WHNA Meeting Notes for April 4, 2018

[ian_winterhill]

WHNA Meeting notes from April 4, 2018

 

Below are our notes from our April General Meeting. Our next meeting will be a social gathering at the Star Market lot. Please look out for details soon!

 

Neighborhood Updates

• Justin filled us in on the Gilman/GLX progress. MBTA starting to do some site work including taking down trees and some abutter property inventory.
• Justin also filled in folks about the newly formed Gilman Square Neighborhood Association and its engagement around the former ABJ Automotive property. A nontraditional developer has bought it, planning housing project that will likely need zoning and permitting relief. Justin is optimistic that the owner will be a reasonable neighborhood partner.
• Mary reminded folks about the upcoming Sustainaville Week with various environment/sustainability themed events including a tour of a wind turbine
• Also a part of Sustainaville week is the City-wide neighborhood cleanups on April 21. WHNA will have a specific site to focus on. More details to come.
• A couple things to keep an eye on at City Hall: you can still send comments to planning@somervillema.org about the proposed Zoning Overhaul. The Board likely won’t vote on the zoning until the fall after they have incorporated some of the public input they received and then reintroduce a revised version. There is also a proposal for a real estate transfer fee under debate at the Board that would raise funds dedicated to affordable housing. The draft ordinance would level a 1% fee on property sales (and 2% on properties owned less than 5 years) with possible exemptions for hardship or length of tenancy. Follow the discussion here.

Star Market Site

• Thanks to the more than 70 people that have filled out the brief Star Market site survey! It gave us a lot to talk about. The plan is to use these responses to refine our survey. We set an ambitious goal of 1000 respondents. Over the next week a few of us will re-format the survey so that we can offer it online, in person, as a handout and in multiple languages. We also want to refine it so that we can get at some issues not covered around access, use, and more. The idea is that the survey will help us communicate with a would-be-developer at the Star Market and the City, our elected officials and the planning and zoning boards.
• We also talked about how the planning and permitting process works for a would-be-developer. The city has this explanation here. We went over it with an eye towards opportunities for community input. We’ll revisit this as things progress.
• Lastly, with a couple architects in the room, we talked about how a developer sees the process. Without any certainty, we tried to gauge how far along DLJ might be in its design, how flexible they might still be and how best to communicate with them. The site still has not be purchased, but we agreed that we need to act quickly if we want to try and weigh in before designs become less flexible.

Next Steps

• As mentioned above, we’ll work to finalize a bigger survey with many more respondents
• We’ll analyze and package the results into something we can share with our electeds and with the developer by June.
• Our next meeting will be a gathering in the Star Market lot. Date/Time TBD shortly