WHNA General Meeting notes from 3/7/2018

[ian_winterhill]

March 7, 2018 WHNA Meeting Notes

Our next meeting is Wednesday, April 4 @ 6:30pm (pizza and socializing at 6:30pm, meeting start at 7pm) in the Activities Room at the Mystic Learning Center, 530 Mystic Ave. The meeting will be focused on neighborhood vision for the Star Market site and an organizing plan to get that vision incorporated into the development.

And mark your calendar for the April 21st for a neighborhood Spring Cleanup coordinated with the City’s Spring Clean Up.

Neighborhood Plan Implementation

• We started the meeting by hearing from two City staff (Lauren Drago, Economic Development Assistant and Sunayana Thomas, Senior Economic Development Planner) to talk about implementation of the Gilman Square Neighborhood Plan and the Winter Hill Neighborhood Plan. You can find the documents here: www.somervillebydesign.com. According to Lauren and Sue, the City wants to form Implementation Action Teams—one for Gilman and one for Winter Hill. Exactly what those teams will look like and what action they will take is still to be determined. The idea is the teams would identify priorities from the plan and come up with ways to make those priorities happen with some help from the City and other resources.
• Lauren and Sue are hosting several “listening sessions” to hear ideas from folks and then will be having a big meeting in late April. Sign up for one of the listening sessions here (they are on 3/14, 3/21 and 3/22) https://doodle.com/poll/k2kf97u2mzw7af97. And encourage others whose voice ought to be included to sign up too.
• Sue and Lauren said that this is an effort to use a new community process based on feedback from the processes in Union Square and other neighborhoods. Winter Hill and Gilman will be the first places to use this “action team” model. Folks had questions about what the action teams would do, what “tools” they will have access to, who would decide who’d be on the action team and how the action teams would work with neighborhood groups like ours and the Gilman Square Neighborhood Association. All of these questions seem to still be open for discussion at the listening sessions and in the future. 

Broadway Signage and Markings

• Adam Polinski, Transportation Analyst from the City came and talked about upcoming signage and markings for Broadway. He said there will be some public meetings soon and a survey to provide input for a design. Things like bike lanes, actual road lanes and other signage could be a part of this. There is also talk of the MBTA using markings to trial a dedicated bus lane on Broadway.
• Broadway will not be repaved as a part of this. That is a longer time frame. When streets are dug up for utility work, they City will not repave for two years to avoid being liable for any damage to the utilities below (so we are stuck with patch work paving for the two years—seems like a bad policy that needs to be changed!).

The Star Market Site

• We spent the second half of the meeting digging into the Star Market site and its potential future. Alderman Clingan reported back to the group about a meeting he had with the potential purchaser and developer of the site, DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners. The developer is working on plans but has not submitted anything to the City yet. And even before that step, they will also plan to hold a community meeting to talk about their plan. But we are not there yet. Jesse said their plan was very much a draft, but that what he saw did not represent the aspirations of the neighborhood plan, it did not include a large, central “square” to anchor the neighborhood. He told them his opinion, we shall see what they take into account.
• To the best of our knowledge, the sale of the site is still not final, but if it does go through, the development process will get going very soon. In order to be best prepared to interact with the developer, we decided we need to be able to better articulate goals for the site. We have the neighborhood plan as starting point, but it is not that specific for the Star Market site and it does not necessarily incorporate everyone’s vision (and it was part of a process started in 2014).
• The idea of using these goals to inform a community benefit agreement with the developer was also discussed again and will be talked more about at the April 4 meeting. You can find a lot more info about CBAs here: http://unionunitedsomerville.com/documents/ and under “resources” tab here: http://unionsquareneighborhoodcouncil.org

If you’ve been waiting to get more involved in the group until we focused on a specific issue, now is the time!

Next steps:

• A couple of us are reviving an old survey about what people want to see at the Star Market site. It will get sent out to our lists electronically.
• A couple others will be creating some physical tools and outreach plan to get input from folks before the April 4 meeting.
• Everyone is reviewing the Winter Hill Neighborhood Plan as a starting point and adding some likes/don’t likes to a google doc Mary created: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WS3qnki3g_zIkupRI2HzKBNmg7n0tgq38aTkPoPYfDs/edit?usp=sharing