The steeply sloped hillside of 15 Littleton Road, as we currently know it to be, will shortly be obliterated. It will instead become the scene of Harvard’s first great (land) fill operation in the name of Chapter 40B. This transformation is replete with septic systems so marginally designed as to make a mockery of and skirt the very intent of prudent protective health ordinances. Impervious surfaces have been so carefully limited and laid out as to make it all but impossible for anything larger than a Poland Spring delivery truck to safely turn around. In the words of an independent engineer from Nitsch Engineering, which conducted a detailed review of the site, “the submitted plans still indicate an intense development on a relatively small steeply sloped site; Nitsch Engineering is concerned due to the intense use of the site and recommends that there be close construction supervision for the project.”
To wit, the list of waivers demanded by the developer, MHOC, to make this project “work” is so extensive that our ZBA has valiantly sought to attach a veritable plethora of protective conditions. The ZBA’s fortitude alone, throughout a mind-numbing barrage of legally coercive argument, is impressive and loudly applauded. However, it may not have been enough.
So, when MHOC’s trucks begin thundering through our town, laden with their 9,000 cubic yards of (somebody else’s) dirt, to make this fantasy project a harsh reality for Harvard, ponder the following:
- Why is Harvard getting credit for merely three affordable units out of the twelve units being crammed onto this site? This represents only the bare legal minimum of affordable units required by law. Why not more? Not one of these affordable units is even designated as “age restricted,” which would have directly benefited our most cherished but threatened of all residents, our senior citizens.
- Why on earth (pun intended) was MHOC even invited into town by the Harvard Housing Partnership (HHP)?
- Why did the Board of Selectmen endorse this as a Local Initiative Project while simultaneously failing to secure anything more beneficial for our town than the absolute bare-bones legal minimum of affordable units?
- Why was it left up to the singular courage of our ZBA to demand and secure a last-minute financial “deal sweetener”?
- Why has town legal counsel repeatedly sought to justify every conceivable loophole and legal argument that augments the cause of the developer? Surely, town counsel is retained to dig in and fight hard for Harvard’s beneficial rights and interests.
- Seemingly, the mere threat of a serious challenge by a preeminent and highly respected land-use attorney, engaged by three concerned private citizens, has MHOC rushing back to the ZBA with conditions of rescission attached to its $45,000 deal-sweetener offer, should an appeal of the ZBA permit be made. How much of a better deal and project could have been secured by engaging such counsel from the outset as was suggested in letters from concerned citizens to both the selectmen and the ZBA?
According to the undoubtedly well-intentioned visionaries of the HHP, in the fullness of time we’re all expected to get accustomed to the new landfill look that will be 15 Littleton Road. Maybe. But in the meantime it’s more like an exemplary illustration of the abandonment of sound development principles, incompetent management, and the complete abdication of common sense by the responsible town officials.
Its most sad and enduring legacy, however, at least for me, will be as monument to developer greed and insensitivity toward one of our town’s most generous benefactors of both the Conservation Commission and the Conservation Trust. Some time ago, a long-time resident of Littleton Road unselfishly bequeathed substantial tracts of land (further along Littleton Road) to be forever held in conservation—never to be developed. That generous and thoughtful gentleman’s widow continues to reside barely a couple of lots away from the very kind of development he so desperately sought to protect us from.
And all in the name of a 40B project that was sponsored and promoted by the HHP as an implementation of its non-town-meeting-approved production plan.
Keith Cheveralls is chairman of the Board of Selectmen’s Shaker Hills Golf Course 40B Ad Hoc Committee.
