This past Thursday night, the Planning Board put the brakes on the proposal to change the IG zoning district in town to a new designation of "office park." They did this despite the fact that a developer who was making a pitch for a zoning change to the not yet approved zone and curiously, the planning director both requested that the subject be put on the January warrant anyway for town meeting "just in case" the zoning proposal would be ready.
This action by the board seemed to surprise the applicants and their attorney but came not at all as a surprise to the most casual town observer. There are a number of things very questionable about these two simultaneous proposals which will take months if not years to sort out and are likely to involve many more people than just the planning director and the applicant.
How for instance did the planning director arrive at the conclusion that the IG district needs to be changed at all? And how did one applicant manage to arrange a full presentation and begin a public hearing process on a change of their zoning to the new designation before the planning board and the public at large had even begun to examine the new proposal?
Despite the fact that the zoning change proposal was continued to February, after town meeting, the developers still laid out their request. As usual it was filled with devspeak (developer speak) which we are all now wholly familiar with. They need 300,000 to 800,000 more square feet of hotel, retail and other amenities beyond what current zoning allows in order to attract high quality tenants here because their vacancy rate is 20%.
Haven't we heard all this before in other presentations? Wasn't the Lahey Clinic expansion, the Commons, previous hotels and expansions of the Mall supposed to attract high quality companies to the region? Wasn't the Sun, Oracle and Northwest Park changes sufficient to attract them? How about the petition to the legislature to raise the number of liquor licenses allowable in the community? Aren't those proposed amenities or the new already built high end restaurants enough?
The proposed project is with in several hundred yards of most of the existing amenities in town yet they need more? Some of the planning board members are beginning to ask the same questions that residents want answers to.
Perhaps it is not more square feet or faults in our zoning which is the answer to any problems. Perhaps questions should be asked such as would you have less vacancies if your rents were lower? Or isn't the real problem that the entire region has much more space than demand can fill? Or instead of telling us how this will help you, please explain in detail how it will help us? Why for instance in a community that has given tax breaks for development, those projects are delayed or on hold? Why is another new hotel necessary? How will new construction directly in the aquifer benefit the water supply?
Perhaps the planning director could expand on his comments regarding the new zone in helping Burlington "market itself." If we have almost 4 million square feet approved but unbuilt because of lack of demand, how will a new zone spur that demand?
These are just a few questions when in reality there are literally hundreds more at this point in our economic life as a community. Some of the most obvious ones are such as why is the same law firm telling us we need more space here and on the Landlocked parcel when they told us Northwest Park needed more space and yet that project is struggling to get off the ground? Will huge new amounts of space jeopardize the investment we have made there?
With the new zone proposal accompanied simultaneously with a new project proposal we blur the fact that any changes in the IG district will effect not only one park but also hundreds of other similarly IG zoned parcels through out the town. What impact will that have?
Most importantly is the impact on our revenue. According to the assessors tax rate history, the total commercial taxable value of the town in 1990 was $1,122,000,000, 17 years later in fiscal year 2007 that value had only risen to $1,361,000,000. This is a fundamental question that all members of the leadership in the community must begin to address. Why after all the development we have allowed has our taxable value increased such a paltry amount?
This proposed zoning designation change is one of the most far reaching revisions of our zoning in the past 25 years. This proposal is more significant than both the town center proposal and the yet uncompleted sign by law review. Both of those required several years of study by multi board participant study groups before any proposal was made or action taken.
We are at a historically significant economic crossroads in both our community and our nation. It would be foolhardy for us to move even another inch forward without having a full understanding of what impact the already enormous changes that we have approved will have on our residents. The first question that has to be asked and answered in explicit detail from now on is "why is it good for us? If not, then the new answer from now on is NO.
