Zoning: Progress on Medford Square and plans to start Boston Ave/Tufts

At the March 25th Joint hearing between the City Council and the Community Development Board to consider zoning changes to Medford Square, Innes Land Strategies Group submitted to City Council a list of concrete updates to the proposed rezoning that City Council submitted in December, which was a rewrite of the same joint Medford Square/West Medford Square zoning that City Council submitted to the Community Development Board May of last year. There’s a pretty long list of edits in the memo; the most important changes emerging from this process were increased incentives to protect historic properties and some updates to parking regulations. During the March 25th joint hearing, members of the CDB committed to referring out this draft during an April 15th meeting after Innes made a few minor edits they requested, after which the plan is to have a final vote in a regular City Council meeting on April 28th.

Meetings to date

This year, we’ve had three joint meetings between the City Council and Community Development Board and two public information sessions on Medford Square; next month, one more meeting (on the 31st, below) is planned, in addition to the CDB’s own meeting on the 15th of April. This adds on to the public information session and the other meetings from last year. The January session was essentially a reintroduction to Medford Square for the two bodies, the February session was dedicated to receiving feedback from the CDB, and the March session was where Innes presented concrete recommendations.

We’ve been seeing dwindling public participation in these the more meetings we have, so it’s fair to say that public comment has been pretty exhausted by now, and a recurring sentiment I hear from many that do speak is that they just want to get it done. Luckily, I think we’re pretty close to the finish line here.

Transom

The joint meeting on March 31st was scheduled to consider a special district to allow Transom Real Estate to begin building in the lots of City Hall. They could theoretically start doing this once the Medford Square zoning is passed on April 28th, but this process has been pretty lengthy, so what’s emerged is a parallel process to get the parcels near City Hall updated so that building can start ASAP. They were first awarded the RFP almost a year ago, and Transom has been rightfully frustrated with the delays in this process.

Schedule Update

The timeline that City Council and the Community Development Board agreed upon at the March 3rd joint public hearing had to be updated, and the internal working group agreed on a proposed one that’s now in the agenda packet for the 31st of March.

Regular CC and CDB meetings are included as well, and not all are related to zoning

The version that was agreed upon at the March 3rd meeting had to be updated because (1) we scheduled committee meetings during passover; (2) some of the proposed meetings overlapped with CDB’s regular bimonthly schedule; (3) the consultants needed sufficient time to get drafts for Boston Ave ready.

Boston Ave and Tufts Institutional Zoning

The next line on the agenda, according to the agreement between the Mayor and the City Council, is Tufts Institutional Zoning and Boston Ave. We already have drafts of these in Council agendas from last year, so plenty of work has been done, but I still edited the meeting schedule to allow more time to work on these in City Council Planning and Permitting Committee meetings and have three joint meetings with the CDB, plus sufficient leeway after to approve in a final meeting before Innes’ contract expires on June 30th. Boston Ave will be worked on — almost as a refresher of work from last year — and representatives from Tufts requested to meet with the zoning working group internally before further drafts of the Tufts Institutional Zone were released publicly, and that meeting will occur April 9th.