by John Osborn ·
Friday, May 15, 2026
Members of the Harvard-Devens Jurisdiction Committee said last week that a provision of Gov. Maura Healey’s economic development bill would hand the state too much authority over zoning decisions at Devens and that Harvard officials learned of the change just one day before the governor filed it.
The provision, which the Press reported in April, would replace the existing super town meeting with a single community meeting convened by MassDevelopment, the state agency that manages the former Army base. A quorum of 50 registered voters from any of the three surrounding towns, including residents of Devens, would suffice, and a simple majority could approve changes to the Devens Reuse Plan or zoning bylaws. The amendment calls for the meeting to be held at Devens or nearby.
SusanMary Redinger, a Harvard Select Board and HDJC member, said Harvard officials received almost no advance notice. “We got a last-minute call from [MassDevelopment President Navjeet Bal’s] office saying they were about to drop it,” she said. “That’s it.” She also raised a legal concern, questioning whether state law would allow voters registered in one Massachusetts town to cast ballots on zoning matters in another. If the meeting were held at the Devens Bob Eisengrein Community Center, for example, voters registered in Shirley or Ayer would be casting votes on land within the historical boundaries of Harvard. “It doesn’t even seem like it’s legal,” she said, adding that the proposal was “just one more chink in the wall for the process that was established as law in Chapter 498.”
“We were slapped in the face by this sneaking through,” said Lucy Wallace, a member at large on the committee. She speculated the provision was driven by housing politics, specifically, a desire to ease the path to rezoning the Innovation and Technology Center district at Devens for residential use. A state-mandated housing working group recommended last year that the ITC district, a roughly 90-acre area that includes the historic buildings at Vicksburg Square, be rezoned to allow up to 400 multifamily units.
Paul Green, also a member at large, called Healey’s stated rationale “a fig leaf.” The governor, in a letter to the Legislature prefacing the bill, had written that the change would ensure “the community’s zoning bylaws can be amended in a timely way and enable the meaningful participation of Devens residents as well as surrounding municipalities.”
“I don’t believe it for a minute,” Green said. “This is the state and MassDevelopment putting its thumb on the scale doing something special for zoning changes that they would never do anywhere else in the state.” He urged the committee to instruct Harvard’s legislative delegation to oppose the bill.
Victor Normand, who chairs the HDJC, said the provision raised questions that reach beyond the immediate zoning issue. “What other changes is the commonwealth going to want at Devens and just do it?” he said.
George Glazier, a Devens resident and member at large on the committee, said a centralized government in Boston “running roughshod” over the towns and Devens residents was “shocking, really.”
In April MassDevelopment described the proposed change as streamlining a process that “has made it increasingly difficult to update the Devens By-laws in a timely manner.” None of the three legislators who represent Devens—Sen. Jamie Eldridge, Sen. John Cronin, and Rep. Dan Sena—has commented on the bill’s proposed changes to the zoning approval process. Eldridge is scheduled to attend the June 3 meeting of the Devens Committee, where member Aaron Farber-Chen has called for him to answer questions about the future governance of Devens. The bill remains before the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies, to which it was referred April 21.
The governor’s bill dominated a meeting that was otherwise focused on the committee’s ongoing work on Devens governance. Members spent part of the session reviewing how Devens compares to neighboring towns in education and police services, part of a broader effort to build a detailed picture of what a formal transfer of jurisdiction over land within its historical boundaries to Harvard would require across 19 areas of municipal government.
The discussion surfaced practical questions about how to proceed. Green argued the committee should address services that are candidates for regionalization—public works, fire, utilities, and the Devens Enterprise Commission—deliberately and upfront, rather than letting the process develop on its own. He cited a pointed example: the Devens public works barn and soon-to-open fire and regional dispatch centers both sit in Ayer, not Harvard, but serve the entire Devens community, illustrating how services at Devens span the historical jurisdictions of Ayer, Shirley, and Harvard.
The committee plans to meet next on June 4 at 3:30 p.m., the first in a new schedule of first-Thursday monthly meetings.