CDB: Inclusionary Zoning and Development Incentive Reforms - 2026-08-12

AI-generated summary. Written by gemini-3-flash-preview from the transcript below, which is the record. It may be incomplete or wrong; it does not report votes. Every item links to the moment it began.

The board recommended a zoning amendment allowing fractional payments for affordable housing and discussed closing loopholes in the city's development incentive bonus framework. Members also reviewed procedural reforms for future zoning projects, including extended document review timelines and early public engagement workshops.

1:45 Inclusionary Housing Zoning Amendment — The board voted to recommend a zoning amendment to Section 94-8.1 allowing developers to make fractional payments to the Affordable Housing Trust when affordable unit requirements result in a remainder below 0.5. The motion passed with an amendment specifying that payment agreements are subject to approval by planning staff.
42:56 Development Incentive Bonuses Working Session — Members conducted a working session to address a loophole in citywide affordable housing incentives, proposing a new multiplier-based calculation and the elimination of the two-story height bonus for deeper affordability. Staff were directed to refine the definitions of community amenities like pocket parks and playgrounds to ensure public benefits are proportional to development bonuses.
1:21:59 Board Rules and Regulations — The board discussed procedural reforms, including a requirement that developers submit meeting materials one week in advance and a shift toward starting rezoning projects with neighborhood public charrettes rather than pre-drafted proposals. Members reached a consensus on prioritizing more board-only meetings to allow for independent deliberation on complex zoning documents.
1:26:19 Zoning Project Timeline — Planning staff outlined a 16-month timeline for future rezoning, prioritizing Tufts University institutional zoning in the fall followed by West Medford and Wellington districts. The schedule remains subject to the procurement of consultants and the identification of additional funding.
2:12:04 Minutes and Administrative Updates — The board approved the meeting minutes from July 15 and noted an upcoming vacancy for the head clerk position in the Planning Department.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Welcome to tonight's meeting of the Medford Community Development Board. My name is Doug Carr. It's 6.32, I'll call the meeting to order. John Anderson. Present. John Began. Present. Page Buldini.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Thank you, Ari. And myself, Chair Doug Carr, also present. Danielle, can you introduce any staff at the meeting or on the call?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yes, myself, Danielle Evans, senior planner. We also have our director, Alicia Hunt. We have 2 of our graduate student interns, Izzy Chung and Natalie Rodman, and also our housing planner, Catherine Buckingham is on the call tonight.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Very good. Thank you. All right, so I'll just outline what we're going to cover tonight really briefly. We're going to have the continued public hearing on the zoning amendment for inclusionary zoning only. We're not going to be talking about Boston Ave or any other global zoning across the city. So we'll do that. So that's a public hearing. Then there's going to be a board working session. with development incentive bonuses for affordable housing. It's related to zoning, but it covers really all of the zoning that we've done to date and hopefully future zoning as well. We'll cover that. Then we'll go over some board's rules and regulations, and then zoning project timeline and other administrative updates plus minutes at the end.

Not the heaviest of lift compared to our previous meetings, but let's dive in. All right, so the first item is the proposed, it's the continued public hearing for zoning amendment inclusionary housing. So this is, again, the proposed amendment to the City of Medford zoning ordinance, section 94-8.1, inclusionary housing, to include a new provision to allow for fractional payments to the Affordable Housing Trust. And again, this is a public hearing. It was continued from July 15th, the CDV meeting. And I'm going to ask Danielle to please give any updates.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yes, thank you. So, you know, at the last meeting, we kind of have gone over the ordinance and the concept of how we were going to come up with the fractional payment, which is the cost of a market rate unit minus the maximum affordable price of a comparable unit, and then taking the percentage of that delta based on the fraction of the unit that's required. Because just to remind you that currently our ordinance requires rounding up, no rounding down, so if you have

21 units, just to give an example then. Yeah, I think it's 10%, I think at 21 units. Maybe not. I think it is. Let's take a different example that I know off the top of my head. So 14 would be 1.4 rounded up to 2. Um, so we don't get a lot. There's basically a developers disincentivized from building a 14 unit, um. Building, because 2 of those would have to be, um, you know, designated as affordable. But so they kind of like play with the numbers to, you know, do, you know, 9.

But if they had, if they were able to do a fractional payment, so 40% of providing 40% of a unit rather than a whole unit, maybe the numbers would work, in which case we could get funding for affordable housing trust, which could be used to create affordable housing elsewhere, you know, it's very expensive. So being able to have different funding sources to kind of coddle together would be helpful. And also, we would get more market rate housing as well, which were from like a supply and demand perspective, you know, the more we can increase supply helps with that.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Sure, Danielle, before I open up to any board questions, is there any document you want to put on screen about that? Because we've talked about this in previous meetings, so I know it's not a new concept for people.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so the language that we shared in July has not changed. But we did. Update the calculator. So that you could have time to kind of like. Look at it, play with it. Because I know that we had just created that pretty, with short notice. So you didn't really have a chance to kind of like chew on it. Let's see. I'm trying to think of what would make sense. I can share. Let me share this, the calculator, see if I can.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, because you summarized it well, like we've had, we've developed as a clearly told us that there's a spot where they won't develop because it doesn't make sense financially, you know, and this is trying to fill that gap, so to speak. Okay. We can see the screen.

[Chair Doug Carr]: This is the Incentive 1 affordability, Incentive 1B, more affordable units.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: OK, that's not the tab I want to show, then. It's the unit's narrative? I want to show. Gosh, why am I so terrible at this? Hold on. I'm going to stop the share. I don't do this. This looks different.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: No, it's a different one. I'm trying to share. Oh, maybe. OK, I usually don't like to share my screen to share the application, but it's not OK. This is dangerous, but I'm doing it on the edge.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, OK, so you see is this the right one, Natalie and Izzy? Yep. OK, so. Our wonderful graduate student interns built this. So there's two things that need to be calculated. So first, you need to figure out what is the maximum sales price of a unit, of an affordable unit. So if the affordability level of the unit that they would be looking to make a fractional payment for is 80% AMI, then you would need to calculate the maximum price of a 80% AMI unit. And so that's going to change because there's all these different variables which kind of push and pull on each other. So, because essentially, all in,

The monthly housing costs, so your mortgage payment, taxes, insurance, I'm forgetting one. No, I think that's right, interest, has to be no more than 30% of your income. And so we know what those numbers are. So, yeah, so this here, Can you see what I'm kind of starting here?

[Director Alicia Hunt]: So that is- Can you zoom in? Because like on my screen, I cannot see the words.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, I'm having a hard time even knowing what you can see.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, just one or two more clicks. There we go. That's getting bigger now. You just need to slide it over so we can see the whole.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Okay. So in the way that, the state dictates what those maximum incomes are, or the maximum housing expenses are. So in the case of a rental, it would be your rent, or for ownership, it would be what I was saying before, the mortgage taxes, insurance, all that. So the assumption is that for a one-bedroom, it could be a two-person household, two-bedroom, three-person, 3-bedroom, 4-person household, so bedroom plus 1. And so going by the medium incomes that are published annually by HUD, and then the state uses those, come up with what these housing costs are. So is this in here? On this tab. Yeah, so here you go.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah. So the 80% annual, 8% of area median income for a two person household for this area is 109,700. So divided by 12, it's 9,141.67, and then 30% of that is the $2,742.50. So you have this is the number that you need to hit for your monthly payments. So basically, yeah, so you play with this number, and then you kind of just you have to do the, there's no way to just kind of have the number spit out. You have to like play with it.

[Chair Doug Carr]: So Daniel, when does this calculation occur in the process? If I can ask that question.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: This would occur when, well, The calculation of maximum sales price is something that's always being done. Anytime a unit is being sold in our region, so it's a number that's known. But for our city specifically, it would be tailored for the real estate taxes, since those are different. Yeah, so there's that number that has to be calculated, which is done Periodically, but then the market rate unit. The way that the ordinance was written is that we would be asking the developer to give us some comps of a comparable market rate unit.

Recently sold within Medford and. PDS would be able to reject those and say this, this actually isn't a comparable. So we'd have to agree on what those are. And then you would take, so here's an example of actually doing that calculation. So say the comparable for whatever size unit is $800,000 per market rate. And we've calculated that 398,000 is the maximum sales price for an affordable unit. If this was in a building that had a for sale unit. And so the difference here is $402,000. So that is the, we would call it the subsidy gap between the market rate and the affordable rate.

And then the multiplier here is 0.2. So that would be for an example where the fractional portion of the calculation ends up 0.2. So say it was 3.2. So instead of rounding up to four, we'd say provide the three units and then you can either provide four or make the 0.2 fraction payment. So 0.2 or 20% of 402,000 is 80,400. So the payment would be 80,400 to the trust. And so hopefully, you know, instead of, The 402,000, which is the subsidy and the difference between providing that unit on site or this fractional payment, hopefully they would be incentivized to build more units instead of having to reduce the overall scale of the project. so that they didn't hit that fraction.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Right. So, um, okay. I think that's helpful. I, I, you obviously sent this around, people have had this. I didn't try to play with this, but I get the concept. So why don't I, uh, just open it up to, uh, board members and have them ask questions and why don't you go first, Ari?

[Ari Fishman]: Thank you. Um, thanks for making this. Um, so 1 of the problem, or the main problem that happened with the 1st, 1, is it not working for different sizes of developments? Have you guys, like, done the calculations for, you know, every size between 1 and say, 500, which seems like the really full range of what can be done in Medford and put it on a graph to see where the issues are. Sorry, interns.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yes, I think. So, like, I'm getting things jumbled in my head too, but I think that issue was with the affordable incentives, which we're going to talk about the next thing. But the fractional payment. Should be just step wise consistent.

[Dina Caloggero]: Yep, I was just, one of the things, what I always see in my current job is spreadsheets like this have a bunch of calculation and macros behind them. It's like, how will you protect the calculation once you test it through the different scenarios and make sure that it remains intact and unchanged? How does that work?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: just calculate the price. Because it's only good for a point in time, really. Because you also have to factor in the interest rates. So if you calculated this number, like now, it's stale in 30 days. You'd have to go back. Because as interest rates drop, the sales price can go up. That's right. Yeah. So with interest rates as high as they are, the sales price is lower. Yeah. This would be a living thing that would be updated.

For each each request, and that there would be a point in time. Where would be calculated so it couldn't be like a year in advance and. I know that is in.

[Ari Fishman]: Danielle, if I may, I think the question wasn't so much about the values, but the actual back end calculations and excels vulnerability to stupid mistakes. So I imagine that once this is. Is that an accurate summary, Dina?

[Ari Fishman]: Is there any possibility we could get this coded in Python or something as a widget that is less prone to having the actual equation change?

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Exactly. The question, and I think that what you're all getting at, that's fine. Is the idea that we give the spreadsheet to the developers and to the public to use, or is this the tool that's used in the back end by the city to do the calculations?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, because my idea is this is like a back end tool, and in my past life when I used to do this, it was The state will have their own backend spreadsheets that they also use, which are probably very similar to this.

[Dina Caloggero]: You still want to protect the calculations either way so they remain consistent. I understand that fields will be variable, like the interest rate at the time, but you want to preserve the calculations that you have tested and ensure that they have worked so it doesn't get modified. I check laboratory systems all the time.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Are you good with Excel, Dina? No, that is a good point. And we'll make sure that whatever tool that we're using is somehow, we can have an official calculator spreadsheet that can't have the fields altered. Right. And a bunch of people double-checking.

[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah, after you test it, after you test it at all different levels to make sure it works. Yeah.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay. Are there other board members who'd like to ask a comment or question before we open it to the public?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: We have Katherine, who's our planner, who had, I think she might want to say something that maybe I didn't say correctly.

[Katherine Buckingham]: No, it's not a correction, just a clarification that all of these calculations are only for if it's less than 0.5 of a unit. So if it's more than that, then you have to round up. So we're only looking at if you have to build 1.4 units, 1.3 units, whatever. So I just wanted to highlight that.

[John Anderson]: Thank you. I guess, given the way the numbers work, at what point would the developer want to go beyond nine units? We know he doesn't want to go to 10 because that means he has to pony up an incremental unit as affordable. going to 11 units, you know, it's really the same problem. Now he has to pony up for 1.1. It would seem to me it's gotta be 20, 30, I don't know. You'd have to look at the numbers to figure out when does it become feasible for the developer to actually wanna go beyond the nine unit free ride.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: No, yeah, you definitely are. I feel like that changes depending on the current economic conditions, like how expensive is it to build? I feel like those are always moving parts of what is driving up the cost of something and what they need to cut. What else do they have to do? The maybe 14 is the tipping point where those extra market rate units, It could be maybe more financially advantageous to build 14 rather than 9. I don't know, but maybe in the higher. The larger projects, you know, over 20 over 30, maybe we'd start to see some. Uptake of this.

In my opinion, I feel like it doesn't hurt to put this in because maybe we'll get a payment or maybe we'll still keep getting nine units. I don't think we're going to get this missing middle housing unless it's some part of incentive.

[John Anderson]: One of the things that's not transparent in this calculation is how much profit does the developer have to work with? In other words, his loss, so to speak, in putting in an affordable unit, how does that impact his overall profit loss on the project? I don't think we know the answer to that.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Generally, there's two ways to Calculate the differences, like the total development cost or the subsidy gap. So this is a subsidy gap method. I don't know if it costs $402,000 to actually build a unit. It might be a little bit lower. It might be more right now. I've seen between $350,000 and $450,000 in recent projects.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so it's in the ballpark. But so I would say that that subsidy or that total development cost is their haircut on providing that unit. And of course, there's the economies of scale. The more market rate units you have, the more that the affordable units, those fractions have just sort of probably just become noise in the overall budgets and such. But I don't know, it'll be interesting to see. It'll be interesting to see what happens. And that's why, you know, zoning is a living document and we could revisit and see if this isn't working and maybe we'll want to do something else.

[John Anderson]: Okay. One other question. How realistic is it to expect that a person who's living on this reduced income will have the money for the down payment.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Sometimes it's down payment assistance. If we participate in that, I think it just got up to $10,000. It was $5,000 or $7,500 for a while. So there's down payment assistance.

[Ari Fishman]: And there are programs that allow you to put, I think it's either 2.5% down or a 5% down. and it's a very select set of circumstances, but people do pull it off.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, we're operating on the assumption of five percent down, so not 20 percent down. We factor in the private mortgage insurance as something that they're going to have to pay for not having the 20 percent, the equity.

[John Anderson]: Do we have any data on how many people who move into this subsidized housing? are buyers versus renters?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: I mean, if it's an ownership unit, they're buying it. While we're calculating the sales price, this also works for the rental developments. Because this is just to come up with what is the market rate. Okay. What's the affordable cost? Yeah, so we would use this number no matter what. So it's buying out a unit. And so I think it's probably much more difficult to come up with the value difference between a market rate unit and a rental unit. So I think you'd have to go out like 30 years and be able to predict the future. I don't know. It seems complicated.

[John Anderson]: Yeah, yeah. So we're basically saying we expect the rental value to sort of move more or less lockstep with the price of the unit, sort of, depending on supply and demand. Okay.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: And there's a point at which the goal is to come up with a dollar amount that is reasonable for them to pay into this. And not necessarily what is the exact, exact value at any moment of this? What is make them feel a reasonable amount of pain, right?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, and that the number is backed by something that we just didn't pluck a number. Like if we just said, our fractional payment is based on 400,000 for a unit, and they'll be like, well, where'd you come up with that? Okay, well, this is how we came up with it.

[John Anderson]: Actually, perhaps I missed the answer to this question. At what point does this figure get determined? At what point in the process? Okay, what does this?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Well, when you come up, I'm looking at the ordinance as the ordinance says. So when do we calculate this? Okay. The payment to the Medford affordable housing trust shall be calculated at the time of the building permit application and due prior to the issuance of the building permit or as agreed to in a fee payment agreement.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: So, I mean, they can, you know, do some, you know, rough math of what it would be at a point in time, and then, you know, make some assumptions of how that could change. from approval to building permit.

[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, thank you, Doug. So I think I had a question kind of along the same lines of what John was getting at. So under this scenario, the developer who wants to do 21 units is going to pay less of a fee than the developer that wants to do 14 units? So if someone wants to do 14 units, they're going to pay at a 4 rate. And someone who wants to do 21 units is going to pay at a 0.1 rate.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yes, because the developer does 14 units is going to do one affordable unit and a 0.4 payment.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: The person who does 21 units is going to do two affordable units.

[Sean Beagan]: Oh, I understand that. Yeah. So, yeah. They both get, I understand that, Alicia, and I've been struggling going back and forth with this because they're both getting the same benefit of getting out of one affordable unit, which is real where the next, you know, level of loss comes for them. So that it would be the same 11, someone doing 11 units or 14 units. Again, they're each getting out of one, they're each doing one affordable unit, they're each getting out of one affordable unit. One is going to pay more than the other.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: But as the person who's building 101 units is going to pay the same point one, is a person who builds 21 units. But they are going to do, what is that, 15 affordable units and a 0.1 payment.

[Sean Beagan]: So playing that out, it's much more fair to the person that does the 100 units, right? That calculation. I think this is a reasonable approach. I'm wondering, I'll be interested to see how it works in real life, what the developers think of it. I think under the scenario that you showed in the spreadsheet, I guess the question is, is it worth it for the developer to take an $80,000 haircut on their market rate unit essentially, right?

That's the feeling. So I think that goes to John's question, which he was asking, which we don't know. The developer knows. We don't know what their profit margin is, but it's an unknowable for us.

[Sean Beagan]: No. So it's interesting. I think it's a good idea, because I think it gets at the problem that we've seen, where people want to stay under the, at least the smaller numbers, they want to stay under the 10.

[Sean Beagan]: I had some, that's all I had on the calculator. I had some other comments on the language and the rule, the real estate comparable draft rules, but that's all I had about the calculator.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay. HAB-Michael Leccesereeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Very good. I agree with that. And I think, Danielle, to your earlier comment, you're going to test this, you're going to see what it, but I think, I think you guys are going to, you should ask the developers, like, and I know you guys do, like, you know, tell us what's motivating you. They said that in our meeting on Salem Street, and it was very helpful to know that. where their pain point was, and if we can just get them to be honest, like, this is what it means for me. This is going to kill the project. This will keep it alive. That will help guide us because this is a living document and we're going to tweak it as we go forward. I think to get the maximum development we can, but the maximum affordable housing we can as well. I think there's a good there's a good medium there that we can balance out. And we're trying to fill that gap and get a few more dollars, but not demotivate people who are looking to add more units. So I think that's a good.

If there are no other board comments, I'm not sure anyone's here from the public, but I will open the public hearing portion of this. If there's any public comments, let me just give my usual preamble. Those wish to provide comments can use the raise hand feature, which may be under reactions on your Zoom. or if you dialed in on a phone, you can use star 9 to raise your hand. You can also message Alicia in the chat if you're having technical difficulties before providing comments. Please state your name for the record. Please, a reminder that all meeting participants to please refrain from using the chat function to message any comments to city staff or board members as it is not part of the public record. Are there any, we'll have two minutes to speak. Is there anyone who would like to speak on this from the public? Is anyone that we can't see here?

[Director Alicia Hunt]: There are no members of the public logged into Zoom at this time.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay, then I will close the public hearing portion just for the record. All right, back to the board comments. Sean, do you have any particular comments on the language of the proposal?

[Sean Beagan]: Just a couple notes that I was making on. So looking at the draft 1C, paragraph 1C, it talks about a payment agreement. It talks about making either the developer is either going to make his payment in full or he's going to enter into an agreed upon payment agreement. And my question was, who is approving the payment agreement? So it's an agreed upon payment agreement as approved by the director of planning, CDB. Maybe we should have some language in there just saying who that authority is that's going to approve the agreement.

And then I had the second part of this was draft rules for the community development board regarding real estate comparables. I had some notes on that as well. I can go through them. I wrote them down. I can share my screen. I can just kind of post them, probably be easier.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: sure yeah and so that the rules and regs would be something that the board would adopt um wouldn't go to city council that wouldn't be in the ordinance but that um you'd probably want these in effect before the first time it's utilized yeah so you should be able to share your screen

[Sean Beagan]: Can you see that? Yes. OK. So these are the changes I had made in regards to real estate comparables, just in how you would determine what a comparable was. And I tried to use some of my experience in looking at how appraisers do comparables. And it was just kind of to fine tune lessen the scope of what we're looking at as a comparable. So to starting from a smaller, for example, if you're looking at residential units and trying to find a comparable, start with comparables that are within a certain proximity of the subject property, and then work your way out.

And then in number two, start with newly built, and then only if newly built don't exist, then move on to renovated. I changed the square footage variance from 20% to 10% because I thought 20% was quite a big variance. If you're talking about a 1,000 square foot condo that's 200 square feet, that would be a big variance. I would think it would make a pretty substantial difference in price. And then I just put in a paragraph six that's kind of like a default, because it may be that you run through this list and you can't find good comparables that meet these requirements. And then what do you do? And then I left that to the director of the planning department to kind of use their best judgment with what's available.

So those were my notes on that rule. I don't know if we're in a position to adopt this as a rule at this point. Maybe it makes more sense to adopt it once the city council approves the ordinance, because we won't need it otherwise, I suppose.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah. And so Laurel, or Clerk Siegel, rather, had kind of thrown this down as, you know, something for you guys to react to. And then it was like a starting point and then expected you would, you know, redline the heck out of it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I, you don't need your, your rules now. You'll need them when you're, when the ordinance gets implemented or you have your first, your application looking to take advantage of a cash payment.

But the rules don't have to, it doesn't have to be a public hearing, doesn't need to be advertised, something that we can throw on an agenda and you can adopt that night. So it's not like a cumbersome thing. And so this will be like much more fluid and you can tweak this when you're like, oh, wow, This is a really narrow, no one can get comps. Let's loosen this up a little bit. And then, you know, maybe the market picks up again and you've got comps galore, and then you can tighten it up again.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Or what are you thinking? I don't know. It wouldn't be adopted by city council until at least September.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay. But do we need a consensus, like a vote, a final draft to the city council, just like anything else?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Oh, you mean, are you talking about the ordinance or the rules?

[Chair Doug Carr]: Well, this document in particular, this is a standalone piece, I think.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so it's basically two To separate documents that I have combined in one word document for you to review. So you didn't have to. So it's just that 1st page, which is the fractional payment. Ordinance language that this board would need to vote on and. Make a recommendation to city council that either they adopted. or not. So this, this language isn't originating with them. So this originated with staff, but they had requested that this be initiated. Yeah. So they haven't, I don't think, seen any of this.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: I mean, I would, if you're ready to make a recommendation to move forward with this ordinance, which is just that 1st page. That would be great so that we could. Get it on the books.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Okay, well, be clear the board would vote to recommend the line, which is yes. You'll draft a memo saying that the board recommended this language. We send that to the city council and then they can vote on it in their public hearing. Yeah.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay. Well, I guess I'll open it up to the board if anyone wants to make a motion on page one only, not the red line we see in front of us.

[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, before I vote, are we going to amend paragraph 1C to clarify the fee payment agreement in terms of, because right now there's a fee payment agreement that it's not clear who's approval it's subject to.

[Chair Doug Carr]: I think it should be by PDS staff, but I don't think it should come back to this board. I think it should be by PDS planning staff. because you're plugged into it more in a way it would never be.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay, so maybe then as amended, page one as amended to a fee payment as determined by PDS staff.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Okay, Ari, you're good with that, right? Okay, so back to this, sorry, John, as in you already said yes, Sean Biggin? Yes, yeah. Page Buldini?

[Chair Doug Carr]: And myself, Dr. R. Yes. Motion passes six to zero. Very good. Thank you. Moving on. All right, next up on the agenda is the board working session for the zoning amendments for development incentive bonuses for affordable housing, obviously related to what we're talking about. But this applies for all of the zoning sections that we've done to date. included the Boston Avenue one. So it's not a specific one to Boston Avenue. It's across the entire, what's been done since zoning was redone. So it includes modifying the structure of a table development for incentive bonuses to DIB for affordable housing, which included in Boston Avenue zoning as well as Benford Square and Salem Street and Middlesex Avenue as well.

I'll note this working session is not part of the closed public hearing for Boston Ave, the full amendment for Boston Ave will be presented and discussed at our next meeting on September 2nd. So tonight we're just discussing, it's a board discussion, but any public comments are strictly limited to the development, instead of framework, it's not related to Boston Ave specifically, because we closed the public hearing of Boston Ave back in June. So Danielle, do you want to give us any more context here?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yes, so I believe that I mentioned in a previous meeting that it came to our attention that the. Framework for the deeper affordability and the more affordability incentives that was built into the overall. Development incentive bonuses. throughout Mystic Ave, Salem Street, Medford Square, and then now proposed in the Boston Ave District, that when you actually did the math, there were certain instances where you could get the bonus without actually doing anything, just because of funny things with how the math worked out. When the incentives were originally conceived, The math did work, but it was complicated. And so I was like, how do we put this into words in an ordinance? Let's put this in a table. And then it got distilled, and that's where it broke.

It's like we tested it, or the consultants tested it, and it worked. But then when an actual real case came in, not an application, but a, Preliminary proposal, a developer was looking to get the extra story incentive without, on paper, they technically qualify it, even though they didn't actually provide an additional unit at all. This was a 14, I think it was a 14 unit example, or maybe it was something where it was, it ended up being, they would get, the percentage wasn't enough that actually create an additional unit. So that's a loophole, and we don't want that. So we kind of racked our brains of like, how do we fix this? And so once again, our very capable graduate student interns, I was like, OK, just try to figure this out. And we kind of came up with different scenarios.

First, making the math work, but then also the kind of bigger picture policy goals of what should be the value of what they're providing and what they're getting, and what do we want to incentivize? Are things proportionate? I guess I will share the, so in your folder, you should have kind of like a stripped down spreadsheet. And I don't know if Natalie or Izzy, if you wanted to actually run through this, I won't force you to, but if you wanted to, you'd probably be much more clear than me.

Or at least just, let's see, I can, how can I share my screen? Can you see this tab now? Okay, I think I can see it.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: So here's okay. So this is what we're proposing to change. And maybe we should call up what the most recent example that we had in Medford Square. I can't share multiple screens.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Well, I was trying to compare what we had before. Basically, there was two different things. It was like, if you did this percentage, then you would get an extra story, or this percentage, you get two extra stories. Basically, when you go into the second additional story, it just never seems to work. So our recommendation is no second additional story. It just never seems proportionate. It seems that they probably would not take advantage of any of the other.

[Chair Doug Carr]: You mean for affordability or is it the driver only or just in general?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so was it there's so right now what we're. We're thinking from a policy perspective that incentivizing deeper affordability is something that's more important right now. 80% AMI is. actually pretty high, and those rents are high. Because as you saw, on the other example for the other matter, that 80% AMI for a two-person household is $110,000. So we know that there's a lot of folks who are well below that and are also looking for housing. So we're thinking 65%, if we can try to get more of those units, because basically all people build are 80%. And because that's what we require.

And many of them are actually occupied by voucher holders because the 80% is still way too high for the rent. So that needs additional subsidy So we're thinking that the 65% AMI units perhaps could be occupied by someone who would need additional subsidy, which so would be, you know, that voucher could be used, you know, elsewhere. So it's more opportunities to serve more people. And so we had decided that the one additional story would be more appealing and beneficial. And I feel like I'm not explaining this well. I'll go back. Instead of going by these percentages, we decided to use a multiplier. So if you have a multiplier of the times required number of units, you'll always get more. Are you guys following, or am I just kind of wah, wah, wah, wah?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: It is. It is dense. So looking at this tab, this kind of makes more sense. I kind of want to get the, I need to find the bowl spreadsheet with the other tabs, because I think that also is helpful.

[Chair Doug Carr]: So how does this solve the problem that you, you could, you found a problem that it didn't work. We saw you, you, you clearly demonstrated that in one of the calls I was on, I can't remember. So how does this fill that gap?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Having a multiplier always, ensures that there's another unit and I'm going to let Izzy explain it.

[CAS00002514_SPEAKER_03]: If you want to go back to the ordinance table. So yeah, like Danielle was saying, I think part of the original problem is that you were taking different percents and multiplying them by the total number of units in the project. But that was problematic for a couple of reasons. And so when you apply this new multiplier by the number of affordable units that's required, you're already rounding up. And that will always trigger a unit increase for Incentive 1B, which is the more affordable units. One of the other problems we were seeing is that for the deeper affordability, which has units at 65%, there were some projects that would have been required to do more units than they're required. So it just wasn't consistent, but this new structure makes it so that they're always having to do at least one unit at 65%, and then whatever's left over in their number of total required affordable will be the number of 80%. So in any scenario, they're still doing the same number of affordable units. It's just a matter of what the mix will look like of 65% and 80% units. And then like Danielle was saying, in terms of the policy consideration,

In terms of actual affordability, for us, it's maybe more favorable to have the deeper affordability because these 80% units are really not that affordable. And so that was also the reason why we moved away from the two stories possible. and made the deeper affordability option equal one additional storey and then the additional affordable units for incentive 1B would only be worth a half storey. Yeah, and then we did put a footnote there of an example if that's helpful to run through to kind of show what it would look like to run those numbers. and then the second tab on that sheet is all the different scenarios for projects from 10 units all the way down to I think 100 or I think there were a couple of big unit scenarios that we also ran but it basically just shows here's what the numbers would look like if you wanted to redeem incentive 1a or 1b or both of them which is also possible

Yeah, and then the other thing to know is that because one of them is now only worth half a story, you can kind of think of it as like they would be forced or required to couple that incentive with another half story, which I think in the proposed zoning, there are a number of other half story incentives that they could pursue.

[Chair Doug Carr]: So you close the loophole, you think under any number of units, nobody, there's no loophole anymore. Is that a first?

[CAS00002514_SPEAKER_03]: Yes, there shouldn't be, but we are also happy to run other unit scenarios than what else is in the table.

[Chair Doug Carr]: You did everything. I mean, I don't know what else you can do zero to, I mean, 10 to 50, right. And then a hundred to 200, like once you get about 50, it's academic at that point. Catherine, do you want to chime in?

[Katherine Buckingham]: Yeah, one thing I just wanted to clarify, and this is probably obvious, but fractional payments would not be allowed under this. So you can't pay 40% of a unit to count it as one extra unit. Like, if you want to get these incentives, you have to build the whole unit.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: We have to have to or should just say in the language of the ordinance that like you cannot take the option to just because people want to play every game they possibly can.

[Sean Beagan]: I think it said that in the ordinance, the draft language that we just were forwarding. I think there was something along those lines in the draft language we were just forwarded to city council that you couldn't use that those payments to it's an incentive. It's, yeah, 1D on the fractional units ordinance, the suggested ordinance, 1D.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: So this is part of the draft zoning that, for the Boston NAB zoning. And we, I think we have a completely updated version of that, that we are gonna send. Izzy and Natalie were double checking. Danielle and I reviewed it on Monday with Emily. We found some stuff that needed to be changed again. We sent them those changes and Natalie is he were double checking that all of that was in there, so we'll include that what that does not have is this language. This right, so this is the one piece that wasn't changed in that and so we'll actually they send us a PDF so we'll actually want to send send them this so they can update the PDF.

And so in this next few days, we'll send you the draft Boston Ave language, which we think reflects everything that the CD board and the city council said at the end of the public hearing. And so we want to send it to you so that you can then say, so if you read it and go, I don't think this is what we said, please tell us that right away. And we will actually have, so Natalie and Izzy have been watching the videos over and over. I'm so sorry.

and we'll double check against what you like. So if Dina or Doug or whoever thinks that what the language we're sending you doesn't reflect what you remember, we'll go back to the video. And so if you're right, then we'll still change it again before that becomes a public document. And if you're wrong, we'll just gently let you know that actually this is what was actually said at the meeting. And if you want it differently, that you would discuss at the public meeting. So our goal is that this version reflects what we believe everybody said at that meeting.

Is that clear? And this is going to get embedded into that, because this is the one thing where they said, Danielle and staff and interns, can you fix this? So this will get added to that.

[Chair Doug Carr]: I know the next meeting is three weeks from tonight, right? So getting this distributed, you know, maybe by the end of the week or whenever it's ready, that's fantastic.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, we have it. And I just, like I said, I just want to give it one more read and make sure we think it's right before we send it to you.

[Chair Doug Carr]: No, no, that's, believe me, we were, you know, you heard the last meeting, we want, and we'll talk about this in the procedures, and we're looking for a one week minimum, and we're almost getting three. So we can't possibly be upset with that. Sean, you have a question.

[Sean Beagan]: Just a question about this new proposal for the deeper affordability. Just under the new formula that you're using, why doesn't it, why couldn't you make it work for two additional floors? We're getting rid of the two additional floor incentive for deeper affordability is my understanding, but why couldn't it work under the new way you're calculating it if you changed the factor from like 0.3 to 0.5 or something like that? Did you guys run those numbers?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so basically it became like a proportionality kind of discussion. It was like, wow, two full floors for converting to 80% to a 65% AMI. Does that seem like what we are looking for? Looking at the entire menu of incentives.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, it seems like no matter how you sliced it, when there was a second floor, it wasn't a lot that you were getting.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, yeah. And so let's see. I'm going to share this screen where we went through several scenarios of trying to figure out what the multiplier should be. Like, OK, how much extra, like, not only to make the math work, but is what they're doing, is what we're giving in proportion to what we'd be getting. So let's see. No, this isn't the right one. How do I? I'm just going to. That's because that's not the correct one.

Can someone else share who's better at this? I'm not in my normal setup, so I'm not able to. Let's see. Let me just make sure I'm. All right.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: OK. I think this is the right one. Yeah. So we went through this scenario of like, okay, what do we think the multiplier should be? And then, so this is a policy discussion and determination for you all, you know, to decide or, you know, make recommendations to city council. What do you think is appropriate for all these scenarios? So, you know, as we said, the way that these multipliers are applied they'll always end up with an additional unit.

Or no, this is deeper affordability. Let's go to the more affordability because that, oh, this is small. Let's just use this one. So it's like, OK, do we do a 0.5 multiplier? So half the units at 65% AMI. And that felt kind of high, but like half. I don't know if people are going to take advantage of that. I don't know if. Requiring that would be. You know, too much. And so we ended up and then we'll put we had 0.25 and then we landed at 0.3 and.

I mean, this really is kind of just like basing this on vibes. What did we feel? So, like in this situation, so if you had, let's just pick like a 21 unit project. So, as you guys know, 2.1 rounded up to three. So you have to do 3 units. And so I was like, OK, if you wanted to get an additional half story for doing deeper affordability, what does that look like? OK, so you would multiply the required units, so 3 times the 0.3. And is this by the 0.3?

[CAS00002514_SPEAKER_03]: That's by the 0.5. You want to be looking at scenario two.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah. OK, yeah. So this, oh, this stuff makes sense now. Izzy, do you want to drive on this?

[CAS00002514_SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I think I can also just maybe answer that question more is part of the reason why we decided to just do the one story and not make it two stories is especially for the smaller unit projects, because they're smaller numbers the a change in the percent or the multiplier doesn't always actually trigger a unit increase. So I think that was the problem with the original structure is you would do, for example, 13% of 10 units versus 15% of 10 units. It all still rounds up to the same number, which is part of the reason why we wanted to just get rid of the more complicated structure of having multiple story incentives and just do one straight incentive.

I don't know if that answers your question, but it was a lot more straightforward. And then similarly, I think even if you did two different multipliers, it wouldn't necessarily always change the unit mix, so they would be able to get some benefit by not necessarily providing anything additional.

[Page Buldini]: Just a really quick comment, and I know we're going to talk about procedures after but I'm just die freeze. I just really appreciate the thought and especially when it comes to policy, because I think the whole point of this zoning is to make sure that. developers or building owners come in and actually take advantage of it. So I really appreciate everybody focusing on this. Excel is not my forte. And I know, Dina, I know you're especially great at this, too. I'm sure many other board members are, but I just really love the thought of deeper affordability, but also something that is applicable and that hopefully will be taken advantage of. So I just wanted to share that. Thank you.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Thanks, Paige. All right, any other board comments? This is a lot of deep math the last hour. But I get what's going here. You had a clear loophole that this is filling, right? I mean, there's no other way to say it. Go ahead, Ari.

[Ari Fishman]: Thank you. I have no problems with the policy or the math And my comment is more thinking out loud on the political side, which is not our job. But one of the things that came up from the public was concerned about the second story. And so if we're getting rid of it, even if it is for a different reason, I think that that is really important to communicate to the public that that area of significant public concern is actually no longer on the table.

[Chair Doug Carr]: All right, was that for both Medford Square or just Boston Ave recently?

[Ari Fishman]: Everything. I mean, I can't, or off the top of my head, I can't quantify the number of people who said that versus people who said add all the height. We heard large numbers of both, but there was a caucus.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Fair enough. That's a great idea. Transparency is always better. Go ahead, Sean.

[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, just to follow up on what Ari said, I want to be clear in my own head. So there are certain instances where the zoning may be two additional incentive stories. It might be five by right and two additional. I think that is still in play. You just can't get it. with this deeper affordability incentive alone. So you might have one story that you get with deeper affordability, and then you put together two other different incentives that are a half story each. And that's how you get to your two stories now. So it's not that two stories can't be had. It's just it can't be had in the exact same manner and after

Danielle and Izzy explained it, I think it makes a lot of sense what they're saying. But the two stories are still there. If people want them, they just have to jump through some different hoops.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Right. And I think, as you mentioned, there's two or three ways to get there. Go ahead, Dina.

[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah, thank you, Sean. I still do agree with Ari, is that I would discuss this as part of the next meeting and the change is that it will affect all the the current zoning in place. I think it's really important to be transparent on what's going on here.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Well, I think the idea is that if you're going to allow some of these zones to be eligible for 2 additional stories by doing incentives that if they are going to get the additional two stories, they'll have done a lot. There'll be a lot of public benefit. It shouldn't be like an easy peasy thing to get, which this loopholes, it was very easy peasy. So if you're zoning for five stories plus two with incentive zoning, Thinking it should be hard to get to it was going to be very easy.

[Ari Fishman]: Think of a scenario where it could be done. I just I want to make like, it will help me understand. Okay.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: All right. So. So, not necessarily talking about Boston app, because this we would get anywhere anywhere anywhere. Okay. So say you did. You wanted to do the deeper affordability, so you. Check that box, you say you have you start with 5 stories. Okay, well, I'm going to make my affordable units. More deeply affordable so now I can get up to 6 stories and then you would look at that menu of other. Choices, which I'll just. Look real close, like, maybe they put in a pocket park.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: How much is a pocket park worth? I have that open right in front of me. You do?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Okay. Yeah, I don't have it at my fingertips. I do. Okay. And maybe they need to be tweaked, you know?

[Chair Doug Carr]: Right. But a park and park is not worth an entire story of a building just for it.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right. Do you want me to talk to it, Danielle? Or do you want me to?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Oh, you can talk to it. Yeah, that looks like half story.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right, so here, as you start to do it, indoor pedestrian seating or outdoor pedestrian plaza of at least 300 square feet, half story, one of the following neighborhood open spaces, this was garden, playground, skate park, half story. So you could put those two together, you could have a large plaza and a playground open to the public, and then that would get you a story. This was the solar one that they'd asked for, that city council had. where the output, the electricity is provided to community solar low income programs or like to the government. So a low income or government person is benefiting from the solar, would get you a solar. 20% of its parking, whichever is greater of its parking space available to the public, to provide more like garage public parking around the city,

And then here was a streets gate improvements for a half story. And this included street furniture, street trees, benches, recycling, bicycle racks, pedestrian scale lighting.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Alicia, can you go back up to the top where it talked about the park, a park? Is there a definition of there for a park, a park, garden, playground or skate park in terms of square footage size?

[Chair Doug Carr]: Because, I mean, what's, what, pocket park, does that mean like? 1000 square feet? It could be, but like playground can't be small. What's a playground?

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yep. And I'm not clear what garden there means, whether they meant community garden or just like a planted public area.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Right, it seems like that's potential loophole material for a half story if they don't even have a minimum size.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Hey, Izzy and Natalie, how busy are you this week? Do you want to put some language around this, perhaps something for us to react to for these?

[Chair Doug Carr]: Because I know what you want, but it's too undefined right now.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right. And I will tell you that I myself keep looking at this community amenities. that I'm not sure whether we want to give them a half story for this because this feels like, except if you're saying, well, trash recycling receptacles with the expectation that they're maintaining them and emptying them, that is a benefit to the city DPW, right? Bike racks, we've required street bike racks for the public. This feels like stuff that the CD board does do through site plan review.

[Ari Fishman]: Yeah, and a bench is like a few $100. I think it is worth for incentive 3 to also quantify because right now the language is vague enough that you could put in a single bench and theoretically qualify it. I think it would be worth either saying. At least 3 of or somehow like quantify them thus that they can mix and match or add up, but make it. Quantify the importance and benefit to the community and to make sure that it is equal to the amount they benefit.

[Page Buldini]: I agree. That's why I had raised my hand too. I just thought that was kind of vague as well. So great call. Sorry, I spoke when you had your hands up.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, if we're trying to not give away the farm here and give a half story, we've got to get something meaningful back. And I think there's a few loopholes here that obviously the staff will take a look at over the next couple of days or week.

[Ari Fishman]: Yeah, and for context on Pocket Park, there was a Somerville Park lit On the, it's like dollar tree and. 1 of the forge sibling cafes, that was literally a single parking spot and it was a great use of a single parking spot during coven. But I do want to be clear that that is not what we are imagining. No.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: I think for some of these real subjective ones, I feel like there has to be some kind of arbiter here. Like the CDB has to determine whether that qualifies.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: So we should try to make these incentives something that we can measure. may have to still be a little bit of subjectivity.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Some of those are easy, yeah. Is this the same language in Medford Square? So if we're changing it, Boston Ave, we're changing it there too?

[Director Alicia Hunt]: So legally, no. Like this is procedurally, you want to, right? So for the benefit of the city and the ease of development, it helps dramatically if these are the same in all the districts. Right, I think we all conceptually agree on that. At this time, it is only the Boston Ave zoning that is going through the public hearing process. So at this time, the changes only apply to Boston Ave and we would actually, but the CD board can start a zoning amendment. So the CD board can refer to the city council these tables for each of the other zones saying we want to replace whatever was in the Medford Square zone, the Salem Street zone, the Mystic Ab Zone with this version of that table.

And that would actually trigger another public hearing process. I'm so very sorry. but it would have to be legally advertised. It would have to go through the public hearing process to replace this for those other areas because right now the table is embedded in each zone as opposed to the vision is that eventually there would be one table and every zone would refer back to it. But that's not how it's been done to date.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Right, but we already have fixes we need to do for Salem anyway. So this is actually consistent with that philosophy. We just need to kind of

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yeah, this CD board can can initiate some of that it doesn't have to come from the city council and something as simple as replace that table with this table doesn't need a consultant even

[Chair Doug Carr]: No, I agree, but I think we have clean up here for a language on Boston Ave in Medford Square we know, and then we'll have to kind of reverse engineer it back to Salem Street because there are so many other things we've added since Medford Square that are not at all present in Salem Street that we know we need to be. So I think one more at a time here, I think.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Do you want me to keep running through this table or did we just do enough of it?

[Chair Doug Carr]: I think we all need to read it and read it critically offline and get that's part of our commentary. I think that's the, that's how I would phrase this.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Cause we're not going to group edit it here, but there's clearly some things that are a little light on incentive and they're giving you a ton of half story for something that could be thousand bucks or less. Doesn't seem like it's in the, in the right area of code.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, because we could do quarter story to, you know, I think there might, I think we did do quarter story somewhere. Yeah.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Maybe Mr. Gaff? I don't know. But I mean, I would, I would be in favor of once the Boston Ave zoning is passed with whatever you think should be in that whole incentive table. So the fixed affordability incentives and then the other stuff, kind of revisiting those. And then we could do another public hearing for those to go into the other zones. And the other fixes that we think are urgent. I know Doug had concerns at some of the historic incentive language, I think.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, the Historical Commission wants to refine, taking a look at the language and more importantly, the procedures. They're not sure. What I described is the way they want to go. So we have an internal debate that we're going to do. And we'll speak with Danielle and Alicia next week on setting up that meeting tomorrow. I there's no one here from the public, so I'm not going to repeat the preamble here, since there's no one who could comment on it. I don't believe so. Daniel, I think are we done with this issue for now? Yeah. OK, so everyone, once we get once we get the revised documents, maybe after the staff take a look at and try to tighten up, we can we can all look at it and have at least two weeks to review all this robust enough.

All right, let's move on to the next item on the agenda, the board rules and regulations. So I'm going to put something on screen. Danielle actually sent around the The language, which I don't sure I'm not sure many of us have seen the rules of the method to be known board governing organization procedure dated July 14 2022. we're not going to go through that, but there's clearly. Some things in there that either we're not doing or should do, and it's not going to be at this meeting to debate those. But I think that's going to be a separate meeting because it's a, it's a document that I think we all need to read and come back with comments from. There's a lot of things there. But what I think we want to talk about is our current process and try to improve the conversations that we started at the last meeting. We want to kind of continue that and refine that a little bit. I'm going to put a document on screen. Hold on one second. Let's see.

Okay. So we started a conversation back in July, and we were really talking about how do we do a better process and schedule going forward. And what I wrote here, and some of this is in the meeting minutes, although this is a little bit more detailed, but we're a strong consensus that Medford Square was better than Boston Ave in terms of less rush, more time, more productive. We had more city board only meetings and fewer joint meetings with the city council. So we want to try to do that the next time, but we want to also be part of the process from the beginning and have perhaps fewer joint meetings with the council, but provide options at the beginning envisioning, maybe towards the end, and at least have one or two city board meetings in between so that we can debate amongst ourselves and try to improve things that way.

Hand in hand with that, we want to have consensus that the board needs to be part of the drafting of the proposal. And there's a couple of different ways that can happen. Daniel and I were literally talking about this about a half hour before the meeting started. You know, one option we talked about our last meeting was you could participate. Some of us could basically sit in on unofficially on the City Council's Planning and Permitting Committee, but that's even more meetings. We already are very meeting heavy. So that wasn't, I personally think that's not the answer, although we can talk about it. The other 1 is that we would see option is that we would say, we would see the job zoning at approximately the same time as the city council. In other words, we don't want to get something that is already a bait finished product come before us and I'd have to undo things and say, oh, we disagree with that because the assumptions are bad.

Danielle offered that perhaps the process should really begin with the public meeting and we start with a blank slate basically and say let's bring the neighborhood meeting. Talk about if it's West Medford or if it's the Tufts area or if it's going to be Wellington. We start off that process with a public meeting rather than the City Council planning subcommittee. So those are all just procedural options that are kind of some things we want to talk about. Because my conversations with Zach Baers is that we're going to have a meeting between the working group soon to kind of lay out the next year and a half and refine our process. So we want to kind of have some sense of consensus of what we are looking for. And hand in hand with that is that we, and we talked about this at the last meeting, is that we want to take about four to five months minimum for each of the future rezoning areas that we're going to be tackling for the rest of this year and all of next year. And what that would mean is Tufts for the fall, West Medford or Wellington for the spring, and the second one for the summer and fall of next year. That basically brings us to the next 16 months as a rough time frame for those for scheduling.

So we'll be paused there and we can just, everyone can maybe just think about as a follow up to what we did last time. if they have any comments or questions on that. That's just a starting point. That was my summary of what we had last meeting, and then looking forward to the next 16 months. Like, you know, what are you folks looking for in terms of scale, in terms of procedures? Do you see a better way? A few people commented at the last meeting, but this is a time to pick up that conversation again. So who would like to start off?

And John, we'll get to your other specific comments after this. That's the part two of this. Go ahead, Dina.

[Dina Caloggero]: I like Danielle's idea of public participation to start out in the beginning. I think it brings the residents as part of the process and then both the Community Development Board and also the City Council can hear some of the concerns of the area. I mean, especially in the groups, You know, I think that would be highly beneficial for, you know, the Tufts institutional zoning. We have, you know, a list of wants that Tufts wants as well, but we haven't heard residents too much, have we? So we'd give both sides the ability to, you know, state their concerns and what things they would like to see moving forward. I think that's a great idea.

[Page Buldini]: Sure. Thank you. So I agree with Dina. And I think also, I think just for me to get a better sense, are we working with a consultant going forward? Has that been decided and secured for the future?

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Yes. No. We would absolutely be using a consultant. We have not put out the RFP for the consultants to respond to. So we do have not hired anybody yet. Danielle and I are going to spend a little bit of time tomorrow working on the draft RFP as it currently stands. We're hoping to get it out very soon.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: So we have COB, Erika Vandenbrande): legally extended their time I forget how many months without extending the dollars, so that be at this time, because that was the. COB, Erika Vandenbrande): The money that was in their original version of the contract was to take us through the end of Boston absorbing. So we have not paid them out all the money for the Boston zoning, because the Boston zoning is not complete yet. So we have extended that. We also have a proposal from them for them to work with us on the Tufts institutional zoning, but we would have to identify new money to do that with. And that is a conversation that we have not had this summer. Somehow, Danielle, my and the mayor's vacations We're completely we're completely disjoint this summer. And so it seems that almost every week one of us was away, simply because of the three of us not overlapping very well.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: So that said, everybody has every intention of having a consultant on board. We have to put it out to bid. In theory, we can keep Innis on through this fall, because it's the three years. Extending contracts is really common, as long as you don't hit that three-year limit. the three-year limit would allow us to go through the fall, but we would need additional money for them to work on the Tufts institutional zone.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Do you think if you don't find the money in the next 30 days, 60 days, I mean, we're not going to get Tufts done this fall.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: We just have to have that conversation and figure out is it in somebody's budget or do we HAB-Masyn Moyer-Moyer): Have this does the city council have to appropriate some money and I don't remember what the number was I looked at it. HAB-Masyn Moyer-Moyer): In July, and I said oh that's not or in June, and we needed to sign a contract extension in like two days, so we said, well, the time extension that's easy a no cost time extension that's easy we circulated it we signed it. HAB-Masyn Moyer-Moyer): It said identifying the money we have to have a conversation and everybody said, do we can't do that before June 30. and we just haven't had the conversation. So Danielle, we should pull that proposal, look at it again. I have to refresh my memory of how much the money it is and then circulate it with the mayor and I think President Bears and decide whether that money is easy or not.

[Page Buldini]: And then can I ask to when it comes to like the schedule of next projects. Is that legally set like Tufts is legally the next one not to like mess up this order. I'm just interested because I do know there are the comprehensive plans and the studies that have come back. for Wellington. That could be helpful data. I don't know or not. But I know the Boston Ave one that Tufts is doing won't be back, I think, until the end of the year. So not to say that we need to wait for that. I don't know if that would be helpful information.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: I thought the Boston Ave study was really though a streetscape study and didn't have anything to do with zoning at all.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: And it's just the one block in front of, I mean, relatively speaking, I know the study is up and around, but like.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Okay. It's maybe, um, I don't know anything about the study really, but we'll, could it inform like the sidewalk widths or something?

[Page Buldini]: She is. Yep. Yes. So we could check in. And then is there any way we could with the Tufts, and this is just a pipe dream, to get more of, I know the master plan is not, but that wishlist that kind of had been floated just to help us if we are talking about Tufts, about if they had any future ideas. I know in conversation there was a potential of a wishlist when we were talking about the pool.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Oh, you mean their future things they want to build in the future?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yes. Well, we know that they're going to tear down the Elliott Pearson School, and that they're moving it to Dame, right? Yeah, on what's that road? George? Yeah. So like, what's gonna happen there?

[Page Buldini]: So not to make this difficult, but just, I don't know if that's helpful information.

[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah, I mean, I know that neighbors, like, I live right down the street from the Elliot Pearson and neighbors are highly concerned what will be put in place of the Elliot Pearson. There's over 20 trees in that area right now. It's very pretty. And neighbors are very, very concerned.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Which is honestly an argument for doing that zoning sooner. so that you would have more control.

[Dina Caloggero]: I agree. I agree. I would do the zoning and then you can change it, right? You can change it if needed, but I would get to that quickly.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right. It's my feeling that the Wellington area is really going to take a long time. That is not something that we could decide now and have done by December, there's no way that's like a solid 6 month.

[Dina Caloggero]: Well, and we communicated that to the public is too. We said that we were going to do institutional zoning after the Boston Avenue. So it just makes sense.

[Chair Doug Carr]: I think it makes sense to me. I think Tufts, West Manford, and then Wellington, I think, is the general outline. I agree. I think Tufts, the feelings are strong, it's right in front of us, and I'm sure they want to do it fast too, because they know that they they need certainty going forward and we have maximum leverage, I think, now to get a deal. So, all right. So are there any other comments about just broad, you know, these are broad, you know, we're talking about, I think with schedule, you know, we need to obviously negotiate with city council, but the process of starting with the neighborhoods that is clearly a consensus that here is here. That sounds great.

There are some other, you know, we'll, Sean and I will meet with the working group. I don't know when, it's probably September if I had to guess. But the other, a couple of other things that, and I'm gonna reshare my screen, a couple of the other things that came out of the, oh, John, I was about to get to your stuff. Go ahead, you have a comment?

[John Anderson]: Yeah, I just wanted to talk about the opening the discussion with the public earlier. I think to make that really effective, we have to put a few things on the table as opposed to just saying, what would you like? Because, you know, you have various groups in the city and a general question like, what would you like? A lot of people say, well, I kind of like it the way it is right now. And, you know, that's kind of the end of it.

You need to kind of, for example, Do people want more tree canopy? Is that something to be interested in? Do they want more bike lanes? Do they want more parking? Do they want less parking? All these things. I think you need to give them a taste of the things that are potentially on the table, or you can run into apathy. You know, there are lots of people, I mean, look at the percentage of people who bother to vote in municipal elections. There's a large number of people who just sort of think, well, nothing's ever gonna happen anyway. You know, I've lived here for 40 years and people have been, all we've talked about is potholes all the time. So why should I even bother to vote? So I think we need to figure out how to stimulate public participation as opposed to just posting a meeting.

[Chair Doug Carr]: I think that's a good point. I don't think a blank slate is probably the best place to start because we know that there are certain principles that we've followed so far that I think those philosophies, those principles are probably going to be adapted to other ones. I'm going to go to Dina next and then Danielle right after. Go ahead, Dina.

[Dina Caloggero]: I think one of the things I totally agree with john, you can't just open it up like a free for all. I agree. But I would also introduce what the current zoning is in place to I think lots of residents don't understand that. And I think sometimes the current zoning is. worse than what we're proposing. So it would allow at least some type of parameters on what you currently have and to transition what you need. And I would also put in there the other plans that Medford has done, like the master plan, right? I would put in the climate plan and many of the other elements that the other plans that were already very well done that would provide also parameters around the discussion and the input from the public.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: And Dina took the words out of my mouth. Because basically, so it's not a blank slate, like we did a comprehensive plan. It was adopted, which has kind of like overarching things and goals in it. And how you implement those A variety of ways, 1 of those is zoning. So, it's like, if we wanted an active streetscape with housing and vibrant ground floor. Retail, okay, but we need to change zoning for that and. That comes back to where it's makes a lot of sense to tell folks what the current zoning is and how that. Almost always doesn't act doesn't match. what you see, so the existing conditions, the existing built environment is not what's in the zoning. People will be like, well, I like West Medford Square, what's wrong with it? It's like, well, you can't actually build that.

So if you like the things that you like, let's codify that and let's enhance it based on what was outlined in the comprehensive plan and any following, you know, more detailed neighborhood plans, like the Wellington Transformation Study, you know, drills down deeper into that section. So, you know, builds on what came out of the comp plan. So having those plans in place, and then the community input, I feel like is how we should be kickstarting what that first draft looks like.

And then it could move to the planning and permitting committee, but I don't think that she should be being born. It's like little babies and planning and permitting. I think that's. We need to back up one more.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right. So there is a technique that you can do with public meetings. It's more like a charrette where you bring big photos and pictures of what exists in some big maps that are Google Maps, street views and stuff like that, and ask people, put hearts on the things you really like, put Xs on the things you don't like. Tell us what you love and don't love about this. And then we'll craft the zoning around that and I think that's kind of what Danielle saying, but it's like you're not starting with a blank slate, because there, it's not a blank slate, it's an existing slate and and help people to understand, they don't need to understand that in that meeting that what they love isn't allowed. It could have helped, because that was part of where we were going with Salem Street. A lot of the little neighborhood area with the cafes and the apartments above it by Park Street, not actually allowed under the zoning. And somehow that wasn't well communicated to people, that the things that they liked weren't actually allowed under the zoning that existed. And some of the things that they were kind of scared of, like apartment buildings, were actually allowed all up and down the street already. So how do we communicate that better in a way to just get people, tell me what you like, tell me what you don't like, what would you like to see more of, what would you like to see less of? Like, that's a technique, but I think we need to do it more like a charrette, which is with people gathered around tables and poster boards and not a presentation with people sitting in rows.

[Dina Caloggero]: Yeah, and the uses too, the use tables. Very, very important. A lot of people don't understand that.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah. I think the charrette is an interesting way to think about it. But again, sometimes a charrette is, again, we're not starting from zero. The comprehensive plan is a roadmap that we've really followed very closely. We've expanded on it, obviously, but it's not been something that, like, that's still the foundational document that tells us you know, the character of the city, the streets, the neighborhoods, all that is in there. And we just, we definitely need to start with that. And I think, does this require you to rewrite the RFP a little bit for, this is a different format than what we did. Because to Sean's earlier point and others, like we weren't getting a newborn, we were getting like a teenager and we had barely, you know, we were, We were dealing with something that was really well baked and it was something that we had to really fight just to bend it a little bit. When we start West Medford, I am not going back to that disaster. I am tossing it out the window and we start fresh because that has to be the way we do this, I think.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right, so the old RFP literally said, we just finished, and remember that we wrote that RFP in 2024, six months after, like, or four months after we adopted the comprehensive plan, right? So it was very fresh. And we wrote the RFP and literally said, the city just adopted a comprehensive plan, a new climate action plan, and a new housing production plan. use these to help draft us zoning, and we'll want to have public hearings, but we don't want to rehash everything. And what we're sort of feeling like is that we went too far on that pendulum. And so some of what you said about putting in more public meetings and stuff like that was stuff we had discussed in a meeting, and to his credit, Councilor Leming actually took most all the bullets that I gave in one of our organizing meetings and wrote it all out into draft language in the RFP. So he's actually already pulled some of that apart. And some of the, we did an RFP for communications consultants where we wrote up a lot of like really better communications, translating this into English for the public, because we didn't say in our former RFP, we want you to take this and make it super clear so all the members of the public understand. That wasn't one of the tasks in there. And I think there had been some assumptions that that would just naturally happen by the planning staff or the city's communications staff or somebody. But clearly, us taking that and putting it in this very simple language was not something we were able to do. So this other RFP went out asking for that. And we have five proposals from communications consultants to do that.

[Page Buldini]: Not to bring up Wellington, I promise I want to stay on the schedule, but I do really appreciate, I'm blanking on the consultants that came and talked to us, but myself and my daughter got to see essentially the charrette of Wellington twice, one at the senior center by the PD office, And then one in the city chambers and that was really helpful to be able to really envision what I wanted, and I know it's Wellington but just think of any square what it was, but um, that was really really helpful to say like a walking path or traffic or building height, and it was a physical game it was like a monopoly game, Doug it looks similar to like what you have.

But um that I think that public engagement and I know it takes time and that's a consultant and I'm not trying to add more work, but I think to speak to what everybody is saying that was really helpful and it was engaging so yeah okay.

[Chair Doug Carr]: All right, well, I feel like, again, there's consensus here. We're building on Medford Square, but we're gonna start with the public and start with the comprehensive plan. It sounds like that's where everyone wants to go, and I think it's a great approach. And so people won't feel it's, they feel like they need buy-in from the early beginning. And I think Boston had to happen so fast, I think people blinked and it was done. And that was tough.

So, all right, moving on to a couple of other things, and just in terms of, I think we did talk, obviously, about getting stuff a full week in advance as a hard and fast rule for anything that's coming before us. I think that is, I think pretty unanimous. John Anderson, you also mentioned that in your comments about the one-week lead time. John also mentioned a couple of other things which I'll briefly go forward and I'll share my screen again so you can kind of see this. Let's see.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah, so the other ones mentioned was that all public presentation, PowerPoint, et cetera, be posted. I'm saying immediately after the meeting, certainly within 24 hours, if it could be, I think that is something that hasn't been happened consistently. We don't often see all those PowerPoints and diagrams and. It's sometimes tough to chase those down. The zoning maps, I think, got better over the course of this year in terms of their clarity and some of the diagrams that we got.

John also mentioned trying to limit the meeting time. to two and a half hours, which I think is challenging, you know, based on our jenison time. I think that's tough. And John, when I'm done running through this, obviously, I want you to speak on these are your specific comments. You know, trying to move the public hearings closer to the start of the meeting and john recommended within the 1st 30 minutes. I think I think that intent is good. Like tonight. It was the 1st thing we talked about. So I think that is good. And we also talked about just, you know, more updates for the city council. That's part of the larger conversation that we. We just had actually so. John, why don't you unmute yourself and maybe you can talk about a couple of those. A couple of those, we call that norms. They're not really rules, but just the way we do things.

[John Anderson]: Sure. I'll settle for three hours. Really, there reaches a point of diminishing returns. I think, anyway. The thing also with the PowerPoints, they're usually done in conjunction with a live presentation. And there is no real opportunity to ask questions during the presentation. The presentation would probably go on forever if we had lots of live questions. But I would like to see the presenters' comments included in the digital version of the PowerPoint, so we can review what the person told us. Do you follow me? Yep. Okay.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: I don't think that's possible. They don't, they're not recording comments.

[John Anderson]: I will know but but I prepared PowerPoint presentations and given them as the author, you have the opportunity to add. on one side of each slide, what you plan on saying when you present it to the audience.

[Chair Doug Carr]: But they don't all do that. A lot of people improvise and they're quite good at it. And Dean, I'll get to you in a second.

[John Anderson]: I didn't find that to be that effective because they're covering many, many topics very, very quickly.

[John Anderson]: So if you're not going well, It's for me, it just wasn't working to have a 30, 40 minute PowerPoint presentation and then boom, it's gone.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Yeah. I want to see it as well. I don't disagree with that. But the recording is probably the only thing that will get you the 100% detail, because they're not reading a script almost ever from my experience. There's a lot of improvisation. They have an outline. But I get your point. You want more information. That's the critical thing.

[John Anderson]: What I was told to do when I was working on presentations like this was not to try to put down every word you were going to say. But what are the key points that you want to emphasize? Beyond just slides where you normally just have three or four bullet points, the stuff you want to make sure you remember to weave in there, it's equally important. I was really glad to see that there are already rules in place about the lead time to review submissions from the council.

I'd like to see some sort of briefing from time to time on progress from the Planning and Permitting Committee. I mean, I'm sort of imagining that when you start out with a new project, there's specific problems that need to be addressed in the area. You know, for example, Tufts Institutional Zoning. How much can we really do there given the, what's it, the Dover Amendment restricts what sort of limitations we can build into the zoning. So what's going to work and what's not going to work?

What are the major issues for the particular area that's under discussion and what are the alternatives for dealing with it? Instead, we're just presented with solutions and we don't even know necessarily what the problem is that they were trying to solve. So this really goes back to some of the things you were saying, that we really need to be more intimately involved in the process.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Can we pause here for a second just to what Dina has for, it's been two hours now. We want a five minute bio break so everyone can just stretch their legs and try to have dinner and do whatever they need to. So why don't we just pause here and come back, and Danielle, you can take it from there. Thank you, Dina, for reminding me.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: I made it to my desk with 15 seconds to spare. And I chatted with Paige in the hallway.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Is that really the default? That's the default. Oh, did it play the sound? I didn't hear. Yes.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: It didn't play it on my computer. Weird. It is the default.

[Chair Doug Carr]: All right. Alicia, I'm sorry, Danielle, why don't you go ahead? You had your hand raised when we left.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, so I had a couple of questions. So the week in advance, the email that I had from John was talking about PDS getting the stuff in advance. Were you saying that the board wants all the materials a week in advance? Because then that would mean packets on Wednesdays, not Friday packets? Because I thought the email that I was going back and forth with John was still packets on Fridays. But we've had more time to look at it.

[John Anderson]: That's correct. I had suggested that they should get materials to you by a week before the meeting, and you get it to us the Friday before the meeting. But I mean, it's whatever time you need. I figured two days was a lot more than you have right now, so.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah. That's why I was like, we'd be getting things on Friday. I hadn't had a chance to look at it. I'm just like to blindly send things, but you know what, sometimes we have to. We're like, I didn't look at this, you know. Hopefully, if the cadence and just the pace of these amendments, at least if we're talking about zoning, if the requests to turn things around aren't crazy, then hopefully we would be able to get things more in advance, but it's when we were having these like meetings like back to back where it was like they can't turn it around, you know?

[John Anderson]: Yeah, and I have more sympathy for developers for whom, you know, they have real deadlines. They need to raise money and get started. I have more sympathy for them than I do for people who are just trying to meet a deadline.

[Chair Doug Carr]: But I don't think we're talking about zoning. I think we're talking about any submission. I don't think it's purely zoning, right? And whether it's a new building or whatever. But I thought, maybe I misread the last meeting, but I thought this board wanted to see things a week in advance, so they had a full week to digest what could be a couple hundred pages of text, depending on what it is. Some of these, like think of what came with the Tufts Aquatic Center, you have traffic studies, you've got, you know, civil drawings, you know, like I think when it comes Friday and people are just having the weekend, they really, if they're away, they're spending only a couple of days and it's really crammed. I was, I guess I was thinking it was going to the board a week in advance, but tell me if I'm wrong on that. That's fine with me, Doug.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: We'd have to amend or change all of our timelines then. I mean, I'm fine, but packet days on Fridays are, not ideal, but the 1230. Right. Um, cause I can't get anything posted. Like if I send it at 1230, like it's not getting posted. I can't get in the clerk's office. Like it's just, you know, yeah.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Well, what, what do other people on the board think about when they need to see materials for zoning or just our regular operational stuff? What do people think they need?

[Ari Fishman]: I need at least three full. Oh, sorry, Dina. You actually raised your hand. You should go. Oh, no problem.

[Ari Fishman]: I need at least three full reasonable days. I think it sounds like Friday specifically are like administrative burden to for Danielle. So I feel like at a minimum, we should move it to Thursday. And if Wednesday is shared with agreement, like, We can tell people that the developers and applicants, that's what they need to do. And if we can communicate that, that feels fine. I also feel okay with Thursday. If for some reason people prefer that, but.

[Dina Caloggero]: I think it, I think it depends on the day on how much stuff right? Are there a number of site proposals? If it's 1. For Friday is fine on Monday. It's fine. You're looking at 1, but when you're looking at a site proposal, and then you're looking at a 100 page document proposal on zoning, it's way too much to digest. We all have jobs and weekends are our weekends and. It's very, we just need some additional time to do it. So, I think size matters in this case and and how much we're expected to look at as part of the meeting.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: So, for a big site plan review project or anything, that's a public hearing the materials that came in. Do get posted 2 weeks in advance, like on. The CDB filings like that's. You know, the law that they have to be available. So. If I could build in a way to give you a heads up. These are here, like, if you want to read a stormwater report. Like, this, like, because we get things and then. Yeah, so we actually, we get things even earlier than the 2 weeks. Because things get go through site plan review and get reviewed by the staff, but. There's usually a lot of changes that happen in there and so we don't necessarily want you to see.

Something that isn't, you know, kind of final for you all. Because then you're reviewing it twice, but I think at least once we've advertised it and we have like a final. You know, plans that. have been accepted are going to you. I just I'd have to, I'll just build it into some kind of procedure where I get to materials like when we have them. But you know, no analysis, no comments. But you can start to look at it. So it's not completely blindsiding you.

[Sean Beagan]: Yeah, I think what Danielle said as to the site plans that are coming in, I think that would work fine if she just alerted us that, hey, the proposal for such and such address is there now if you want to see it. I think that's great. On the zoning, particularly, was my concern, Doug, when we were talking about a week's lead time. I don't want to get a full draft of new zoning. And I feel like sometimes on Boston Ave, we were getting revised drafts like day of the meeting. Or maybe I'm wrong. But there was still revised drafts coming in very late.

just this exercise we did tonight where we went through the development incentive bonuses, I know I read that whole table when we did Medford Square. And there was still probably, as we, there was still three or four things that should have been changed and should have been identified that we identified tonight that if we had all had, you know, extra day, extra two days to really read it and think about it, maybe we would have identified it at the time, you know, instead of having to go back and amend so much now. So I would like to get, I would like to, you know, consider or, you know, a rule or at least letting city council know we want a week's lead time. And if we can't do it, then we're going to reserve our right not to vote on, you know, a, uh, uh,

What's in front of us, you know, just so they have a heads up that, you know, we got this yesterday. We're not voting on it.

[Page Buldini]: I think it's really awesome. And we're all kind of saying the same thing. So this is great for our board. Thank you, Sean, Dina, and Ari, and John and Doug. Danielle and Alicia, is it something that the CD board can help do not to change your processes, but our procedures, but that we do look at how you receive your information and I don't know, I don't, not to tell you guys what you're doing or how to do it, but it sounds like if there is something that we do say, we will not look at it a week, we need a week, or is that something that we could do as a city board to help support your office as well?

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Let Danielle think for a minute, but part of what I just, I feel like what, it's important to separate the zoning type stuff from the site plan review. And I think it's also important to sort of separate out things like an A&R, which really those are legally formalities and you don't need to study those. Like there's very, there are these very simple tests and they meet them or they not. And you want to know about the project that's great, but really, you know, you should in theory, it's going to be extraordinarily rare that we're putting one in front of you that isn't a legal obligation to just say yes to. And in fact, some boards actually, there are some zonings where they delegate a lot of those to the administrative approval for A&Rs.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Right. And I think with the A&Rs that we're legally required to place it on the next available meeting, which is Whichever like 48 hours in advance, as long as it can get on the agenda 48 hours in advance, you have to hear it. Right.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: Right. So I want to sort of separate that as those are different from site plan review and if we should get another subdivision review, which I don't anticipate, but I didn't anticipate the last one either. Those are big and long. And I think that I'm just, I feel like I'm just gonna restate something that Danielle said. There are a lot of those materials that we can make available to you. And I would say even like a week or two, two weeks in advance easily. The department head comments is like pulling teeth to get those out. So, and it might be that you seeing the bulk of it in advance with the department head comments later is acceptable. Um, sometimes the department head comments result in a back and forth with the developer where they actually show up at the meeting and they say, I read those comments too. And here's what I'm changing on the plans. In response to those comments. And sometimes that meeting is the first time that Danielle and I are hearing those changes because they made a formal submission four or five weeks earlier. Um,

And they could also show up and say, I don't plan to change anything, right? So we like it when they change in response to department head comments. So just sort of like understanding the differences there that like, well, we could give you these easily three weeks, four weeks in advance, right? The comments we would start putting there when they're available, we tell the department heads that they're due a week before your meeting. that doesn't mean that the days before the meeting, we're not saying like it was a legally advertised public hearing and we're still pulling at, I'm not gonna name names, but some of them to give us their comments.

So there's sort of that balance. And I think to respect the idea that some members of the board want to see everything in advance, And some members may not actually read through everything in advance, and they prefer to have it presented to them and explained to them. I am really bad at reading site plans, and I actually prefer to have the developer walk me through it and watch for it. You know, it's different people with different skill sets.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: Yeah, and I just want to add, if it's complicated, you should not, I would never expect something like the aquatic center to go through in one meeting. The first meeting is basically presenting it, getting your bearings on the project, hearing comments, and then you can really dig into it. You could just do a cursory, familiarize it with it as much as you can, but I don't feel like that first meeting you need to be like, ready to vote and know what all the conditions you want to add. No, that's why it takes more than one meeting.

[Chair Doug Carr]: We've never gotten through a project in one meeting that I can recall, so I don't disagree with you at all. It's it's just trying to get a more rational flow. And I think, you know, when you post stuff because you have to on a Saturday morning, you know, because you don't want to do that. You don't want to take your weekends, obviously, and do that. If we could back that into Thursday somehow by giving you a little bit more breathing room to read and post and be able to leave at noon on Friday, knowing it's done. Like, I think it's just, like, I feel like you get pulled so many times and put in an unfair position because people get stuff to wait for you. So if we can just maybe move back the deadline a little bit to give you more breathing time and your staff more time, I think that would, That alone would be an improvement.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: And then I wanted to sort of just touch on the zoning piece. So one of the things that I found is that some people work really well sitting quietly with the document and reviewing it themselves and redlining it, right? And other people work better discussing it in a group and understanding it. And I'm that kind of person, which is why, for one thing, Danielle and I are going to work tomorrow. I worked with Emily on Monday on the zoning with Danielle. So it may be that it would make sense to do more, plan to do more working sessions. As we read through that table, that table that I've looked at a million times, because I was reading it out loud to you all and we were discussing it, I was going, oh, I'm seeing things I hadn't processed before. And so there might even be an option if there are people who want to do like a like a working session that isn't that's not even a full board to read through some of these together and work through them together, that that is helpful for some people. And other people just want the slides that the consultant is presenting to them, right? Like, I feel like some of the city council has been super in the weeds on this and others have said, I trust my colleagues, I trust the CD board, I want it presented to me by a consultant, I wanna understand it, but I don't need to read every word because I have to have trust and everybody can't be in every weed. And so I just also wanna sort of put that out there if that, works better for some people or others. I know I personally prefer to sit with the document with other people in the room to have the conversation or in a Zoom room. So that's an option.

[Chair Doug Carr]: All right, I think we've kind of beaten this one out in a positive way. I think you understand the general direction we're trying to get here to try to get a little bit more time. I like the idea of an early look, even if it's not a complete one. which I know has been true for a while, but I don't think a lot of us have taken advantage of it. But I would certainly love to look at a couple of site plans and elevations a couple weeks in advance, even if they got to tweak it in that time, just to get my head around the project, you know, figure out where it is, what it is, and what the intent is.

All right, well, why don't we close out this portion? What we have left, the next one is zoning project timeline and admin updates, but I feel like we've just covered that. So I don't think we need to rehash any of that, because you guys have given us all that. I think all we have left is minutes, is that correct? Unless, Danielle, there's something we missed on an admin side that you need to update us on.

[Chair Doug Carr]: All right, then I'll move on to meeting minutes and entertain a motion to approve the meeting minutes. Yep, so moved. Too moved or one second?

[Chair Doug Carr]: All right, thank you, Dina. You broke the log, Jim. Join in. Yes. Sean Began. Yes. Page Buldini.

[Chair Doug Carr]: And Ari Kaufman-Fishman. Yes. And myself, yes. Motion passes, nothing. Go ahead, Alicia, before we wrap up.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: One quick administrative note, it's actually for our office. We are gonna be hiring a new head clerk. If you know anybody, I would describe the role as an office manager, but that is not the legally assigned title. If you know anybody who'd make a great office manager for a very busy office that manages a lot of funds and money in the city, that job will be posted in the next week, hopefully within the week.

[Director Alicia Hunt]: No, Laurel is the CDBG manager. That's what we're interviewing for. She's the city clerk. Our head clerk has been Lauren Carpenito. And she's been magnificent, wonderful. And she's leaving us for a much higher paying job. Of course.

[Chair Doug Carr]: All right, I think we did well. Motion to adjourn. So moved. Thank you, John. Second, anyone? Yeah, second. Thank you, Sean.

[Chair Doug Carr]: I got from Fishman. Yes, and myself to thank you all. We'll see you in 3 weeks. We'll have zoning well before then and it'll be. We'll be ready to go.

[Dina Caloggero]: Okay. I just want to write on my calendar. Okay. The week before Labor Day.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Right, it's before wave day. Wave day is late this week, this year.

[Sean Beagan]: And we're going to have on that agenda is going to be Boston Ave. Yeah. And do we expect anything else? Any like site plans or anything like that?

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: We have a special permit for a second single family on a lot. Okay, CBA granted a variance for that. It's on Lincoln Street or road road, whichever one's in Lawrence States.

[Senior Planner Danielle Evans]: And I feel like there was one more thing. Oh, we're going to have to put a public hearing a perfunctory public hearing to delete a section of the ordinance because it's being basically replaced by the vacant storefronts or vacant building ordinance. So there's something in zoning that needs to be deleted, because there's going to be a general ordinance that will handle it. But zoning, you guys have to technically recommend to delete it.

[Chair Doug Carr]: Sounds good. All right, we'll try to limit to three hours, John, for your... Cheers, thank you all.

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