SAUGUS — Thursday night during the Planning Board meeting, there was a public hearing to discuss Article 23 MBTA Communities Multi-family Overlay District and vote on whether they would recommend it to Town Meeting.
Chair John O’Brien opened the meeting by inviting a consultant to speak about the article.
Before the consultant spoke, Town Manager Scott Crabtree highlighted a few things.
“I think everybody should understand that these are mandatory. It’s a state law. I think people have probably been following this in the news with Milton and other communities sort of pushing back. We sort of strategically, and I guess I talked about this before… our strategy administratively was to kind of wait and see how things panned out,” he said.
He also stated that this isn’t something they are doing by choice and that people need to know the ramifications if the town doesn’t adhere to the law.
“If we don’t adhere to it, we’re looking at loss of funding, grant money, etc. As well as potential law suit with the state that we would obviously have to fund to fight that,” he said.
Community Scale Co-Founding Principal Nels Nelson was the consultant there to speak on the article.
“So the compliance deadline was moved to July 14. Saugus is an adjacent community. That’s impactful because it means that you can put the compliant zoning anywhere that you want in the community,” Nelson said, stating that there is some freedom there.
Some of the other requirements mentioned was that the town has to zone for 50 acres, and the town has to have zoning that provides capacity for 1,130 housing units. Nelson noted that this was capacity, not that those units would suddenly be built.
“The last requirement in terms of how this has to be situated in Saugus is that the district has to be contiguous. So, you can’t take all the existing multi-family up and down and Route 1… It has to all be connected,” he said.
Nelson explained that to meet the goals of the community, they looked at areas that have already received some kind of development. There were three different density zones shown: A being 21 units per acre, B being 15 units per acre and C being 12 per acre.
Crabtree mentioned that through the Housing Production Plan Saugus has already done a lot of rezoning and development.
“We want to be in control… We want to have smart growth with the least amount of impact,” he said.
Nelson walked everyone through the steps made which included Avalon, which has a capacity of 232 units; McDonald’s, which they had to include to make it contiguous; Walmart was also used (164 units); NOBO has 245 units with a capacity of 140, so the potential impact is zero; Saugus Ridge, which currently has 300 units with a 309 capacity; the Mobile Home Park, with 71 units and a capacity of 96; and lastly, the Holiday Inn and Kavida Healthcare.
In the end, a motion was made to recommend Article 23 MBTA Communities Multi-family Overlay District to Town Meeting and the motion passed 4-0
