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By Wilfred Mbah
Candidate for Somerville City Councilor at Large

The City Council held a lively public hearing last week at which residents and workers from neighborhoods around the city called on the council to correct a variety of procedural problems and a pro-developer bias in planning and zoning.

Representatives of neighborhood and advocacy groups related many instances when community members have felt excluded and ignored in the processes of plan formulation and project reviews. Their experiences seemed to contradict the work we tried to do in 2017 to support the first neighborhood council at Union Square and in 2019, to adopting the new Zoning Ordinance. We expected that these new instruments of public engagement and open deliberations and record-keeping would insure a community-oriented process and outcomes.

It was disappointing to hear that so many citizens now perceive these processes to be a false front, hiding the “real” decision-making between developers and city staff and officers behind closed doors.

Clarifying the fundamental problems

The testimony revealed that the problems and shortcomings are occurring in all aspects types of the zoning and planning processes:

• in broad area-wide planning and detailed neighborhood planning;
• in comprehensive spatial and urban design, and in detailed street, traffic and infrastructure and public facilities planning;
• in the reviews of multi-building master plans, individual building projects, small-scale variances, special permits and site plans;
• in the transformation zones where large-scale redevelopment is underway; in the squares and main street corridors getting infill projects; and in the residence zones where the housing stock needs improvement, but gentrification and displacement often result.

Given this variety of problem areas, there was not a clear focus on what remedies will be most effective.

Could we pinpoint sections or clauses in the Zoning Ordinance that need to be re-written? Did the main problems lie in the structures of process – the sequence of stages in a typical zoning application, starting with the “pre-submittal” stage when a developer is supposed to meet with city staff and hold a neighborhood meeting? Maybe citizen engagement at this early stage is ineffective because a project is still too abstract for meaningful evaluation?

Perhaps the main problems lie in the legal instruments that are expected to define mitigations, protections and community benefits? These restrictive covenants, Mobility Management Plans and other documents may or may not appear in the public record and often they are often written after decisions are made. Similar to the community benefits agreements, they are written in quasi-contractual language. The promises made are often contingent and aspirational and later cannot be enforced.

Is there a pro-developer bias?

Some of speakers implied that a pro-developer or anti-community bias is inherent in the “culture” of the city agencies, the Planning Board and ZBA. Some of their practices seem to be dismissive of the citizens. These include the frequent failure to send or post required notices and the issuance of studies and reports at the last minute, giving citizens too little time to read and understand their content. Most annoying are the times when residents come to a hearing and the board chair announces that the date has been postponed at the request of the applicant.

It likely that rather than a bias or bad motivation with city personnel, the problem lies instead in the artificial structure and format of their hearings and meetings and in the rote content of their decisions and reports. The Planning Board, ZBA and UDC meetings rarely involve any direct and frank discussion of the important planning issues – instead, applicants make their exaggerated presentations with pretty pictures, members of the public speak for two minutes each, and then the board members say very little to reveal their thinking.

The formal decisions make superficial and abstract findings with rote language and with no substantive explanations. Dozens of conditions are added, most of which require a developer to subsequently finalize and submit the key environmental, traffic and design reports, and the legal covenants and agreements to the pertinent agency directors. Thus, even though these documents embody the substance of the project, the Boards act without them and the public never learns whether they have later been properly completed and complied with.

What should happen next?

The job of the City Council should now be to look systematically at all of zoning and planning process – its structure and sequence of stages, timetables, meeting and hearing formats, and the content and legal status of the instruments, prepared by the planning and legal staff.

We know from our neighbor Boston, that even with hundreds of planners and a generous budget, the BPDA encounters many of the same problems that we are seeing in Somerville. Similar to Mayor Wu’s review of the BPDA, the Council should undertake a thorough review.

First, it should look closely at the Zoning Ordinance. It now contains almost a dozen different procedures with varying numbers of stages and steps, with different documents and instruments and with differently defined roles for the parties – developers, staff, community representatives, and elected officials. It should be possible to simplify these in ways that eliminate distractions and better focus on planning issues in plain language.

Second, the Council should review the practical capabilities of OPSCD. Does the staff have too little time and too few resources to handle all the types of applications, reviews, planning initiatives and monitoring jobs that are assigned to it?

Third, the Council should review of the recent planning and zoning applications to judge whether these is pro-developer or anti-community bias evident in the records? If so, some staff guidelines for communications, office operations and protocols should be prepared.

Finally, the Council should consider whether the limitations of the zoning and planning powers themselves are at the core of the problems. It may be more important to strengthen our advocacy at the state legislature to gain new direct powers of housing support, rent control, anti-displacement legislation, fair wage and local hiring programs rather than trying to “leverage” zoning.