The Belmont Planning Board has been saying one thing and doing another in its Form Based Zoning Code for the Center. It ignores both repeatedly expressed community wishes and concerns, and its own stated promises about being “sensitive” to the context, scale, neighbors and businesses in Belmont Center.
Instead, the actual zoning bylaw posted by the town is a shocking invitation to real estate developers to a free-for-all in Belmont Center:
1. No building footprint limits are established! Even 3A zoning did that!
2. Highest impacts on allowed buildings are hidden.
3. Maximum Heights enlarged with “bonus stories”.
4. Further height buildups of towers/roof structures are allowed in the small print.
5. Deceptively calls full stories “half stories”… .
6. Packed with problematic images – see below – which don’t accurately represent what can be built.
If you really want to know what they’re doing, spend 20 mins on Town Meeting Member Doug Koplow’s careful review and superb analysis, from which this material is borrowed, a document publicly available here:
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AjsbE6z69oxHhcJabJVbQ2t223IwtQ?e=JwHJ7E
The Belmont Planning Board Chair has been pushing this Center overlay zoning project forward at breakneck speed. So is Elizabeth Dionne, chair of the select Board, who is effectively running Taylor Yates’ campaign for the open Select Board seat, election on April 1.
Together, they insist this project will grow the town’s commercial tax base – while simultaneously ignoring and REFUSING TO ANSWER all requests for crucial data on COSTS, such as proportion of residential to commercial, actual numbers of tax revenue to be generated AFTER costs, infrastructure costs, traffic and parking impacts, and costs to schools of 200 more children living in 100 new apartments, and being driven in at least 100 new cars into the Center every day?
The Planning Board Chair and Select Board Chair are highly intelligent people. They know what good planning is, with due diligence. They know that once in a generation change can cause huge negative downstream impacts. They know they are pushing a massive buildup that will have little ground floor commercial space, topped with tons of residential – hundreds of new condos and apartments.
The deceptions in this zoning bylaw, in Taylor’s statements to the public which are the opposite of what’s in the actual zoning are the mark of a Planning Board Chair in a tearing hurry. His mantra seems to be “get it done – and damn the consequences!”.
Consequences we in this town who care about the Center will live with – forever.
———