Planning Board — 2021-03-08
Minutes
MELROSE PLANNING BOARD ZONING SUBCOMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES Meeting Monday, March 8, 2021 7:00 PM Remote Meeting PRESENT: Anne DeSouza-Ward, Paul King, John Sadowski, Greg Sampson & Jack Welch ABSENT: Sharon Petrillo STAFF PRESENT: Denise Gaffey, Director, Emma Battaglia, Senior Planner & Lori Massa, Planning Coordinator The meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Mr. Sampson. Pursuant to Governor Baker’s March 12, 2020 Order Suspending Certain Provisions of the Open Meeting Law, G.L. c. 30A, §18, and the Governor’s March 15, 2020 Order imposing strict limitations on the number of people that may gather in one place, this meeting of the Melrose Planning Board was conducted via remote participation to the greatest extent possible. Meeting access and the general guidelines for remote participation by members of the public and/or parties with a right and/or requirement to attend this meeting was found on the City of Melrose’s website, at www.cityofmelrose.org/remote-meetings. No in-person attendance of members of the public was permitted, but every effort was made to ensure that the public could adequately access the proceedings in real time. An audio or video recording, transcript, or other comprehensive record of proceedings was posted on the mmtv3.org website as soon as possible after the meeting. A link was also available on www.cityofmelrose.org. The Subcommittee met to review a revised version of the zoning amendment that allows for incentives in the BA districts and parking regulations again to incorporate comments and concerns raised by the Building Commissioner, comments from City Councilors following small group meetings that Ms. Gaffey had with each Councilor last month, consideration of the Housing Choice legislation, enacted by the state legislature and signed by the Governor in January and adjustments to the incentive provisions based on specific developments in the pipeline. The proposed changes to the amendment from the last version were highlighted in yellow and members discussed them in detail. The UR-D district was tied to the design review special permit which is no longer relevant. Since the multi-family use is already allowed in this district it is not going to be moved into Section 235-65 that allows for multifamily residential use in non-residentially zoned areas. Planning Board Zoning Subcommittee Meeting Minutes March 8, 2021 Page 2 of 2 The discretionary parking reduction for projects that are undergoing Site Plan Review will require a Special Permit for the reduction. The language of the Board’s consideration of this reduction was changed to explicitly state that proximity to public transportation is a consideration and that the Board is looking at the characteristics of the units, not the occupants, in making this determination. The Building Commissioner did not recommend using the clear width dimensions as they would be difficult to enforce. Without the clear width dimensions the aisle and driveway widths can be reorganized to be more clearly stated. The front yard parking restriction was also clarified. In looking at potential development sites it made sense to consider adding the incentives to the BA-1 to allow for increased FAR but not height. Also, the minimum open space may not be possible onsite with increased FAR but if approved the projects would meet the intent of the open space by providing usable open space for residents or pervious surfaces like green roofs. The Ward Councilor encouraged the Board to expand the proposed BA-1 district boundary at the intersection of Main Street and Emerson Street to Lebanon Street. The Subcommittee will discuss the proposed changes to the full Board in their meeting that follows this one. Documents: Draft Zoning Text and Map Amendment dated March 5, 2021 The meeting adjourned at 7:30 pm.
Transcript
▶ 0:01 Okay, this is a meeting of the Melrose Planning Board Zoning Subcommittee on Monday, March 8th, 2021. 7 PM, pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the Open Meeting Law, General Law, Chapter 30A, Section 18 in the Governor's March 15, 2020 order imposing strict limitation. On the number of people that may be gathered in one place, the meeting of the Melrose Planning Board conducted via remote participation to the greatest extent possible. Specific information in the general guidelines for more participation by members of the public or parties with the right or requirement to attend the meeting can be found in the City of Melrose website at cityofmelrose.org.
▶ 0:43 No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time. On the event that we are unable to do so, we post on ntv3.org website the audio video recording transcript or other comprehensive record of proceedings as soon as possible after the meeting a link will be available on the city of noros.org and then the link for access is uh meeting access information from the following link is available city morrow's.org remote dash meetings try to do that that was awesome fantastic so um great we do have a short amount of time We called the planning board meeting. We had continued the, well, we, we mentioned that we're going to have a special planning board meeting and schedule it for 730 tonight. So we did go ahead and do that.
▶ 1:39 But in the event that we don't get through everything here, we can always just pick up the conversation at the planning board meeting, because the planning board meeting, the sole purpose of the planning board meeting is to get this get final approval on the zoning amendment, which hopefully will happen this evening. Um, and the reason we had to come back is because a couple of things we. We had gotten, we got some comments from the building commissioner that didn't come in in a timely way. I'll just say so. But once we got them, we did want to. We thought they were worth considering, and we did have some, some modifications based. On his review, so that was 1 thing. Um. We also, um, we had a small group meetings with the counselors. This was something that, um.
▶ 2:25 Denise Gaffey: I met in the mayor met with the city councilors to just kind of give them an overview of this. So it wouldn't come as a surprise and we'll have a little background. And as part of that process, we got some comments back that we thought were worth considering. And there's also the housing choice legislation, which was recently enacted and signed into law by the governor with an emergency declaration. So that's all that took effect right away in January. And some. Some effects of that legislation that might. Kind of, um, change the way we present somewhat and we'll talk about that and then also just some further adjustments that we thought were worth considering based on some projects that we know are in the pipeline and these transit oriented locations.
▶ 3:13 So, those are sort of the reasons why we. Took another look at some of the provisions and what we sent to you on the other day are the market version. We still have the original approved version with all the modifications and zoning amendments underlying. But anything that is now highlighted in yellow are these further changes that we wanted to walk through. So, what do you think, Greg? Should we just go from the top? Yeah, I think so. Should we bring it up on the screen, Emma? It's the revision dated. March 5th, 2021, our easy 1. Finally perfect. Okay. Everyone can see that. All right. Great. All right. So, um. Why don't we, why don't we? Yeah, we'll skip. We'll talk about the maps map changes at the end.
▶ 4:25 This 1st, change striking out the, uh, reference is something that the building commissioner picked up on. Um, is actually allowed. This is this is a note that references our table of use and parking regulations. And it referred back to the zoning tool in section 235 dash 65, which allows for residential use and non residential zone districts. So, we'll see another reference to this in a few minutes later on, but. But in both places, we're actually going to strike the provision that allows for this use. This tool in the, because is already. A residential district, and it allows for multi family use. Um, and so this is a way redundant to reference it here and create some confusion. Um, it was always in, it was always in rezoning. That's why we carried it over. It was.
▶ 5:24 It was tied to the design review special permit. That's that is also that is, you know. Um, that was always needed in conjunction with this. The special permit, but it doesn't really make sense given that the allows for multifamily already. Does that make sense? So, we're proposing to strike it there. Um, and. Why have we highlighted this? A, 1, we're actually now talking about extending the incentives to be a 1 and B. A. 2. Oh, so I guess we should just highlight the whole. You want to be too? Um, okay. It's worth mentioning that there's no B. a. Talking to the building commissioner today, and he's like, we're, we had a little struggle around that, but it is reference. There is a B. a district shown on the T. I mean, the table refers to it as the B. a. and then I would need to be a 1. but.
▶ 6:24 There's technically no being disparate and so. Anyway, you will take that out. I don't know. Um, all right, moving on, so some of these are just very, these are some of these are housekeeping type things. Of course. We're going to move on to the next highlighted portion. Here we go. Great. Okay. And, um, yeah, this was something that. That Paul also pointed out, and we kind of agreed. We wanted to make it clear that we thought it was okay for parking to be allowed in the required front yard area. For 1 and 2 families loans right now, the provision in section 3rd name. At paragraph a states that there's no required off street parking. Space shall be located within the required for any district, except for 1 family drawings and then elsewhere in the zoning. It says.
▶ 7:25 there's that exemption isn't there so we're going to take care of that but um what we thought made sense here was to create a new paragraph in this section there's already a paragraph b so we were leaving a paragraph c and um because this is the section of the zoning that deals with parking location standards and we would say that parking should not be located within the quiet required front yard area except for one family and two families that make sense okay great so next section is section 40. um this is kind of interesting um because we've had this provision whoops well okay we've had this provision in our zoning um a couple for a little while now we created this this um parking reduction provision maybe as part of our um our rail station zoning
▶ 8:21 I think that was it, but it gave the planning board discretion to allow for parking reduction under, you know, upon review of all these different types of criteria through the site plan review process. So we had talked in the previous iteration about eliminating the limitation to the VA1 and the VA2 districts, but what Paul Johnson brought up and what the housing choice legislation actually kind of makes crystal clear is that this type of um discretionary uh parking reduction can only be done by the by special permit so we're just going to modify it and and um make that clear so that's what this language does um and then we've added a criteria it's ironic that one of the factors that the board should consider did not include proximity
▶ 9:24 to public transportation. I mean obviously that was always like one of the number one reasons why you would consider a party reduction but it wasn't clearly stated so I think one of our one of the members of the public pointed that out which was a good catch. So we add that in And we also modified the language in paragraph 2 to the characteristics of the residential or commercial units that create those parking demands. So we didn't want to specify household or affordable housing. We didn't want to call it attention or discriminatory or anything like that. We just wanted to make it this criteria based on the characteristics of those units. So that's just a refinement in the language. Any questions about that? No, good clean up. Okay. Yeah. Great. All right. Moving on.
▶ 10:33 Okay, so here we get to a few more provisions that the building commissioner asked for some tweaks to just because he's. He very much likes things to be black and white didn't didn't sit well with him to have language that spoke about here with. Remember, we talked about that at 1 of our previous meetings, and we came up with that idea. Of the, you know, 8 foot wide with 10 feet of clear with. But he preferred to have a just a solid number so. So, we were going to modify that to just say, make the driveway with for 1 way traffic. To be 10 feet and for 2 way traffic. To be 20 feet is there a. I'm sorry, I feel like the, um. Let's see the 2nd sentence is has something missing because it says the minimum driveway with for 2 way traffic.
▶ 11:32 For a residential residential mix uses 20 feet. And for you, oh, oh, okay. Sorry. No, you know, and I would also just, I think we'll just change that to say, and for all other uses. That's usually the language and Paul, Paul, are you good with this? Because you are. Particularly, you know, that's fine. He likes the black and white clarity of it. That's. That's good. Yeah, I appreciate it. It's not going to have that much of a bearing either way. Yeah, he probably gets stuck making some subjective calls enough that he's trying to. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and then, oh, man, I talked to him for a long time today about this next session and he's. I think he's looking to have it sort of separated out in a little bit. There's a little bit more clarity around 1 way or 2 way and residential and non residential. But.
▶ 12:33 I, I think we're going to, I don't think we would change this language for presentation at this point. And I think if we need to make any further modifications. Through the public hearing process, we might do that. Only because I think we want to just move on this and he didn't have time to get me. He didn't actually send me as he just called me and. Grab an hour of my time until I have enough already. You might want to know that the 3045 sixties are all 1 way. Those can't be too late. Ah, that's a good point. Okay. So that's maybe part of the confusion. So, we can take that out. Yeah, I could actually be that could be cleaned up. I think Paul, you're right. Because. But 90 is the only thing that applies to 2 way.
▶ 13:32 Right in parallel. Yeah. Yeah. Right and then I think he just wanted to say, um. Yeah, I guess for the 20 that we're talking about residential. Right or is that the intent to me? What was that Denise asking? Well, we are the cursor is right now is that that do we want to change that to further clarify that? That's residential since we're making a distinction with the 24 feet for a 2 day commercial. Am I not totally. Oh, I hadn't thought about that. Yeah, it just kind of begs the question. Um, but, but that was the intent was 20 feet for if it's a residential, right? Or for commercial. Right, I think we should be and then both. Yeah, we should be consistent with the language of Bob, which is.
▶ 14:49 You know, residential or residential used, and then all other uses is 24. Okay, so that clarifies it right? Greg? Yeah. 2 way residential is 20 feet. And 24 is all of there. Okay. We have had that nuance in there trying to get the driveway with to be narrower. That's that's why. It might seem awkward now, because we were trying to get those driveways to be as narrow as possible and the backup space still needed to be. You know, what it what it needs to be. Right. But that's why, you know, it was kind of divided out like that. So now maybe we can consolidate more if we need to just keep with the 10 and the 20 and the 24. Yeah, we may be able to present this in a simpler fashion. Yeah, that's right. Because we, we had to, we got into the nuance with the.
▶ 16:02 Clear with, yeah, that required a little more. Clarification, so I think we're all on the same page as far as if you guys are comfortable with us. Clarifying it, um, you know, after this meeting and just. Just to make it your, you can run it by Greg and just. But I, you know, I'm not sure we want to get hung up. Hang the whole thing up based on this since wasn't even our primary objective, but it's a good thing. I'm fine with that. It's all consistent now. It's just, I suppose it is a little bulky to look at all the rules like this. But makes sense. Yeah, and, um, well, before you leave that, Lori, I'll ask you this because Paul kind of caught me off guard and was like, why did we cross off aisle there and can we just leave that in there?
▶ 17:06 Well, that was his question. Yeah, he made that. I was going to say that wasn't his comment, right? Right. To move it back to driveway. So I thought that that's what he would prefer for it to say, was that enough parking space needs to access the driveway. I guess in semantics, you could call the aisle the driveway, you know. I guess that's kind of technically what you want to call it. Yeah, and I think, Laurie, that's right, that we looked at it and it seemed like aisle was encompassed in the definition of driveway, which is why we went. unless you have a unless you have a garage structure where you you do park you know you know you got hills that aren't near driveways you know a parking lot has aisles and you don't
▶ 18:01 access the driveway directly you go in the aisle you might drive down a few aisles and then get to a driveway you know i always thought a driveway and an aisle were kind of the same thing it's a a way you can drive through or an idly you can drive yeah like i said it's kind of semantics what you call it i think if you call it yes it is a a a driveway in a drive way i suppose if you put the accent on a different syllable yeah yeah you have the different connotation there but maybe if we have such a fine line you know between the definition yeah the i mean we can let's take a look at you know when we clean up the driveway aisle dimensions if if it we can just eliminate an aisle or something like that or we can leave it in there at this point
▶ 18:54 i was just trying to make it you know cleaner but yeah causing some more confusion so yeah i think it makes sense to say an aisle or a driveway i mean i it it has to it has to access either or no matter what you call them you know what i mean it's not wrong yeah at the risk of beating a dead horse is there a definition of either driveway or aisle in the zoning ordinance there he is there's a driveway definition of driveway but not of aisle so he wants to add the word aisle to the definition so by putting in the required you know above the minimum aisle widths required for driveway backing out parking spaces i think that that kind of gets to the point i you know well okay i'm looking at the definition it says an open space located on a
▶ 19:53 lot which is not more than 24 feet built for access to a garage or off-street parking or loading space that sounds like it covers everything yeah so roundabout yeah an open an oh it's called an open space on a lot built for access to off-street by it it's kind of a weird definition itself i wish i didn't read it that was a mistake i don't think it's going to be too confusing either way If it says Iowa driveway or just says driveway. All right, I got that confusing. Sounds good. Sounds good. Okay. Well, we'll clean that up a little bit for them as well. Here we cross out your idea. Okay. So the other, I guess more substantive change is. to modify the incentive program to allow for excuse in the ba1 district and the ba2 now we
▶ 21:18 had a lot of discussion about this earlier and i think we originally excluded this device from the ba1 which is our downtown area because we're we didn't think the additional like story is necessarily appropriate and i don't think we've moved from that position but i do think We didn't want to allow if you go down. Yeah, here we go. We did want to allow for some flexibility with the floor area. We just took a look at a lot of some of the parcels. In the BA 1, and in particular in the area that we're now. Going to be calling the BA 1, which is not, which is the BD. It's picked over down by Emerson and me. And it's pretty difficult to redevelop. Some of those parcels with a 2.0, um, so we thought we could, um.
▶ 22:12 We could allow for the planning board to have some discretion over for area ratio. In a 1 up to a maximum of 3.5. And then we still have that language in there. Bottom paragraph, which, you know, empowers the planning board to require. Some, you know, different types of treatment to control for bulk and massing. Well, that was that's that's the change there and then we also. Recognize that difficult even with a 5% open space provision, it can be difficult. For these sites that are have buildings on either side. To to allow for and create 5% open space on their property. So. We thought maybe there's other more creative ways of doing it and we added this division. Around open space to maybe eliminate.
▶ 23:15 Eliminated in lieu of providing areas for roof decks, falcons and more closets. And again, this is just, this would just be in the, um. I think this is just applied in the. Hey. Oh, no, sorry. And right now the base requirement and that in those districts is 5%. So it's already very small. But even so, it's pretty tricky to. Provide landscaping on the ground. Per se, so some of these sites don't have any, it's all building. So it's 100%. Site, you know, building on the site. But if you're able to replace this with some usable open space that wouldn't otherwise count. I feel like you're meeting or exceeding, you know, the benefit of the ordinance. So. Again, also to special permit by the planning board, right? Or they might be able to make the 5% fit, but it's not meaningful. It's just trying to fit it in along the edges, you know, and it's.
▶ 24:26 it's not programmed so so it's allowing the five percent to be these other things the roof decks balconies green rooms plazas exactly planning board but discretion to allow that i get that the only thing that i'm about this is it's very basic about this section that it just hit me this last time reading it because i did read it all when the building commissioners comments came in um is the building height increases only in ba2 where all the other incentives are both da1 and ba2 okay that's deliberate okay just checking and that was to address the concern of you know applying it to the ba1 and not necessarily wanting to see the fifth story in the downtown right okay thanks i I just wanted to be sure I'm clear on that.
▶ 25:22 So, we are running out of time. I was afraid this would happen. We have 4 more minutes and we have 1 other thing to show you. And we also have members of the public who, I think at this point, we're probably going to have to suggest that they tune in to the planning board portion of this meeting and then we can open up for any comments at that point. But I think the 1 thing we wanted to show you was the file around the map change. That's being proposed and also the planning board meeting is not a public hearing. Yes, but we're it's not. But I mean, I know when I talk to Greg about tonight's subcommittee, he didn't mind. Hearing from the members of the public, so I think that so that is up to you.
▶ 26:15 And we anticipate that some people might be there wanting to ask questions or to make comments. I believe so. Do you think I should just end this and start that meeting in case other planning board members are trying to join? Yeah, I guess we can well, I would just quickly go to page 4. you've already seen the 1st, 4 pages. This is no change. Oh, I think you would. Yeah, this is right. Okay. So here the major thing I'll, I'll leave you with and then we'll bring it up. We'll talk later is. The expansion of the boundary in this, you know, everything that's outlined in hatch marks here is currently in the medical zone, the BD zone, but we would expand it. We would change that to the BA1 and then we had the outer, the eastern, you know, boundary
▶ 27:00 tugged much more closely to Main Street, but upon recommendation of the ward counselor, he actually encouraged us to consider having that line go all the way out to Lebanon Street. So, that's what this is showing and it does pick up about 10 more parcels. So, we can talk more specifically about what those parcels look like. In the next meeting, and I think you're right. I think we probably do need to conclude. So we can give any, any last minute comments to make before we jump over to them. No, I think just for, I mean, my suggestion would be, you know, for the, for the full board. I don't necessarily know that we have to go through as much detail on. You know, the changes and, you know, maybe we can do a.
▶ 27:46 Shorter version to summarize, you know, why the changes are out there and then be more responsive to questions, but not to say that. Yeah, just. You know, for the purposes of people who are paying attention, you know, this can be spent more time with it. So I think most of the board members will be. Finance a little bit of a shortened recap. Okay. And either either Denise or Greg 1 of you is going to. Volunteer yes, I mean, do you want to do that? Do you want to give a quick overview or? Yeah, I can run through and. You know, I'm sure I'll leave holes, but we can. Yeah, we'll fill it in. Okay. Yeah, I think that'd be great because I'm not really. I'm not able to do that. Okay. And for the members of the public, so we are going to close this because we have another meeting starting at 730 and apologize for the awkwardness of that. But if you can just.
▶ 28:43 Denise Gaffey: Find the link on the website to the meeting and we'll be opening that up momentarily. All right, so we're adjourned here. See you all soon. See you in a minute.