At the June 8 Super Town Meeting in Harvard, voters said no to a rezoning proposal that MassDevelopment said it needed to attract a second large bio-pharmaceutical company to Devens, bringing millions of dollars of investment and hundreds of jobs to the region. Almost immediately, wires around the state began to buzz, criticizing the vote and speculating on its causes.
As the Fitchburg Sentinel and Enterprise noted, the Harvard Planning Board and a number of residents who spoke at the meeting thought the zoning change “was too broadly written and left unclear the type of company that might wind up in the rezoned 18-acre sector.”
MassDevelopment President and CEO Marty Jones said the vote was a “missed opportunity for the Commonwealth and the Nashoba Valley, given the paucity of parcels primed for major economic development.” But Senior Vice President for Devens Thatcher Kezer vowed that his agency would work with the town to craft a proposal that was “cleaner, more straightforward.”
Our interviews with town officials and voters this week show that many were swayed by arguments that the bylaw changes were a “mishmash” and would allow MassDevelopment to “willy-nilly” do whatever it wanted with the land. But some voters said they were angry that MassDevelopment and the Devens Enterprise Commission had permitted a project on Grant Road that would decrease the percentage of affordable housing in town. They asked how they could trust MassDevelopment to respect future concerns of Harvard residents, including those who live on Devens land within Harvard’s historical boundaries.
As David Hopper of Harvard’s Municipal Affordable Housing Trust (MAHT) put it in an impromptu conversation this week, to vote for the article, voters had to trust MassDevelopment “to do the right thing.” Many that we interviewed agreed with him, saying that they saw Article 4 as “a bargaining chip” and they wanted to send MassDevelopment a message. That discontent, we suspect, was a more potent force than MassDevelopment officials had been willing to acknowledge.
The agreement signed this week between Harvard’s MAHT and Devens Village Green, the developer of Grant Road—with the support of the Devens Enterprise Commission(DEC)—shows that it is possible for Harvard and Devens officials to craft solutions that meet the needs of both parties (see story): If all goes according to plan, Harvard will gain 40 new units of affordable housing after all, and the DEC and MassDevelopment can claim they are adding the “workforce” housing to Devens they say they need.
The agreement, however, leaves in place the regulation that led to the problem in the first place. When it comes time to build the final 18 homes allowed by the housing cap once Grant Road is completed, current regulations would allow MassDevelopment and the DEC to permit a project with no Chapter 40B affordable units on Harvard land, decreasing Harvard’s percentage of affordable housing once again.
We think MassDevelopment and the DEC should fix the problem now and rewrite their regulations to guarantee that future projects maintain the Devens goal of 25 percent affordable housing across all of Devens, as stated in the 1994 Devens Reuse Plan, which was approved by Ayer, Shirley, and Harvard. Not doing so will, in our view, endanger any future zoning proposals brought before the town, no matter how cleanly they are written.
