Framingham Aims to Cede Permanent Control of Downtown to the State

Any adjustment to Central Business District zoning rules will require state approval if the Mayor and the City Council have their way.

In the ongoing saga of how the city complies with the MBTA Communities Act (MBTA CA), the current phase is the most critical.

It is already clear that key players have worked to ensure that Framingham’s compliance plan includes zero credit for any of the extensive prior residential developments in the city. See:

Framingham's MBTA Zoning Solution Takes No Credit for Past Housing

Those key players thus far have been:

• The Planning & Community Development Director

• The Planning Board

• The Mayor

The Planning Board has been a surprise in this, as generally it is expected that its members would be somewhat aware of what is happening in other communities.

However, the Planning Board Chair is Director of Planning & Community Development in Hudson, which is not an MBTA Community and has not gone through a compliance process for the MBTA Communities Act.

Further, one member seems to have trouble turning up, and another recently commented on Facebook that:

‘I've never seen anyone provide any support for the "we can get credit for past development" argument. I don't know what the basis is for that.’

My Facebook response to that was:

‘I suggest you call planners in Wayland, Ashland, Marlborough, Wellesley, Sudbury, Dedham, Norwood, Abingdon, ... and explain your ideas to them and see what feedback you get. An hour of your time spent doing that would radically change your view of what is actually happening.’

The bottom line is that the key players in fashioning Framingham’s MBTA CA response have been united in opposing the most commonly used approach in towns and cities across the Commonwealth to get credit for prior residential development and mitigate any negative impacts the MBTA CA could have on city finances, infrastructure and school system capacity.

However, now that the City Council is engaged in the final planning effort, things have gotten worse.

The key player in the City Council, the Chair of the Subcommittee on Planning & Zoning, has joined the ‘no credit for prior development’ group.

In fact, this City Councilor was all for simply rubber stamping the Mayor’s CBD plan into final approval as well. Having failed to get the City Council to go along with that, this City Councilor is now engaged in an effort to just trim the CBD and give up on getting credit for prior residential developments.

Things look pretty grim for getting back to the MOD approach, which would cut the city’s MBTA CA burden in half, as explained in the article linked above. [MOD = MBTA Overlay District]

It is in this context that the real danger of the current City Council trajectory becomes truly apparent.

Once the city delivers up the entire Central Business District (CBD) and its zoning rules as its compliance solution for the MBTA CA, any changes to the CBD zoning rules will automatically trigger a state compliance review, and if the state does not like the CBD zoning rule changes, it will reject them.

It is in this manner that the city is now headed towards ceding CBD zoning control entirely to the state. Framingham will have to come, hat in hand, to the state whenever it wants to make a local downtown zoning change.

That will become permanent if Framingham sticks with the CBD strategy, rather than a MOD approach.

In the MOD approach, CBD zoning rules can be changed anytime, without state review. A Downtown MOD simply overlays part of the CBD and ensures that the MBTA CA rules apply just for that MOD.

In such a scheme, the Downtown MOD would yield 2,236 units or less for compliance, with the remainder of the units coming from MODs which cover prior developments across the city.

In summary, the advantages of the MOD approach are:

1. Control of the CBD is not ceded to the state.

2. The CBD zoning rules can be changed anytime without state approval.

3. The area of the Downtown MOD would be much smaller than the area of the CBD so that the number of units in that MOD would be more like 2,236 or less rather than 4,355. That would greatly reduce the impact on Downtown and city resources.

4. Framingham will get the maximum amount of credit it can for prior developments, at least 2,120 units or more.

5. It is much quicker to settle on a MOD solution compared to a complete review of the CBD, which has 533 individual parcels.

It is a pity that the city does not have the nerve to run a poll in the community asking if the MBTA CA compliance solution Framingham adopts should include real credit for past residential developments. Such a poll would find huge community support for that notion.

In the absence of city interest in gauging community opinion, this publication ran a poll asking the following question:

How many residential units do you think Framingham should be on the hook to the state for to comply with the MBTA Communities Act? Pick one.

1. 5,348 as in the Mayor's plan, which has conditional approval from the state

2. 4,355 which is the target number for the current City Council planning

3. 2,236 or less, if Framingham gets credit for its prior residential developments

The results were:

1. 6%

2. 15%

3. 78%

This is based on 79 responses out of a population of 915 and gives some idea of where the community stands.

In an election year, it seems that the City Council should be very careful to take the temperature of the community on this issue of getting credit for prior development, which can only be achieved in a MOD approach.

Bottom Line

The City Council has a clear choice.

It can choose the MOD option, cutting the negative impacts of the MBTA CA in half, and freeing the city from permanent state control of the entire CBD, or it can choose the CBD option which is the most burdensome approach possible, and will put the city under state control for all future changes to the CBD.