Winter Hill Neighborhood Association

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

• 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. 

• 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!).

• 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

• 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