Zoning moaning

Last week, Cambridge city councilors voted to rezone most of the city for the first time in 50 years — but critics charge that the three-year process of drafting the new system went wrong at the last moment.

The Cambridge Planning Board had hammered out a comprehensive, citywide rezoning proposal that had the support of local community groups, including the Association of Cambridge Neighborhoods (ACN). “The proposal didn’t satisfy everybody entirely, but it was realistic,” says ACN president John Moot. “I don’t think you could ever have done a citywide rezoning proposal that was more carefully done than that.” It called for adding 17 new residential-housing districts, reducing the density of development, and limiting the often unsightly rooftop mechanical devices used by local biotech companies.

But corporate interests — whose tax dollars allow Cambridge to maintain the lowest residential tax rate of any city in the state — were not pleased. Representatives from companies such as Alkermes (located near MIT) and the Alewife-based Genetics Institute argued vigorously against the draft at the February 12 council meeting. In the end, the council passed a watered-down plan that had been proposed just three days before the meeting by Councilors Kathy Born and David Maher. This version, which passed by a 7-2 vote, reduced the number of new housing districts from 17 to six. And it drew particular fire for leaving out Alewife and East Cambridge, the areas most coveted by developers and high-tech companies.

Councilor Jim Braude, who joined Henrietta Davis in voting against the revised version, was frustrated by the omission of those areas. “In my dictionary, citywide means citywide,” he says. “If we couldn’t make the toughest decisions, namely Alewife and East Cambridge, as part of a package, how in the hell are we going to find the votes to deal with those neighborhoods as stand-alone questions?”

Councilor Michael Sullivan defends the compromise plan, however, saying it successfully balances business and community interests. After all, he says, “the business community probably would have liked the status quo to remain.” And Councilor Tim Toomey, who voted for the compromise, says it made sense to hold off on rezoning Alewife and East Cambridge — especially the latter, since the council recently allocated $500,000 for a planning study of the neighborhood that will be completed in July. (Alewife is also in the midst of a planning study.) “You couldn’t adopt some zoning in that area and then go back in three months and rezone it again,” he notes.

But there’s another twist: despite its intentions, the council may have rezoned East Cambridge after all. Steve Kaiser, an MIT-trained engineer and ACN member, says he realized the day after the measure passed that the Born-Maher proposal didn’t properly state the parts of East Cambridge the councilors wanted to exclude. The result, he notes in a letter sent last Wednesday to Born, Maher, and other city officials, is that “no actual area is enclosed at all” and East Cambridge is now subject to the more stringent regulations of the original proposal.

“There was no opportunity to do quality control on this [revised version] because of the late notice,” Kaiser says. “The penalty for doing backroom work is you don’t get a good, across-the-board review to identify problems.”

The city’s legal department says it’s reviewing Kaiser’s letter. If the new zoning petition actually is flawed, Braude speculates, the councilors will quickly vote to undo what he calls their “unintended wisdom.”

There may be a lesson in all the confusion. As Kaiser points out in his letter, “Any legal controversy of this sort could have been avoided, including any possible legal action to interpret the actions one way or the other, had there been a reasonable and rational schedule for the review of the new zoning ordinance.”

Braude agrees that the system needs to change — it’s rife with last-minute substitutions that get insufficient public scrutiny. “In all fairness to David and Kathy, as they both said to me, three days’ notice may not be much, but it’s three days more than we’ve gotten on any other proposal,” he says. “Sadly, they’re right. But the fact that we’ve done poorly in the past is no excuse.”

BY DORIE CLARK