the thing is, I couldn't even imagine, Alicia, putting an eight-story, let's just take eight stories, where the Elliot Pearson School building is. It would just be this huge building in the middle of a residential area.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: So the way so and we might I'm going to make sure I say this correctly, but we've we've gotten questions like this before and so the way the Dover amendment works is that we start with what is the zoning in the area and if what what tosses proposing or what any educational or. religious institution is proposing in the land that they own. If the zoning allows it, then it's allowed and they can just do it. There might have to be site plan review, but it's allowed by right. If the zoning in the area doesn't allow it, then they have to request waivers and they have to say this is what they want to do and why. and then the city can comment on it and may say like well this is unreasonable that's reasonable there's some room for negotiation so that's sort of what we're we're looking at here is the difference between what is just allowed with site plan review and what is if they would have to show that they need that that it's a necessary part it's necessary for their purposes or for their financial purposes in order to do it that way am i getting that right yeah i'm getting the nod from christian i can't see christian i said i'm getting the nod from christian that i got that correct and i think that what your point is there is that
[Dina Caloggero]: putting the zoning in place for Tufts University institutional zoning as well as Boston Avenue is extremely important, right? To prevent a lot of these larger buildings not taking into account the impact on the residential properties that abut those areas, correct?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Correct, right? It gives us more of a say in the matter, more control in the conversation. But there is, of course, like a point where somebody would just say it's unreasonable. What if we said it's two stories everywhere? Then we might find ourselves in court and struck down as being completely unreasonable, right? Like you have to find a place where it's reasonable and rational and not over-controlling.
[Dina Caloggero]: Exactly. And one more question. When we talk about, we're talking about, say, districts, we could set up parking requirements based on what the property is. If you're building a dormitory, could we put in place parking allowances for dormitory? Whereas if it's a science building, no.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right. And that's something that we should sort of consider. And I actually, I just want to flag as a process, I sort of got out, stopped running the timer and we started getting into long conversations. And we have four hands up and we have three hands in the room. And we have a couple of people who have been putting things in the Q&A that Emily and I have been answering online. And some of those people would like those comments read out loud. So we will be here all night if I don't start using a timer. This is unfair to people, but on the other hand, we need to do it.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: So so sorry, sorry, you know, we're gonna have to have to cut you off there. Moving forward, we're going to go to City Council public speaking rules, which is just put all your questions at the front, like during your comment, list all your questions one at a time, and then we'll answer the questions in order. That avoids a back and forth going on. Is that okay with everybody? All right. The next person was Isaac.
[Laurel Ruma]: These rules really should have been brought up at the beginning.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah, I agree, sorry, that's on me.
[SPEAKER_19]: Hello, my name is Isaac. I just moved to Medford last September, so a lot of the stuff I'm jumping into it, like sort of looking at now. I live on Boston Avenue between, like in the area between North and South. And the part that I'm interested in is actually the part, I think it's in, the part where the Ace Hardware, where the hardware store is. As someone who's just moved to the area, I don't know how long that's been boarded up, I don't know how long that's been closed, but walking past it always seems years, do you think? It seems like it's just, like, I just have this question in my mind, like, is this city healthy? Like, is there, are we dying? Like, what is happening here? It sort of was a surprise that I could see, like, such a stark line. Here, it seems like everything's really taken care of. Here, it seems like buildings are abandoned. So I sort of want to know if that is a known thing, if it's like something that is actively, you know, offer my perspective as a resident. As I walk past it, it seems like something that I'm sort of worried about and would like to assure that the business there have a lot of care. Again, totally new to this.
I also have one other question, which was, it seems like there is not an existing campus zoning rules, and we're trying to decide what those rules would be now. I'm just understanding that correctly. OK. That's very interesting to me. But yes, that's my thought and question and experience. Thank you.
[Rocco DiRico]: >>:Sure. Just on the hillside hardware one, yes, Tufts University purchased the building a few years ago. It's not viable for renovation given its current conditions. It's also not usable in its current conditions. So it wouldn't be safe to put anybody in there, whether that be commercial or residential, which is what it was used for before. Our intention is since the zoning is scheduled to be completed by June 30th, is to wait to see the results of the zoning and then design a renovated building for that lot that meets the new zoning.
I think ideally, and again, it depends on the zoning. So if the zoning allows for mixed use with commercial on the first floor and residential above, that's probably something that we would look at.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: And the second part of your question was just, could it be paraphrased as just sort of generally wondering about the city's financial issues long-term, stuff like that?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Actually, in the big picture, I'll tell you that we have a lot of businesses that want to come to Medford. We have a couple of long-term vacant storefronts. And in other neighborhoods, there are every one of those is because we have difficulty with the landlord taking somebody in there. And so we have economic development staff that is trying to find locations for businesses all the time. So...
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah, then it's what you brought up like a much more extensive conversation. But yeah, but I'm going to go back to zoom. I believe Chris has had their hand up for a while. And again, please just please state all your questions right at the beginning and then and then we'll answer it sort of in order like that. Okay.
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay. So my name's Jessica and I live kind of close to Boston Ave. And I just want to, you know, first of all, reiterate everything that everybody's been saying here from the town and the area. So yes, I'm wondering about potential redistricting of residential homes, since they're all now nonconforming. And we live in a pretty small house here, and I think it would, you know, we see a lot of new construction happening and people are wanting to build bigger and taller. apartment buildings and condos. And it's really kind of pushing a lot of people who have lived here for decades out of the area. And those are the people who are the real cornerstones of our community. And that's one of the reasons why we love it here. So what's going to happen in terms of that and these very residential areas?
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: I could take this. As a policy decision, what the city council worked out with the mayor late last year in terms of this rezoning process is what we're doing is taking a lot of the main squares and corridors, so non-residential areas and rezoning them. themselves so we again we just got done with Medford Square and during the during the CDB review of that we even specifically cut out residential residential areas and when we were talking about the borders of Boston Avenue at the recent planning and permitting committee meetings, we decided that we would largely focus on any either mixed use or commercial use areas and cut out the areas that are residential to the extent possible, which you'll see the green borders there. That's because when we were Figuring out the the overall schedule for this for rezoning. It was it was it was more of a as a Policy decision we said, okay We will get to the residential area sort of in themselves kind of after we've already rezoned all of the main squares and corridors and that's because the residential rezoning is going to be a much a larger discussion that gets into a lot of the points that you just brought up and that will need to be a whole process in itself. The answer to that is that it should be, for the most part, out of scope for this particular rezoning proposal to the extent that we can.
[SPEAKER_07]: But there are a number of residential areas in the zones that we're looking at.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: The residential area, a lot of the residential, sorry, can we go back to that?
[Emily Innes]: One thing to consider is residential use versus which is what's being shown on here is the existing land use versus the residential districts because we have some of those non-conforming so that's one of the things that we've been bouncing back and forth between as we look at the boundaries is what uses are existing on the land versus what they're zoned for. So this section here where it's not part of the green does have quite a lot of residential use only in it, even though it may or may not. So it mostly conforms with this. We tried to keep the apartment two district Which you see in the sort of peach color here within the green boundary and then this yellow which should be the general residential We left out of the boundary for the rezoning area to councillor Leming point earlier Folks in a room Laurel
[Laurel Ruma]: My name is Laurel Ruma. I live at 149 Burgett Avenue. So I think when we talk about, first of all, the schedule, I would love that we could actually move quickly and do great things. But to be realistic, for years, many people in this room, including myself, have been asking for and talking about Tufts Institutional Zoning. and knowing that Summerville has done it and their process, certainly took a long time as well, and that these are the rules or the agreement that we have with Tufts going forward into the future, that we want to make sure we do it right and not for nothing. We're not going to do it in two months. There's just absolutely no way, it's too important. and to have it tied together with the business districts as well, there's a lot going on.
Second, the whole idea that the Tufts institutional zoning is one parcel, it's not. It has so many different uses and so many different parcels that I really encourage you not to talk about it as one parcel. It crosses many public streets. There is MBTA train station involved. There's lots of neighborhoods involved that are not technically part of what we're looking at as the zone, but it is definitely not one parcel. There's many uses, many pieces, and we all certainly feel that in many different ways. Yeah, thank you. And then the reason I think the Elliott Parson school topic came up, and just by the way, I wanted to identify that was a community development board member asking these questions, important. It's concerning because these kind of questions have been constantly asked for a long time. And I really want people who work so hard for the city and volunteer their time to understand why this is so important and why we need more time to make sure that Tufts zoning is done correctly.
It's long rumored in the neighborhood that that building is going to be torn down and a large building is going to be put up there. And then behind that building is the massive green space, which is Stern's Field. And that field itself has been very contentious within the neighborhood as a space that the neighborhood really wants to preserve as green space. So I would say if we're looking at the various different parcels and the various different uses of the various different pieces of the Tufts land as well as boundary, anything that can be done within reason, of course. We wish we didn't have a 15-story apartment zoning on a hill. And we wish we didn't have 10-story dorm buildings to look at, but we also need to be realistic that Dover does not allow a lot of control by the city. So my other suggestion would be that when we think about Bosnia, we also include St. Clement's and maybe consider it as a non-profit slash Dover exclusion zone. Because that property is also falls under Dover and also has the same sort of zoning restrictions applied to it. And that is also a for sale. And so if we're not careful, we're looking at another massive part of the city that could be zoned and built and we would have very little control over. So I think in general, we need to think about that in a very careful way.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Thank you, Laurel. I wanted to clarify something. The reason we showed it as different areas, the zones that we put up as a proposal was to talk about the different areas. Legally, it's actually, this is fascinating to me, but all of the ball fields and the athletic buildings on both sides of College Ave And the property up on the hill, all of that is legally one large parcel in the city of Medford, which has actually caused us some serious zoning confusion because our assessor's map didn't know how to handle electronically the idea that we would have one parcel in multiple zoning districts. That's what I was trying to get at, that when we talk legal, which is zoning, it's actually a problem that it's legally one big parcel, but you're right, it's very different areas. I have to say this because it makes me crazy. In the ball fields, you see what looks like streets. Those are not streets. Those are paper roads that were never built. And many of them have... Some of them have been legally dissolved, and we're working on getting them removed. Tufts is providing us with the paperwork to show that they don't literally exist anymore. So don't think that there are houses along those. Those are actually not real roads.
But we really want to hear, so we hear loud and clear, nobody wants 15 stories, nobody hears 12 stories. What would you be okay with? If they tore down Elliot Pearson, what would you be okay with? Because we should put in some zoning because what if they do tear it down? I don't think you're very wrong there. Yeah, actually, yeah, we have let's get to the people who are online.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah, I did. I did want to I did want to say something about about the timeline specifically. So with with the schedule, like when you're when you're setting a schedule in November, and you say we want to get through Medford Square and Tufts, Boston Avenue, and we have till June to do it. That's like six, seven months ahead of time. That sounds That sounds very reasonable, but of course, you get delayed. Right now, the schedule is to finish up the Tufts and Boston Avenue, the Tufts Institutional and Boston Avenue zoning by June 30th.
seeing where things are going and seeing what drafts are out there and the vibes, I think we'll probably get Boston Avenue there and it is likely that the Tufts institutional zoning will be put off till September. That's not like a promise, but that's just to set expectations here and just the nature of how these timelines go and the way committee meetings go. Again, I'm trying to keep the schedule as much as possible just to help set expectations with the public, but realistically delays happen. This whole rezoning process is actually pretty exhausting to the staff and consultants who are working on it because they need to do a lot of work behind the scenes between all these meetings and drafting everything and doing public presentations, which gets stressful.
We will go to Jeremy Martin on Zoom. Thank you.
[Jeremy Martin]: Good evening, everyone. Jeremy Martin. I live on Burgett Avenue. I wanted to start by saying I really appreciate this meeting session. And I think the meeting has been pretty well advertised. I've read about it in multiple newsletters, and I've heard about it at other meetings. So I appreciate the city making an effort to get the word out there. It was mentioned earlier that this is the first meeting on this topic, but actually there were several meetings on this last year. Many residents who are here again tonight showed up to comment and give input. It's great that the city is collecting more input, but please make sure that the comments, the feedback that we gave you last year are factored into and incorporated into these plans. And I have to say, it's a little concerning to now hear that this might push into September, but we'll deal with that. Another time. When it comes to Boston Avenue, Boston Avenue should absolutely be a mixed-use corridor, as several people have noted. I think it's a mistake to leave out the small residential, barely a block of residential. That would be barely a block of this entire corridor that is not cohesive and consistent with the rest of the corridor. It is residential now. It will change in the future. And it seems like a political decision, not really a planning decision when you take a step back and look at the map.
For Tufts, it's really great to hear that Tufts is now offering to give some kind of planning update. Institutional master plans like that are very common at other neighboring institutions and Tufts even has one at their Boston campus, so it's really long overdue in Medford and appreciate that. We should very much care about building heights in the core of campus, not just along streets. There were some questions that you raised about that, Alicia, and as others have said, the core of campus is on a hill, and so building heights are very impactful for the community. When it comes to the optional boundary area that you had in the different parcels or the different boundaries you're considering, I recall that Tufts agreed to some restrictions on what they could and couldn't do in that zone when they were approved for the whatever variances were needed for those home redevelopments there. That should be researched and I think it should be factored in here if it isn't already. I agree with Laurel. This is not all one parcel and in fact Tufts in its both of its Recent CDB applications has explicitly addressed the need for it to be considered a single parcel because it's not a parcel.
The city has taken the position of treating it as one and that weakens some of the zoning regulations that can be applied under Dover. As we're seeing with the construction that's happening right now, lot coverage and setbacks do have a significant impact. even on a campus. And I really wish we'd stop calling it a dorm. It's called Pachyderm Apartments. It's an apartment building. So this process should create standards that are both applicable and the city can confidently consider reasonable.
When it comes to the Elliot Pearson site, four or five stories, let's step down to the neighborhood really smartly to a three-story maximum neighborhood. If the institutional zone will be limited to campus proper, the city needs a plan to deal with properties outside of that zone that are purchased by the Tufts for-profit real estate arm and transferred to the Tufts nonprofit, limiting the city's purview. And I will close with a question here. Please describe what Tufts has asked for, requested in that institutional zone. I think it was mentioned earlier that they put in a request.
It's reasonable for them to make that request. But those conversations and those requests should be a public record, just like our comments are when it comes to our properties into this process. Thank you all for sitting through my extra comments. Look forward to future meetings.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: I think I heard somebody in the background there who also had a comment. Jeremy, if you could just let them speak as well. Yeah, so as I said during the planning and permitting committee meeting, we did receive a list of bullet point, I will say, requests from Tufts University. I'll just email it to you after this because I know you've asked about that twice, but yeah, I'm going to be putting that in a as part of a docket and a city council planning and permitting committee packet when we do come up with the initial drafts of the Tufts institutional zone.
Most of the previous city council PNP meetings have focused on Boston Avenue specifically, so it didn't really seem appropriate to include those in the packet. But again, I'll just follow up in the meeting and give you those. It's like an eight-page list of requests, and they'll be public. I believe, was that Jeremy's only question? Well, I so I personally have a newsletter if y'all want to sign up for it Then I have like a little list of zoning updates. I put out once every two weeks But yeah, typically when it's like a list of documents with like zoning changes It is included as part of a City Council agenda and that's our way of making it public there's a Sorry.
But yeah, so I'm personally trying to put out these documents as much as possible. We also put them up on the zoning web page in the city. Angela Murphy has had her hand up for a little bit, so I'm going to go to you.
[Angela Murphy]: I want to say I liked what that gentleman just said about stepping down to the neighborhoods. That would be convenient because high-rise towers create problems in a lot of times when they're built. I also want to have a question about what is built how are you going to handle parking and traffic plans that it doesn't negatively affect the neighborhoods? Because right now, when I come home from work, if I come through West Method and Boston Ave, and I go to 16, after 16, it takes me 40 minutes some days to get to Winter Street to take a right, and then another 20 to 25 minutes just to get four blocks to turn on my street. It's horrible. And that's not just me. And if I go the other way and go home by Winthrop Circle, down that way on Winthrop Street to 16, that also is not right. So that's something. Whatever you build in the neighborhood should be family friendly. I've been living on Carding Street for 70 years, moved here in 1956.
And we moved to Medford because the houses had green space, they had yards, they weren't stuck together. We had a choice to move to Somerville. We didn't move to Somerville because there was no trees on the street. There was houses on top of each other, alleys way to go into a backyard that was concrete and two by four. So we took Method, a house that was going to be knocked down, and rebuilt it. It's 1886 my house was built. And there's a 1,700-year-old house on the end of Carding Street, number 78 Carding Street, that was owned by John Quincy Adams and John Adams. And that's due to be knocked down pretty soon, I gather, because I don't think the owners think it's big enough for them. Which is sad. Method is losing a lot of historic homes in what they're doing. My other thing is that whatever you build on Boston Ave, because I've lived there so long, it was a place to go. I brought up my kids, I brought up daycare kids, I brought up my grandchildren, and we walked to Boston Ave. We'd go to all the businesses. I mean, it's since lost a lot of businesses because, especially with the closing of Hillside Hardwares, which I see as a tragedy, because that was known throughout the state as the number one store to go to for paint. And it was on the news many times, profiled on Chronicle and all these shows. I mean, Boston needs to be family, neighborhood friendly. It was a community, an integrate part of the community. And the people surrounding streets, people flocked there. Tufts University, they go there. The students are always there. We had no problem with Tufts. And I'm just saying that whatever happens there needs to still be part of the community. So you have to address what you put there. Are you taking things away, making it convenient for the people who are going to live in these high-rises you're proposing maybe come and build? And are they going to be convenient only for tough students? Or is the neighborhood still going to have convenient access to utilize the street? And the one thing I'm going to say is fix the streets.
That's another thing. Another thing I have. Boston Avenue has worked. For 70 years, I lived here. And before then, because Hillside Hardwood was 80-plus years there. I hope it works again. For the next years, I have it. And I plan on being around another 25 years till I'm 100. And I want to see it thrive again. I don't want to just be high-rises and where people can't go there because it's going to be overwhelmed with apartment dwellers and transient people who are going to move into a neighborhood that they're going to eventually leave. I don't want it in and out. I want it part of the community where you go up there and you might see somebody who lives in one of the buildings and say, hey, hi, I remember you from seeing you before. I don't want so many people that it's a city of strangers. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you very much. I think your comments on making sure that we have a diversity of allowable uses and also, I'll fix this in a sec, a diversity of allowable uses and also that some of those uses should be neighborhood-based uses as opposed to simply student-focused uses, that's really important. So thank you very much. I really appreciate hearing that. We do have one last person online and then we can come back here. So Katie Persons, we will ask you to unmute.
[MCM00001519_SPEAKER_25]: Hi, thank you so much for this meeting tonight. So I wanted to answer some of your questions first, since you're asking for our opinion, and then I wanted to end with a question. So I live on Orchard Street, closer to the end, close to North Street. And I, for what my preference for Boston Ave would be is, I agree, I think it should be a mixed use corridor. I think we need to have more businesses brought in, especially at the corner between North Street and Boston Ave. Right now there's just a nail salon and a smoke shop. However, it would be really nice if we didn't have smoke shops every two blocks. So there seems to be a plethora of those in our area. Also, I do think that as much as I would like to have businesses, I don't want it to just become a bank, similar to when we had a vacant storefront in Medford Square, like that restaurant there, I think it was The Vault, it became a bank, which is Great, more banks, cool. No, I think we need more restaurants. I think we need more coffee shops. We need more actual destinations and local small owned businesses, not chains. I think that is something that is really nice about the corridor between Boston and Winthrop. However, I do think some of those businesses are struggling a little bit, especially with the closing of the hardware store. So I think as much as we can to promote those kinds of businesses would be useful. I do think that we should not have 15 story buildings. I know it was a concern about the Walkling Court redevelopment about the height of the building and specifically because my property will be in the shade of that building. So I am concerned about my garden and being in the shade of a high rise, especially since I hadn't really heard much about what was happening at where those Elizabeth Grady building is at the corner of North Street and Boston Ave. And if that's going to be a big development, I hope it's at least a development that would have commercial use, you know, businesses, a convenience store, coffee shop, restaurant, something for someone in the community to use. And it wouldn't be so tall since I live down the hill. from there.
So I do think we should be taking the heights on the hill in consideration since I live in the low part of hillside, down the hill from that. So those are my comments. I hope we can get some nice local small businesses in to revitalize the neighborhood, especially at Winthrop Street and Boston Ave and North Street and Boston Ave specifically. And then my question is, what is going to happen with all of this with the MBTA's Better Bus Project? Because right now, their current plan is to reduce service to our neighborhood. And if we're going to be having more like residential buildings coming up, that's going to be a real problem. Like they're going to be getting rid of the 94 and they're reducing the 80. And then they're changing, they're rerouting the 96 away from our neighborhood. They're having a turn at George Street away from the Boston Ave and Winthrop Street. And I really hope that there is some type of advocacy on behalf, on the side of the city to help keep the MBTA from implementing those plans. I went to all those public meetings, but they didn't seem to listen to our little corner of the neighborhood. So I'm just wondering, is there any type of plan in place to help improve the public transportation, especially if we're going to have so many folks and people are worried about parking, that's going to be even worse if the bus service is actually reduced when it should be increased.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: >>:Great. Thank you very much, Katie. And this is Alicia. I have... I will actually mention that the property owner that owns that Elizabeth Grady corner is, in fact, waiting to see what happens with this zoning. He's had some offers on his property, and he's hoping that the zoning will be good. Every time he's talked to us, he said he understands that we really want to see commercial on that corner. So that's hopeful. That said, this zoning is very important, so we appreciate your feedback about the concerns about the heights in that particular area. I will tell you for the Better Bus Project, even though this is about zoning, we do care about transportation. The Director of Traffic and Transportation, Todd Blake, and I both attend better bus project task force meetings as well as at least one of my staff usually sits in on them. There was one recently where they actually said that they have a list of upcoming changes, things that they're looking to change from their original proposal. And one of the ones that they mentioned was that basic Boston Ave area with the 80, the 94, and 96. And they said that they are having conversations about what exactly they want to change, but they heard loud and clear from the neighborhood that that was a problem there. So Todd is trying to follow up and figure out exactly what they're talking about and who they're talking to about that. That was within the last week that they said that. They did, I will say that when they started rolling out their phases and they rolled out a concrete phase one and a not so concrete but where phase two would be and phase three was sort of everything else at some point in the future and everything in Medford was in phase three, I said to them, why is everything in Medford in phase three? And they said, because there's still so much argument about this 80 Boston Ave area that we need to work that out because all of the routes are interconnected before we do anything there. So they use that as their excuse for pushing Medford, but it does sound like they're looking at some changes at this point, and we hope to have more information about that in the future. There was good news, though. They did dramatically increase the service on the 96, so it's running about twice as often as it was before.
And so it's running every half hour in the evenings and weekends and more frequently during the workday, which we are seeing the benefit of at City Hall. Next.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: I'm going to go to Judy. Okay.
[Judith Weinstock]: I hope this will be quick. So first, thank you for holding the meeting, and I agree with Laurel. I do think, you know, the Boston Avenue corridor, I think you're hearing a lot of support for mixed use, understanding that there are going to be some very small pockets of residential where, you know, what do you do with that? So, I appreciate Jeremy's comment about not excluding necessarily as long as everybody can end up happy. So, I just want to focus a little bit on the toughs, because I think it's incredibly important, and I think that it is also really, really hard. And it's hard for Tufts, and it's hard for the neighbors, and it's hard for everybody to think about this. I would point people who haven't already seen it to Google Somerville City's Tufts University plan. because they have one and it's in writing and it is not a voluminous document. It's actually a very short, concise document about what is permitted, how one steps down as they get to the residential community. I think from looking at this map that is up that Medford has more challenges than Somerville might have had as they were considering that because There are sort of more breakaways and sort of disparate areas of the Tufts campus on the Medford side. At least it feels that way to me when I look at it. And so the idea that, yes, not one parcel, but probably for design and zoning purposes, multiple parcels that may each have and have a need for individual consideration regarding step-downs as they approach neighborhoods and setbacks as they approach neighborhoods.
I do think that, yep, when you purchase a hill and then you start building on it, yep, height matters. And the Somerville plan does address that as well. It basically looks at the campus as a donut on the Somerville side with more things allowable in the center and as you get closer and closer to other residential areas stepping down. So, I would just encourage everybody, because it gives you a context to then come to the next meeting with a more informed opinion, because I think that's what you're really looking for. You're sort of saying, well, but what do you really want? Like, do you want three? Is three stories okay on the, you know, where the aquatic center is going to be and across the street? And, you know, so I would just say look at it, because it can help just formulate some ideas of context for the next discussion.
[Emily Innes]: And if I can just say, I know you were talking kind of to your fellow residents and neighborhoods, but just to let you know that we, of course, are also looking at Somerville zoning as well as other communities that have institutional zoning as precedence. But thank you for pointing that out as the closest and probably the most relevant for the initial discussions.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: I'll see Elizabeth. Wait, nobody else is on Zoom, right? Okay. See Elizabeth. You did already speak once, but does anybody else have it before I give it to Elizabeth for a second time? All right.
[Elizabeth Bayle]: Thanks. I just will be brief that I wanted to emphasize the height so much that I didn't mention a couple of other things that you're asking for comments and I wanted to add my voice to people who are asking for green space and trees because I just think that's incredibly important and somehow it has to be built in. I was going to bring up Somerville, and I've said many times that we should just not be worse than Somerville, just make sure that whatever we agree to, it's not worse than what they agreed to. And if you can try to make sure that the zoning page reflects documents that are available and things like that, and is kept up to date, it's kind of confusing who's responsible for that.
That's where I go to look for things more often, and I would really love it if I could rely on the information that's there. So thank you.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Yeah, go for it.
[John Elliott]: John Elliott, Emory Street. What's labeled zone one there has got no damn business being part of the Tufts campus. It's the corner of Boston Avenue. And luckily, there is an optional boundary around it, which makes me think that perhaps somebody's come to his or her senses. You can just look at it and see that it doesn't belong to be part of the campus, compare it visually with what's known to be the campus, and compare it with the residential areas to the north and to the west. You can't see from that map that the streets that are on there are public streets. All of the streets in It might not be all. The overwhelming majority of the streets on the campus are private streets. You can't see it from that map, but every one of those houses in Zone 1 was built between 1890 and 1930.
Question mark. The adjacent buildings in zones two and three were built after 1930. Oh, one exception might be the Breed Hall or Sacred Heart, which I think was built after 1930. It's got no business being part of the campus. So it needs to be part of the residential area surrounding. And it seems to me that the only way it got to be there was that zones two and three were APT2, and zone one was APT2 or APT1. No, APT2. And so I spot a pattern. Let's make this part of the campus.
None of those houses is conforming on lot size. They're all two and there might be one family and might be two, three families. All of those buildings on that parcel are nonconforming because an APT2 has a 10,000 square foot minimum lot size, and none of those is even 5,000. Very few of those is even 5,000 square feet. So how did it get to be there? Laziness. Thank you.
[Emily Innes]: Thank you for your comments, and can I just say thank you very much for paying attention to the non-conformity maps. We collectively appreciate the analysis, so.
[John Elliott]: I used your little website.
[Emily Innes]: Beautiful, thank you. That will make our spatial analysts very happy.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: All right. So with regards to Elizabeth's comment about the zoning page, the only people who have direct access to update that is, again, the city's communications department. So typically, we'll send a request to them to update it. Steve is always doing like a thousand different things. And again, this is why we put in a request for the communications consultant to help us out with that. Not to plug my own newsletter, but if you wanted to, you could sign up. I put links to everything in a nice little digest with a zoning specific section.
Oh, I agree 100% it should be on the zoning page. I want a lot of things to happen.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Matt, one of the commenters... So we've been answering questions in the Q&A in order to keep things moving, and one of them asked that we read their comment out loud for everybody.
[Unidentified]: Sure, yeah.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: And so I'll just say this is from Elliot Jockelson. He said, hillside is one of the most underrepresented areas in Medford, while also seeing some of the largest increases in density. That makes clear communication, early notice, and meaningful community involvement especially important. Residents are now hearing reports of special zoning for a high-rise student dorm on North Street. Before anything this significant moves forward, the neighborhood deserves clear information, direct outreach, and a real opportunity to respond. That is especially important given the recent history here. The Walkland Court process left many residents feeling ignored and shut out. More than 1,200 local signatures were collected, yet the community still felt dismissed and excluded from the decision-making process. These meetings were supposed to be held in the neighborhood, being discussed, and somehow that did not happen. Given the context, it is disappointing and it does not build trust. So I will just add, when I said that the owner of the corner of North and Boston is waiting to see what this zoning is, that is the same. I assume that's what he's talking about because that owner has also said, would you think about student housing here? So we said, thank you for your input.
And we've developed a list of pros and cons for what private student housing looks like. And I won't get into that now, but... The property behind it, the Elliott, sorry, not Elliott. Thank you, Elizabeth Grady. The Elizabeth Grady building, that entire corner is owned by the same property owner. He had a plan, honestly, in 2020, 21, he had an offer to do biotech there, and there was rezoning on that parcel. So, it's actually, it's zoned something like office two that allows eight stories, but it doesn't allow residential right now. So that owner is in fact, his property is on the market. He'd be happy for me to say that if anybody wants to bid on it. And he is watching to see what happens with the zoning before he really makes any decisions there. I think every city councilor has heard that from him, so it's no secret.
And then I will say that as far as I know, the only public space to have meetings up there in this area would be at Tufts. And I had gotten some pushback that maybe we didn't want to have these at Tufts because it felt like, you know, does that seem biased in some way? Somebody has now said to me that 200 Boston Ave has a space to meet, which I've never heard before, but I can look into it. But if people feel strongly pro or con, you don't have to answer this now, but about having meetings at Tufts about this because it's easier for the neighborhood, we're happy to do that. I'm sure Tufts would be happy to accommodate our public meetings. But I also didn't want people to feel that I was dragging you all into Tufts in order to have meetings about them. So I just wanted to put that out there.
Did we have anything else? Because I'll tell you, we don't have any more hands up. We have tried really hard to answer a lot of these questions online that have come in online, and we'll save them for our records.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Sure.
[Emily Innes]: Somebody noted a blue line when I transferred the PowerPoint presentation into a PDF. There was a line on one of the maps that shifted. They called it out. We are going to make that correction, give the city the PDF, and it will be posted on the web page as soon as that happens. So you will have tonight's presentation and can delve even more deeply into the maps. But just in case anybody else noticed that line, it will get fixed. And back to you, I think.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Well, you can't please everyone. Lou, Lou. Right now, one moment, sorry, doesn't get doesn't get on the recording unless it's
[SPEAKER_23]: >>:Thank you. I have a question that applies to these general hearings and zoning across the board, not just to Tufts, so I hope that's OK. But I've gone to some of the hearings in the past about residential and Medford Square. And I have a question about the feedback process. So what is an example? What is often brought up is traffic and parking, traffic and parking, traffic and parking. It's noted And then the next hearing, you know, many months later, it comes up again. What happens in the interim to address that, to say this is the analysis, this is the impact that it will have on traffic and parking, and this is what's going on to try and remediate that or, you know, diminish that? or this is a good reason why we shouldn't do that. So what's that process for a number of things? It was also brought up about the environment, the, you know, impact on the utilities. There's just so much out there that's just still out there.
[Emily Innes]: I'll start, Alicia will finish. So in terms of the overall general process, what happens is we have a meeting like this, or we've had a public hearing and we hear comments. We, being Paula and myself and our staff, take them back and discuss them, figure out what works there. We frequently interact then with Alicia and her staff, or in this case, we have a zoning working group. that we're working with take back the results of that. So for example, we had a lot of questions in one of the processes last year about what would this look like? Can you show us what these buildings would look like? So we did some section cuts to show different sides of the street. We looked at shadow studies in some cases. So we're doing different levels of analyses. There is, however, a level of analysis that we don't do because it doesn't typically come up as a component of a rezoning process. Unfortunately, traffic is one of those, and I have been caught in some of those same traffic jams that were mentioned earlier, so I understand exactly what you're talking about, but typically, Something like traffic is studied when a development proposal comes in, and then as part of either a site plan review or a special permit, the applicant is required to do a traffic study and talk about that. It's not typically done at a zoning level, It might be if you were zoning a very small site, but generally it's not done at the zoning level because the zoning gives an option, it gives a possibility is not actually a development project for which you would have a known number of units, a known square footage of commercial use, and then be able to do a traffic study on that. You could do, it is possible to do something called a build-out analysis that evaluates, well, if you put all of this in place, How much of this would change over time? I'm not a general fan of them because they're not very precise and they frequently get people very worried about something that's not actually going to happen. And so, you know, those conversations where people get very worried about something that's not going to happen aren't very fun. for anybody because of the level of anxiety, but it is possible to do something like that. A full traffic study would require a traffic engineer, and we're not traffic engineers. It's not within our scope, but that's also because it's usually done if you're talking about a specific development project. Anything you'd like to add?
[Director Alicia Hunt]: add to utilities. So let me just add about utilities, because it was something that people talked about, and our DPW commissioner came and spoke with the board last summer. To better understand that is, so there's sort of two pieces to this. One is that the things that are under control by the city, water and sewer, and sanitary sewer and storm sewer, are both things that our DPW has had inventories and studies done, and they manage it, and they look at where the demand is and how big the capacities are. And there are some places where things are a little tight, and so that's where they've been adding capacity and doing water projects. There's places where there's leaking, and they've been doing projects there.
But what they've said is, we have sufficient capacity. And when we talk about adding a couple of buildings here and there, when we talk about adding a bunch, if we tripled the number of single family homes in Medford, if we turned every single family home into a two-family home, they're not really concerned about that. Our water and sewer can handle that. And also, it's not going to happen in one day. It would still happen a little over time. and the capacity continues to be increased as needed and reductions continue to occur.
They said they would be concerned if there was some massive heavy industry. If we were bringing some massive thing in, and I can't even remember, they gave me some example of something we would never do. in Medford, because nobody would ever buy a big parcel and bring a big factory into the city, then we might be talking about issues. For each building, they add, does this need a water loop? Does this need a little, do you need a bigger main here? They'll put it on the building that's being proposed. Do you need a larger water main? Do you need a larger connection? Do you need another loop? So they're constantly doing that as we have development. And actually having the development allows new things to get added to the system. The same with the electrical grid. It's a little different, but people worry about brownouts. We don't have brownouts in Massachusetts. We have pretty good management of our energy system.
People think that, oh, if you add more buildings, we're going to have more blackouts. A blackout is a failure. It's like when something explodes, when lines go down. and that causes something. You might once in a while notice a blip. That's because something went down and stuff got rerouted. We're so dense here that things get rerouted pretty quickly. When you have too much draw on the grid is when you have brownouts. Massachusetts doesn't have brownouts. Sorry, I'm starting to lose my voice on that. I'm going into a little too much detail because that's actually kind of my field.
But it is something the electrical company is actually starting to put out some public maps about where the substations are and what the capacity is. They just shared with us two weeks ago new maps that we could go look at to share where there's demand and stuff. The hard thing is when people want to put a lot of solar onto a grid, that actually changes their capacity numbers much more dramatically than a number of houses or another apartment building. And frankly, another apartment building, they'll just say, oh, we need another piece of equipment here. Sorry, I blanked on the word. And they put it on the developer to install that equipment as part of the project. So it's really something that you wouldn't look at it zoning, that sometimes if you hear, oh, but that's part of a zoning, it's if you have a, as Emily was starting to allude to, a wide open area, 50 acres, and you're going to zone it. And then people are going to build stuff for the first time. then you care about your water capacity, your electrical capacity, stuff like that, because it's not built out already. Medford is built out already. We actually have had, actually a member of the, I'm gonna say it, a member of the CD board has raised her hand asking to speak, so maybe we could take one last speaker, and I'm gonna recognize we've been here for two hours, and we'll start to wrap it up after that.
[Emily Innes]: All right, Paige.
[Page Buldini]: Thank you so much. Yes, Page Buldini from the city board. I tried to put my camera on, but it didn't work. I don't want to keep everybody, but just super quick. I did join late, so I apologize if this is a redundant question. And thank you to everybody from Emily's team, planning development, our city Councilors, and the community. Quick question. Was there an update on the status of the Boston Ave study group? I know that there was some work being done. And I was just hoping to see if we have heard anything about that.
[Director Alicia Hunt]: Actually, we also got a question about that online, which I touched on a little bit. But if Rocco doesn't mind sort of telling everybody else what that means and then giving us a quick update, Rocco's here. He'll do that.
[Rocco DiRico]: Thank you, Lucia, thank you, Councilor Leming, and thank you to Amos Consultants and all the neighbors that have shown up tonight. Really appreciate everyone's comments. To answer Paige's question about the community advisory group, as part of the Boston Avenue dorm project, the university agreed to fund a Boston Avenue planning study to the tune of about $500,000. As part of that planning study, we put out a call for folks who wanted to join a community advisory group. It's basically a third neighbors, a third city staff, and a third Tufts University all working together on coming up with a plan for how to improve basically the streetscape, trees, a lot of the things that folks talked about. here tonight, which was some great feedback, which I'll bring back to the group. So far, we've done two meetings. We had an initial meeting to do something very similar to this, collect feedback, and then we did a meeting last night where we walked up and down Boston Avenue and did a site walk. And our plan is to do, I would say, at least three or four more meetings throughout the course of the year. And then by the end of the calendar year, deliver a product which we can share with the city based on our recommendations. And the city can use that as it see fits. And we, Tufts University, will use that to kind of guide the decisions that we make around Boston Avenue. So thank you very much.
[CC Councilor Matt Leming]: Thank you, Rocco. So I believe that should wrap everything up. Thank you all so much for coming out here tonight. Once again, apologies that a Tufts Boston Avenue meeting was held in the Medford Public Library. The story behind that is that I attempted to, I was attempting to reserve this space for one of the Medford Square meetings, but this is such a nice space that it's just reserved months in advance, so I decided to just, all right, let's just put it on April 30th, because that was the only time I could get it, and then we passed everything for Medford Square, and I said, you know, It's a really nice space, so we'll just keep the meeting here, invite folks on Zoom. But we do have another meeting on the calendar for June 1st, and we're going to be looking into actually holding that around the neighborhood. One of the initial plans was a walk-in court. I don't know if that space will be available, but we can look into hosting that at a Tufts University space. So, yeah, and we'll be having a city council planning and permitting committee. I believe it's on May 5th.
That's the date, right? Yeah. Yep. Yep. And that is where we'll have some of the consultants will be incorporating a lot of the feedback we heard here today into some of the initial drafts for Boston Avenue. And if there's capacity, The tough zone, but once again, this is this is a process your presence and feedback both in person on zoom is so very much appreciated and Yeah, looking forward to engaging with y'all as we as we continue down this road. So, thank you Thank you so much for showing up and I'll be sticking around if anybody wants to have any one-on-one conversations or whatnot But uh, yeah
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