The Devens Enterprise Commission wants to eliminate the current cap on commercial development at Devens and replace it with a dozen criteria that would be used instead to track the environmental impact of such development on the 4,400 acres of the former Army base.
The cap on commercial development is 8.5 million square feet, a number approved by the state Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and specified in the Devens Reuse Plan enacted in 1995 by Harvard, Ayer, and Shirley. In 2008, however, the EEA said the cap should be eliminated, as long as the impact of future development remained within a number of the agency’s environmental guidelines. (See the table below.) EEA officials said the cap was arbitrary and authorized development to proceed without it.
Unfortunately, MassDevelopment, the agency responsible for the area’s redevelopment, never acted to remove the 8.5-million-square-foot cap from the Devens Reuse Plan, and now, 14 years later, with 7.7 million square feet of commercial space already occupied, permitted, or under construction, that 1995 limit is within sight.
“It’s a huge screwup by MassDevelopment,” Harvard-Devens Jurisdiction Committee Chair Victor Normand told the Press in a recent phone call. “They should be held to account.”
In the absence of MassDevelopment, the DEC has stepped into the breach. Ordinarily, any revision of the 1995 reuse plan requires the town meetings of Ayer, Harvard, and Shirley to approve it by majority vote in a so-called Super Town Meeting. But the DEC proposes to expedite the process by asking the Legislature to amend Chapter 498, the state law that created Devens.
The amendment, yet to be drafted, would strike the 8.5 million cap from the reuse plan. State Sen. Jamie Eldridge and state Rep. Dan Sena say they are ready to sponsor the necessary legislation, but only if it has the support of the select boards of all three towns. In a Zoom call this week, DEC Director Peter Lowitt said that unless the cap can be lifted before the end of the current session of the Legislature, future development at Devens will be at risk. “It’s really just an administrative change,” says Lowitt; “It should have happened a lot earlier.”
A source within MassDevelopment said the agency supported the DEC’s push to modify the reuse plan and that increasing the cap was necessary to support and grow Devens. But the agency had no comment on MassDevelopment’s failure to push for the change earlier.
Why the urgency? Lowitt said commercial development at Devens is likely to reach the 8.5 million-square-foot limit set by the reuse plan by the end of this year or by early 2023. In a slide presentation shown to the Press this week, Lowitt reported that 6.6 million square feet are already occupied, and that with the addition of sites under construction or permitted the total is approximately 7.5 million square feet.
The cap puts the future development of Salerno Circle, Shirley’s village growth district, and North Post land in Ayer at risk, Lowitt said. And some properties, such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Commonwealth Fusion, and others, have existing master plans showing additional development of more than 1.28 million square feet. Once the 8.5 million limit is reached, unified permitting will come to a halt. MassDevelopment has estimated there’s another 2 million square feet that could be built at Devens without exceeding the environmental guidelines set by EEA in 2008 when it approved MassDevelopment’s application to lift the cap.
As for EEA’s environmental criteria, Lowitt said the DEC was confident development could continue without exceeding them. “We are 50% to 75% below the 1995 expected impacts associated with traffic, water, wastewater, and land altered,” he noted. Asked about the higher number for impervious surfaces, such as parking lots and roofs, Lowitt said that DEC would be able to control their growth by pushing developers to use porous pavement and green roofs. He said the DEC would report annually on the environmental impact of future development.
Lowitt has already presented the DEC’s plan to the Shirley Select Board, which voted to support it earlier this week. He will present to the Ayer Select Board next week and to the Harvard board July 19. His wish is that all three boards voice their support to Eldridge and Sena by July 31.
