By Adam Swift
The town council is moving closer to making a final decision on how it wants to proceed with the MBTA 3A Communities Act.
The town is required to submit a plan for multi-family residential zoning to the state by the end of the year.
At its meeting on Tuesday night, the council voted to hold a special meeting with the planning board on Tuesday, August 27.
The planning board has been working with RKG Consultants on a plan to bring the town into compliance with the MBTA 3A guidelines. The current plan being put forward by RKG would create overlay districts in the Seal Harbor and Governor’s Park areas which already contain more dwelling units than would be required under the 3A overlay district.
In addition, the town would be able to leverage 221 units in the Central Business District to help offset the 3A requirements as a mixed-use offset.
However, some town officials and residents of the Seal Park and Governor’s Park condominiums have raised concerns about unanswered questions about how the zoning would impact the condominium documents in those developments.
At the same time, residents and the Winthrop Says No to 3A group have continued to gather signatures in an effort to put the 3A question to voters in November.
During Tuesday night’s council meeting, several councilors laid out their current thoughts on where they believe the town and the council stands in regards to 3A.
Council President Jim Letterie said the planning board is close to making a recommendation on 3A to the council. But, he said the council could move forward with an up or down vote on 3A at any time.
If the council votes not to move forward with a 3A plan, it could open the town up to legal action from the state, said Town Manager Tony Marino.
Letterie stated that if the council does vote to recommend a 3A proposal to the state, the citizens’ petition would likely move forward in November with residents likely voting to say no to 3A.
Letterie and Precinct 5 Councilor Joseph Aiello had a tense moment after Aiello shared his opinion on where the town currently stands in the 3A process.
“When 3A came out, it was very confusing to everybody,” said Aiello.
He said when the town began to look at the original data that came out for Winthrop, it realized that some of the data the state was using was wrong and included Logan Airport as part of the town’s total acreage.
“When you corrected for density, I believe we were the fourth most dense of the 3A communities in the region, Boston is exempt from 3A so we are not counting that, which is incredible,” Aiello said. “I benefited from a lot of people calling me up or emailing me, and some of the other councilors, who said let’s not forget what we have done in this town.”
Aiello said the data that Marino has shared with the council shows that while the number of single-family residential homes have remained consistent over the past decades, the town has dramatically increased its stock of multi-family housing.
“We have been a leading town as we have increased our densification as we live next to Boston,” he said. “Is it a good thing or a bad thing? I’m not going to say one way or another, but the facts are that we have densified well ahead of the state coming to the conclusion that they would like to get people to densify.”
Aiello said he does not believe it is correct that the town has gotten no credit from the state for its existing density of multi-family housing. He noted that if the town had not added 3,500 multi-family units over the past decades, the state would only require zoning for about 350 units under 3A as opposed to the 880 its formula currently requires.
“It’s discriminatory, the calculations they use in terms of good actors of municipalities that have increased densification, further requiring relief from the community,” said Aiello.
Aiello also noted that in the 2010s, the town rezoned for an additional 900 residential units along the waterfront and in the center of town, further showing its commitment to increasing available housing.
“We have two paths we can make, and I’m not going to judge which path is better,” he said. “We can just say no, that’s fine, or we can just say to the state … we have already done our part and we want you to recognize that we have done our part between what we have actually built in this community and what we have approved to build.”
The original recommendation Aiello said several councilors made was to have the town go to the state and have it give the town full credit for all the units it created through the zoning changes in the 2010s.
While saying he didn’t currently approve or disapprove of the current plan being worked on by RKG Consultants, Aiello said there are legitimate questions about the approach.
“Basically, will the 3A zoning overlay over existing condominium developments overrule the terms and conditions, the condo docs, that happen within those units,” he said.
Aiello said the town needs answers to those questions from either the state’s attorney general or the secretary of housing’s legal counsel.
“We need to see the answer in writing under their letterhead before we can have any discussion about whether we like the solution or don’t like the solution,” said Aiello.
If the town cannot get a clear answer from the state that a 3A overlay will not harm any of the people who live at Governor’s Park or Seal Harbor, Aiello said the planning board should go back and try to get the state to credit the town for the past zoning it has done. He added that the town needs proper documentation from the state before it can make the final decision on where it goes with 3A.
“That does sound like a nice speech that you are against 3A,” said Letterie following Aiello’s comments.
Aiello countered that he has not stated whether he is for or against 3A.
“Do not put words in my mouth,” Aiello said. “Do you want to have a debate about how this started and how you mismanaged this from the beginning? I’m willing to have that.”
Letterie ruled Aiello out of order for his comments and asked if he wished to leave the meeting, and asked him to follow the rules of council decorum.
“I’ve been here 18 years, you’ve been here a year and a half, please learn before you make comments that you don’t know what you are talking about,” said Letterie.
Letterie shifted the meeting back to the 3A discussion and said that during the joint meeting with the planning board on August 27, the planning board will propose what it is recommending on 3A.
“They still have a couple of questions to ask RKG,” said Letterie. “In the meantime, I think at the beginning of this whole process we did ask the state to give us exemptions for the 600-odd units we had in the (Central Business District) and they said no.”
Once the planning board votes on its recommendations, Letterie said the ball will then be in the council’s court.
“There was a petition that was (brought up) earlier, that petition could come before the council and we could vote to hold a special election, we could vote to put it on the November election it looks like if we do it in a timely manner,” said Letterie. “We could also just vote and see; if it’s a no, it’s a no, if it’s a yes, it probably goes to the citizens. Whatever we do, we have to do it before Dec. 31. Once the plan is approved by the planning board, it would then go to the state for approval.”
Marino said the planning board does have the option to have the state review its 3A plan to see if it will meet its guidelines.
“If we were to get a favorable review from the state, and we were to vote it down, or the citizens were to vote it down, and eventually it became law of the land and we had to enact it, we would go back to that version, correct?” Letterie asked Marino.
Marino said he would hope the state would use the previously reviewed plan, but that it was not a guarantee.
“If the council just decides to end this as soon as possible and votes yes, there would probably be a petition that would be moved along by the citizens,” said Letterie. ‘If we vote no, that would more than likely be the end of it. We would probably have some sort of legal action from the state.”
Letterie said he has no problem with voting now or moving the question onto the citizens.
“I’ve been ready to vote since January, I don’t know what the heck we are waiting so long for,” he said. “We keep looking for answers that we are not going to get, and the answers are never what we want to be anyway, and when they are, they are very ambiguous and change from moment to moment.”
Letterie said the 3A issue will remain on the council agenda for future meetings and that the council could decide to vote on it at its next meeting.
“I know we have asked a lot of the questions a few times in a few different ways to the state, but there are two looming question marks,” said Council Vice President Hannah Belcher. “That is the Milton case and the Rockport case, and I am personally not comfortable voting until those have been decided. That’s big information about this and that impacts everything; it could make it all go away.”
Belcher said she did not believe it was responsible for the council or residents to vote until all of the information regarding the lawsuits from the two towns over 3A was on the table.