Feb. 28, 2018
Boxborough Planning Board
Town Hall
29 Middle Road
Boxborough, MA 01719
Re: Site Plan Application - 700, 750 & 800 Massachusetts Avenue
Dear Chair and Members of the Board:
As it appears likely that the March 5 public hearing on this matter may be the last, we submit this final letter on behalf of Boxborough Citizens to Save Our Town Center (SOTC), urging you to deny the Site Plan Application submitted by Boxborough Town Center LLC for 700, 750 & 800 Massachusetts Avenue.
Over the past year, as residents have become aware of – and alarmed by – the scale of this project, you’ve seen a steady increase in attendance at your public hearings. When hearings began in January 2017, there was enough seating for attendees in the Morse Room at Town Hall and later in the Community Center across the road. Within a few months, you found yourselves addressing capacity crowds at Sargent Memorial Library. By October 2017, when SOTC co-chairs Heather Fleming and Wes Fowlks published the results of a town-wide poll about the 100 units of age-restricted housing proposed for this site, 322 residents said the project was “inconsistent with the town’s character” and registered their opposition by signing a petition to the Planning Board. To date, the website we developed to publicize the details of this proposal has been visited over 10,500 times. The public hearing videos we’ve uploaded to the website have been viewed more than 1,000 times.
SOTC now includes well more than 400 supporters, representing a cross-section of Boxborough neighborhoods, who have taken an active role in demonstrating our opposition. Supporters have attended Planning Board hearings; reviewed plans and documentation; conducted research on environmental, traffic and safety issues; written letters and emails to the Planning Board, and conferred with members of other Town boards. Since the fall, we’ve raised a significant amount of money to retain attorneys, who are experts in land-use law, to build the legal case against this ill-conceived project. SOTC donors represent the same cross-section of our town as SOTC supporters: donations range from $20 to $1,000, and they’ve come in from every neighborhood.
Our attorneys from McGregor & Legere have written four letters (Nov. 25, 2017, Dec. 8, 2017, Feb. 5, 2018, and Feb. 28, 2018) to the Planning Board, citing the guidance of Boxborough’s Zoning Bylaws as well as the precedents established for towns in Massachusetts to defend the purpose and intent of their own zoning bylaws. In their legal opinions, attorneys Greg McGregor and Olympia Bowker have laid out clear and straightforward grounds for your denial of this Site Plan Application.
They have also made a clear and straightforward case justifying the authority you have to deny this Site Plan Application. Early on in your review process, there was some question among members of the Planning Board, as well as members of the public, as to what the Planning Board has the authority to decide. As a result, you spent a great deal of time writing, reviewing, and revising detailed conditions for approval, in the hope of finding some way to make this project appropriate for this site.
The futility of that exercise is what finally prompted SOTC to begin our legal fundraising campaign, to answer this question: Is there any legal precedent in Massachusetts land-use law where a Planning Board has denied a Site Plan Application and, when the Applicant appealed the denial decision, the Board’s decision was upheld in court? In his letter to you dated Dec. 8, 2017, Atty. Greg McGregor presented three cases where this exact legal scenario has occurred.
There should be no question in anyone’s mind that the Planning Board has the authority to deny this Site Plan Application. There also should be no question that you have more than sufficient grounds to deny, based on the legal facts and conclusions presented by McGregor & Legere. As Atty. McGregor wrote in his very first legal letter to you on Nov. 25, 2017: “Our main conclusion and request to the Board is to deny this project as proposed for multiple, independent, free-standing legal grounds, each of which is sufficient to justify an outright disapproval.”
You have given the applicants every opportunity to revise the scale and impact of this project. They have refused. They have made no attempt at all to accommodate the purpose and intent of Town Center District zoning for these 60 acres of land, the last significant area in our Town Center that remains undeveloped. The blueprint for this Town Center District land, ever since the zoning was approved by voters at the 1989 Annual Town Meeting, is a pedestrian-friendly, mixed-used, New England-style village. Instead, what these applicants propose for our Town Center is a privately owned island of “luxury” age-restricted housing, with no opportunity for public use or access.
The only reasonable response to these applicants and this Site Plan Application is a denial.
Sincerely,
Steering Committee | Boxborough Citizens to Save Our Town Center
Murdo Dowds, 124 Picnic Street
Heather Fleming, 140 Stow Road
Wes Fowlks, 155 Stow Road
Diana Lipari, 394 Littlefield Road
Cindy Markowitz, 99 Meadow Lane
Francie Nolde, 459 Sargent Road
Barbara Salzman, 73 Cobleigh Road
Lynn Stahlberg, 343 Sargent Road