The Community Development Board
I’ve been making my way through The Power Broker on Audible for a few months now. It’s a long, detailed biography of Robert Moses, a city planner who was probably the single most powerful person in the history of New York City despite never holding any elected office. It contains lengthy descriptions about the use of public funds and regional boards to circumvent or bend the will of elected officials, and much of the book is dedicated to explaining how this municipal clockwork operated. So I’ve been pretty interested lately in these boards, who appoints who, and their relationships with elected officials. And, today, I’m going to talk a little about Medford’s Community Development Board.
Medford’s Community Development Board is pretty central to our ongoing citywide rezoning process, which has kind of gone off the rails recently with questions about whether the consultants working on this would have their contracts renewed to continue work on it. Rezoning has also generally become a political lightning rod with election season rolling around. The CD Board is a group of volunteers that normally do the important-and-innocuous civic duty of site plan review — making sure architectural plans for proposed new developments are up to snuff with local, state, and federal regulations. Since June, the CD Board has been thrown into the middle of an increasingly public and politicized rezoning process.
To change zoning, as I’ve written very recently, City Council refers proposals to the Community Development Board (which is our version of the Planning Board, as the state defines it), which holds a public hearing and refers them back to the City Council with recommendations that the Council may choose to accept or reject. Then Council requires a two-thirds vote to pass it. By default, M.G.L. requires that members of the planning board be nominated by the Mayor and approved by the City Council.
But Medford is different in a small-but-important way. In Medford, the Mayor has sole appointing authority over CD Board members. Why? Medford used to have a City Manager appointed by the City Council, not a Mayor. Our Office of Community Development was founded in 1974 by a special act of the legislature, which specified, at the time, that the City Manager got to appoint members to the planning board without Council confirmation. This was fine because the City Manager reported to Council, so the system had more checks and balances. But, for some reason, when Medford switched from Plan E to Plan A and got a Mayor in 1986, the revised charter decided to continue letting the chief executive of the city have sole appointing authority over municipal boards.
I don’t like this. As a general rule, without confirmation by a legislative body, members of appointed boards tend to feel more beholden to the individuals who appoint them (in this case, the Mayor). It’s fine for purely advisory bodies to individuals, but not bodies from which expert and impartial feedback is expected. The President of the US cannot easily remove the Chairman of the Federal Reserve because they were confirmed by the Senate, but they can easily remove their own advisors. There’s a reason that M.G.L. specifies that members of the planning board ought to be confirmed by the City Council — it lends more independence to a non-elected body — and the fact that Medford’s doesn’t is not a well-reasoned decision so much as an artifact left over from previous systems of government. Furthermore, one person unilaterally deciding the overall composition of a board can be a problem. In my experience, this became an issue with a few individuals on the Charter Study Committee earlier in 2025, which I wrote about previously. This exchange between the City Council and the Mayor, which wasn’t widely viewed, was probably the most substantive public insight into the Mayor’s philosophy in composing the Charter Study Committee (she stated that she wanted a committee that was balanced in its political ideologies, though I personally disagree with this approach because Medford had around a 3:1 ratio of Harris to Trump voters in the last election).
Can the CD Board make changes to zoning? No, they make recommendations, which Council may or may not choose to accept. But — and this is the point that irks me — preventing any rezoning from happening is one thing the CD Board can, technically, do. While M.G.L. points out that planning boards have to hold a public hearing, it doesn’t specify how long that public hearing ought to take, so it can just go on indefinitely. And, given the Mayor’s outsized influence on the CD Board, they’re more inclined to do that. In June, the Mayor sent a letter to the chair of the CD Board that explicitly requested that the residential rezoning be pushed to the Fall, which they did, and she even commented at length on their July 9th meeting on the residential rezoning proposal, which further detracts from whatever independence they’re supposed to have. At the CD Board’s most recent meeting, which followed a public exchange between the City Council president’s proposal on a path forward and the Mayor’s response, the timelines they committed to in June got derailed.
What I would like to see out of the Community Development Board
At the last CD Board meeting, one member expressed a thought that I agreed with: it was unclear who was actually accountable for the work. I took this generally to mean that the CD Board was unclear about their role in the rezoning process, and I don’t blame them, because the guidance has often been unclear. I’ve noticed, at the last few meetings, that they’ve tended to discuss, at length, the rezoning process rather than the content of the proposals themselves, especially after June. To be fair, this is what’s on their minds — the CD Board is a group of volunteers, and I think they’ve been unfairly thrown into an increasingly politicized process. And, to boot, many of the members are new and still need time to orient themselves to the role. So, for my part, as one elected official, I thought I’d make it clear what I personally want to see:
More meeting pre-planning. Understanding open meeting law is important for anybody sitting on a board. Residents have generally demanded more clarity from the CD Board, but at their last meeting, the outgoing chair said that members cannot deliberate with each other outside of meetings due to open meeting law, so all the discussions need to happen in the board meeting itself. This made the meetings feel a little unmoored, since members kept debating what the board should do and their own issues with the process, rather than the actual rezoning proposals.
It's true that open meeting law limits communication between members outside meetings, but it does not mean that individuals on the board cannot speak to each other at all on board matters. It just means that a quorum cannot. I think the chair should feel free to talk with one other member of the board, as well as the planning staff, outside of meetings, just to have a sense of what they want to bring to the table beforehand. This would keep with the spirit of open meeting law and prevent the meetings from feeling directionless.Stick to the role specified under state law. Mass General Law says the following about the planning board’s obligations when it comes to zoning changes: “No zoning ordinance or by-law or amendment thereto shall be adopted until after the planning board in a city or town, and the city council or a committee designated or appointed for the purpose by said council has each held a public hearing thereon, together or separately, at which interested persons shall be given an opportunity to be heard.” So, the planning board’s job is to hold a public hearing. They then close the public hearing. They then develop recommendations based on said public hearings and refer their recommendations to the City Council. City Council then holds its own public hearings. It then votes on the zoning and whether or not to accept or reject the CD Board’s recommendations.
I’m bringing this up because, again, the CD Board’s meetings are increasingly focused on the rezoning process rather than the content of the proposals. The last meeting contained a lengthy discussion about how more outreach needed to be done. I agree with this, and more outreach is a perfectly fine request for the CD Board to make. But it’s not their job to execute an outreach campaign because that costs money, and the CD Board has no money. It’s the Mayor’s job to allocate funds so that consultants and staff can have the resources to carry out more outreach. Somerville spent the money to print some very nice palm cards advertising their public outreach sessions. (By the way, outside all the public meetings, Medford’s had six of these sessions, five of which are on Youtube.) I would like to see Medford spend the money on similar materials to increase outreach. But if the Mayor refuses to allocate funds, the CD Board still needs to run public hearings and make recommendations on the content of the proposals in a timely manner.
(State law also gives the option of having a joint public hearing between City Council and the CD Board. A CD Board member floated that very idea by me in a one-on-one conversation a few weeks ago. I thoroughly rejected the idea at the time, but given the unique disconnect between the two bodies in Medford and the fact that other municipalities have done this often, I’m warming up to it.)Propose a specific timeline and stick with it. I can deal with delays and slowdowns. I’m fine with that. Do residents need more time to learn about zoning? Do we need more time to hash it out? That’s more than fine. But indefinite delays, caused by never closing public hearings, without any specific dates for when to take up a given proposal, are not acceptable. That’s the outcome I want the least, and pushing the process for months and months without any clear and specific idea of what you want to get out of those delays is not a good way of doing business. The CD Board cannot get into the habit of setting a timeline at one meeting and then throwing it out the next, without any proposed replacement.
Anyhow, for all that criticism, my last departing thought is that I have nothing but appreciation for those who volunteer to undertake the important — and, at this point in time, particularly challenging — civic duty of serving on municipal boards.
