city-hall

A zoning amendment passed by the City Council last winter relating to special permits and retaining walls was an obstacle to the city being in full compliance with the MBTA Communities Act.

On Monday, the Planning Department recommended—and the Zoning and Planning Committee approved—a fix for that obstacle.

If the full City Council approves the changes, all retaining walls higher than four feet in the village centers will need site plan review. And any retaining walls higher than eight feet will need a special permit.

The expectation is that developers will try to avoid both by building shorter walls (or none at all) when possible.

“Any additional review is a deterrent,” Zachery LeMel, long-term planner for the city, said.

The four-foot hurdle

A few months after Newton’s City Council passed the Village Centers Overlay District plan that seemed to satisfy the MBTA Communities Act, the Council passed another zoning ordinance amendment requiring a special permit for any retaining wall higher than four feet.

Since the MBTA Communities Act was aimed at making MBTA stop-adjacent housing development easier by-right, the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities put Newton into “conditional compliance” with the law until its retaining walls policy could be changed.

“The [state’s] concern is that you can only build beyond a height by special permit,” Deputy Planning Director Jennifer Caira said. “And they believe that will push too many potential developers out of a by-right option. So it’s not that we used the words ‘special permit,’ it’s that we put any restrictions on the height of walls. We can still allow a special permit, but we just need a reasonable allowance for by-right.”

Deputy Caira and LeMel presented two potential fixes that would both allow the city some control and satisfy the state’s by-right requirements for zoning near MBTA stops.

The first option would eliminate the special permit for retaining walls higher than four feet when such retaining walls are needed to meet parking requirements, and all projects with retaining walls higher than four feet would go into site review. That’s when the Planning Board looks at it, scrutinizes it and works with the developer to come up with changes that satisfy various criteria or concerns.

The second option would keep the special permit requirement but move the threshold up to eight feet in the village centers if the retaining wall is needed to meet parking requirements.

Not satisfied with either option, the committee made a two-for-one combo: site plan review for anything higher than four feet, special permit for anything higher than eight feet, and notice given to the ward councilor whenever the issue comes up.

Councilor Joshua Krintzman suggested eliminating all parking requirements in the village centers as a way to simplify the decision, but enough other committee members said they’d oppose that idea that the idea was dropped as quickly as Krintzman raised it.

“I feel like we’re getting really silly here,” Krintzman said. “We spent a lot of time regulating retaining walls, we were very thoughtful about it, we went back and forth a number of times, and we’re about to eliminate all of that in the VCOD just because we want to require parking, which to me seems silly.”

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