A new application from local developer Lou Russo does not, after all, make any mention of the 250-unit assisted and senior-care living center discussed at length at a Planning Board meeting last month. The project would have required a significant bylaw change, and the prospective applicant had even brought a draft of the bylaw that would have been needed to realize the plan.
The new application, dated July 26, sticks instead to the plan first presented in March for three commercial buildings on 11 acres across from Dunkin’ Donuts. One building would be a nearly 30,000-square-foot badminton gym with one caretaker apartment; uses for the other two 8,000-square-foot commercial buildings remain unspecified.
The senior housing idea had been discussed at a July 18 Planning Board meeting under the agenda item “overlay district.” At the time, board members worried that the number of units proposed exceeded the maximum number allowed (100) for one project. The cap was adopted by Town Meeting in 2021 as part of a comprehensive senior housing bylaw that took the Planning Board and the town’s then-director of community and economic development, Chris Ryan, more than two years to develop and publicize. Members also wondered whether the overlay district constituted unlawful spot zoning, but Town Counsel Mark Lanza, who had reviewed the bylaw ahead of the meeting, declared it did not.
Questions about the overlay district are, at least for now, moot
“The MUOD [mixed-use overlay district] that was proposed by a prospective applicant is on indefinite pause,” Planning Board Chair Richard Cabelus told the Press Monday.
The one significant difference between the March and July applications is that the July application asks for two special permits instead of one: A special permit under “large-scale commercial use” has now been added to the existing request for a permit under the Ayer Road Village Special Permit bylaw. The new application, along with a recently placed legal notice in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, effectively reopens the hearing and allows the two new members of the Planning Board, John McCormack and Arielle Jennings, to vote on the application. Absent the reopening, the new members would not have been able to vote on the project.
At issue from the start has been the project’s eligibility for a permit under the Ayer Road Village Special Permit bylaw. Russo’s engineer, Bruce Ringwall of the firm Goldsmith, Prest, and Ringwall, noted the project met requirements for frontage and minimum acreage. But when new member McCormack asked the chair why the developer was applying under the Ayer Road Village zoning, Cabelus replied: “That’s an open question to some extent.”
The ARVSP bylaw was created in 2004 to “assist the town in creating and maintaining a village identity for commercial properties on Ayer Road,” and for “the promotion of mixed-use development.” The project as currently proposed contains no housing, a component largely thought to be an integral part of mixed-use zoning. One section of the bylaw identifies housing as essential to a mixed-use development; other related sections are silent on the matter.
During the public comment, Steve Moeser of Park Lane, who is also a longtime member of the Zoning Board of Appeals, counseled the new Planning Board members to fully understand all the conditions of the development before taking any vote, especially “the massing and the grading” of the buildings.
The next hearing is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 19, when the applicant’s traffic consultant is likely to report on the results of a traffic study.
