The November 4th Planning Board meeting was a disaster. They failed to make a recommendation to the Special Town Meeting (STM) concerning the MBTA Community Zoning. Instead, they are submitting two flawed options for consideration by the STM.
If the Planning Board cannot get a majority of their own members to support an option, how should they expect a majority of Town Meeting voters to support it? Both options would harm the Town and increase your taxes. The only logical vote is to take no action.
The details of the zoning requirements were not well-thought-out. For example, the parking requirement of a maximum of 1.25 car parking spaces per unit is unreasonable. Hopkinton does not have the public transportation infrastructure to make that work, and you cannot walk or bike to food stores and other shops from the overlay locations.
Most Hopkinton couples have two cars and our downtown does not have enough on-street parking. Where will visitors park when they visit their friends? The floor of Town Meeting is not the best place to fix all these details by offering amendments.
If you live in the Indian Brook condos and think you dodged a bullet, think again. The zoning districts can be amended at STM to include you.
If you want the MBTA community zoning never to be built, locating it on existing expensive condos is the best place, as the existing condos are not economical for a developer, and any developer will have the added difficulty of buying from multiple owners.
Besides condos, some of our better commercial properties and other high-priced residential neighborhoods would not be economical for a developer to buy to turn into apartments. Adding this apartment overlay on vacant land or lower-value per acre land with buildings will lead to the development of new apartments, resulting in impacts on our schools and taxes.
The only good news from the meeting is that Planning Board Chair Rob Benson now understands the economics of building apartments. The Planning Board failed to hear the opposition at the last ATM, failed to draft an alternative workable zoning change, failed to win over the opposition, and failed to make a clear recommendation to the Special Town Meeting.
Vote no action on November 18th or NO to either of the two proposals as they currently are written.
Ken Weismantel
145 Ash Street
NIMBYs, heed the call!
Now is your time to act!
Thank you Ken for a thoughtful and factual discussion of the issues.
Regarding the proposed zoning overlay districts that will be presented at Special Town Meeting, I am puzzled as to why the Commonwealth would even accept either one as meeting the supposed aim of providing space for 750 units of housing.
Both proposed districts as well as the zoning regulations for the overlay districts seem meaningless.