After weeks of intense effort to get its proposed senior housing bylaw ready for a vote at the Oct. 3 Special Town Meeting, the Planning Board threw in the towel this week. At the board’s Sept. 28 meeting, members voted unanimously to table the controversial article and give themselves more time to work on it. When Article 9—the bylaw article—comes up for a vote this Saturday, board Chair Justin Brown will provide a brief statement explaining the reasons for tabling the article, and will move to do so.
The board is not entirely abandoning the senior housing bylaw and decided to continue working on it during the upcoming months in preparation for presenting it at the Spring 2021 Town Meeting.
Before voting, each board member stated the reasons for his or her decision. Member Fran Nickerson explained that she wants to see a senior housing bylaw pass at town meeting as soon as possible but expected that this one would fail, making future senior housing proposals ineligible for consideration for the next two years. She said, “I think it is likely to go down, and that would be the biggest mistake of all.” Nickerson also said that the proposed bylaw was too open-ended, which would make Harvard residents wary due to uncertainty. She suggested that tying the bylaw to a specific parcel of land might make it more palatable to voters.
Board member Jane Biering argued that before proceeding with any senior housing bylaw, the Planning Board needs to answer some big-picture questions about the scope of the project, both among its own members and by getting feedback from the community. She presented the board with a bulleted list of 10 questions as a starting point for further discussions in the months ahead. The questions address the tradeoffs between adding senior housing and preserving Harvard’s rural character.
Member Gwen Leonard stated that the board needs to gather far more community feedback before proceeding with a senior housing bylaw. Using the analogy of product design and marketing, she said the board should use the upcoming months to find out what exactly Harvard’s citizens want from the bylaw.
Board member Stacia Donahue said she had been in favor of proceeding until just days earlier, when it became apparent to her that the bylaw was still undergoing intensive rewrites and would not be a finished product in time for Town Meeting. Despite her wish to take more time to incorporate feedback into the bylaw, she voiced her support for the current bylaw’s emphasis on clustered zoning. She said, “There has to be some happy medium between 1.5-acre lots and 40B projects. It breaks my heart seeing Harvard’s land getting split up to build megamansions that most people in Massachusetts cannot afford.”
Brown echoed Donahue’s sentiment of wanting more time to work on the bylaw’s details while still supporting clustered zoning for senior housing.
After the vote, the Planning Board allowed public comment. Former Planning Board member Michelle Catalina criticized the proposed bylaw for allowing much lower setbacks than are normally required in Harvard (as low as 10 feet in some cases). She also voiced her opinion that large-scale zoning changes like those in the proposed bylaw take a long time and many iterations to pass at town meetings.
The board remains committed to assembling a senior housing bylaw in time for the Spring Town Meeting, and it advises interested citizens to remain on the lookout for the board’s public outreach requests in the coming months.
