Internals of the rezoning initiative
Rezoning requires a lot of meetings. The City Council has its own Planning and Permitting Committee meetings to come up with initial drafts of rezoning proposals. These are then voted on in the full Council and referred to the Community Development Board, which offers recommendations on these proposals and sends them back to Council, which must hold another meeting to decide whether to accept those recommendations or not (this process is mandated by Mass General Law). Outside of this process, the City hosts public information sessions. As covered recently in the Tufts Daily, we’re trying to consolidate meetings a little by having joint City Council/Community Development Board hearings.
And that’s only the public meetings that everyone can attend. Last term, the rezoning initiative was planned by an internal working group. Having the working group is important because you need to be able to go over slides, discuss procedural concerns, and have informal conversations about next steps before presenting them to the public. This group consisted of a few consultants, senior planners, and Councilors, who planned out the meetings and presentations of zoning initiatives at Council meetings. I wasn’t really privy to what was happening at those meetings, because of open meeting law; two members of the five-person Planning and Permitting Committee of City Council (the Chair and the Council President) were already members, so I wasn’t able to participate.
Following the renewal of the zoning consultants’ contracts and my appointment as Chair of the Planning and Permitting Committee, I reorganized the internal working group and renewed meetings on the topic. Now, I can speak a little more intelligently to it. Right now, it meets every two weeks, and the working group consists of the Mayor, three members of City Council (myself, the Council President, and one Councilor not on the Planning and Permitting Committee), two senior staff planners, two representatives from Innes Land Group, two members of the Community Development Board (including the Chair), the Building Commissioner, the Director of Communications, and the Chief of Staff.
There are two important changes this term: first, I expanded the group to involve members of the Community Development Board. Second, meeting minutes are taken and subsequently forwarded to members of both the City Council and the Community Development Board, which allows voting members to know what was discussed at meetings without violating Open Meeting Law. I implemented these steps to ensure that neither body is operating in an information vacuum and, along with the Joint meetings, establishes a more collaborative relationship between the Council and the CDB, which was a hindrance last term.
What is discussed at these meetings? Procedural stuff, mostly — what will be presented at certain meetings, schedules, opinions on what should happen when, how zoning meetings are advertised. I spent a lot of last week on a Google document trying to map out when specific meetings would happen for the next six months. That should come up at the next joint meeting on February 25th.
