Poison Pill Amendments: The Challenge Facing Town Meeting

Our town’s legislature will be meeting on March 4th to consider two important proposals by the Belmont’s Planning Board that are intended to amend our town’s zoning bylaws to promote commercial development in Belmont Center.

If you’ve been reading letters to the Belmont Voice or dropped into any of the various social media forums on Facebook or NextDoor frequented by residents, you know these are contentious issues. But a series of really odd amendments proposed by Town Meeting member Bob McGaw makes what was going to be a lively and contentious Town Meeting even more tenuous.

If you ask me, that’s actually the point. Mr. McGaw’s amendments related to the zoning overlay proposals appear to be poisoned pills: vague calls for changes and corrections that are intended to confuse and disrupt an important Town Meeting debate.

In this post, I’ll break down my “read” on the McGaw amendments. I’ll also share insights from our Town Planner and ask questions about the intent and potential impact of these amendments.

(I did reach out to Mr. McGaw to seek explanations of his Amendments. Bob declined to take part in either a phone or email interview so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If Bob does ultimately respond after this post goes live, I will update this post as needed.)

The Overlay: Clear Rules To Encourage Development

Some background: The Belmont Center zoning bylaw amendments that are “the overlay” are laid out in two Town Meeting articles: Article 2 and 3. The goal of each is to create an optional zoning “overlay” that applies to specific areas of town and encourages private developers to update and modernize the Belmont Center commercial district. The areas affected are Belmont Center (Article 2) and the “Center Gateway” – that small commercial strip of Concord Avenue just outside of Belmont Center (Article 3). If passed, Articles 2 and 3 will add new sections to Belmont’s Zoning By-Law: Section 10, the “Belmont Center Overlay District” and Section 10A, the “Center Gateway Overlay District” containing the overlay zoning language.

Belmont Center is one of our community’s largest sources of commercial tax revenue. The proposed Town Meeting articles provide an optional “overlay” to the Town’s current, outdating zoning bylaws that encourages the construction of multi-use buildings. They do so by creating a “form- based zoning framework” that will guide redevelopment in Belmont Center: providing clear regulations for the size, scale, and design of buildings and allowing a broader mix of uses (retail, commercial, residential, hotels, etc.) The goal is to give potential developers and investors clear rules and a streamlined process for getting their proposed development approved and completed. New commercial spaces will attract new businesses (see the new mixed use buildings in Waverley Square as an example) that draw in shoppers – generating more commercial tax revenue and helping the existing Belmont Center businesses, as well.

Condemnment: A new take on the “amendment”?

But the ideal of a fair and fact based debate of these two articles and their impact at Town Meeting is complicated by a series of amendments submitted by one Town Meeting member: Bob McGaw, a longtime Town Meeting Member from Precinct 1 and Chairman of the Bylaw Review Committee.

I won’t dig into all of the amendments Bob has proposed. (There are a dozen!) Instead, I’ll focus on the two Amendments that relate specifically to the zoning overlay proposals. As outlined in this letter from Mr. McGaw to Town Clerk Ellen Cushman on January 14th, the purpose of the amendments is to essentially erase the overlay language regarding Belmont Center and the Center Gateway in Articles 2 and 3 and replace it with a single word: “(Reserved)”.

What gives? As Mr. McGaw explains in his letter to the Town Clerk and a subsequent email to Town Meeting members: he is concerned that the proposed articles have ”errors, (lack) needed definitions, (fail) to identify definitions consistently…and (violate) the General Bylaws.” The proposed bylaw language “needs to be carefully reviewed and corrected before submitting it to Town Meeting,” McGaw suggests. The articles need to be ”made understandable, made consistent,” he argues.

In my experience, amendments to Town Meeting articles are straight forward. They propose clear changes to the language of a Town Meeting article. As the Town Meeting handbook explains, that might include adding, deleting or substituting words in the motion to be amended. Town Meeting then votes to approve or reject the amendment before voting to pass or reject the article as submitted or as amended.

What amendments don’t do is gut all the language from an article, then ask Town Meeting to pass the blanked out article as a placeholder. From what I can tell: that’s a first. After all, if your opposition to an article is so substantial that you want to gut it, don’t amend it – move Town Meeting to dismiss the article and, failing that, lobby to defeat its passage.

McGaw’s Amendments: a ‘head scratcher’

That’s not the case with Mr. McGaw’s amendments, which cite errors and inaccuracies that his amendments make no effort to identify. Amendments that call for copy edits to articles aren’t unheard of – but they’re unusual. That’s because things like the factual errors, typos, formatting issues and flawed definitions that Mr. McGaw refers to are typically called out and corrected before Town Meeting.

The Planning Board held more than 17 public hearings on the proposed zoning overlay for Belmont Center going back to April of last year, Belmont’s Director of Planning and Building Christopher Ryan pointed out. “We took a lot of comments from the public that were actionable and reasonable and made a number of changes to the bylaw,” Ryan said.

As a member of Town Meeting and the Bylaw Review Committee, Mr. McGaw has a long record of working with committees like the Planning Board to do this in the lead up to Town Meeting.

“Typically in the past, Bob reached out well in advance and gave detailed assessments of what needed to be changed. This time he did not do that,” Ryan told me.

A February 17th report for the Planning Board by Director of Planning and Building Ryan notes that “amendment sponsor Robert McGaw submitted a list to the Town Administrator purportedly to show evidence of how the proposed By-Law is not ready for consideration.” But “this list provided no details… Without specificity, there is nothing to review or consider for revisions or error corrections.”

“Bob gave relatively broad descriptions of things with no details and nothing to look to specifically.” Director of Planning and Building Ryan said.

The same lack of specifics was a point of discussion during Mr. McGaw’s meeting with the Select Board to discuss his amendments on February 9th. Check it out here starting at around the 2:19:00 mark. He is asked by Select Board Chair Matt Taylor as well as Select Board Member Taylor Yates to provide specific details on what changes he wished to see in the articles – but Mr. McGaw failed to do so.

“These amendments are a bit of a head scratcher,” Select Board member Taylor Yates said. “Bob and I tend to get along because we share a passion for tidiness, which is why in the past we’ve worked collaboratively during the drafting process to review his suggestions and, where they have merit, incorporate them. This time around Mr. McGaw ignored or declined multiple invitations to collaborate on the bylaw, including ones sent to him in writing months ago.”

Fixing the articles: “We had to guess.”

That left the Ryan’s team and the Planning Board in the position of having to guess what McGaw’s critiques were referring to.

“We had to guess. We went through the (proposed) bylaws one more time and found some things that needed to be capitalized. Small issues (but) nothing that rise to the level of rendering the bylaw not ready,” he said.  

With the edits made, the Planning Board shared a draft with Mr. McGaw last week in order for him to review the document and give them his feedback at last week’s meeting. “We thought (McGaw) would be at the Planning Board meeting to talk about his amendments, but he didn’t come. We didn’t have a chance to hear from him,” Ryan said.

Ryan and McGaw did eventually connect last Friday to review the Planning Board’s changes, Ryan said.

Planning Board recommends rejecting McGaw’s amendments

In the end, the Planning Board voted to reject Mr. McGaw’s amendments seeking to remove the zoning overlay language with the word “(Reserved)”, as well as his proposed amendments regarding overnight parking.

(As it turns out, parking is part of the Town’s general bylaws, not its zoning bylaws, so the Planning Board doesn’t really have a say in parking-related matters.)

Director of Planning and Building Ryan told me that he is “confident that we have a complete and workable bylaw.” The errors identified have been small, copy-related issues (spelling, capitalization, heading and caption placement) and not material to the articles themselves. “I think the bylaw reflects that fact that the Planning Board listens and is responsive to the public,” Ryan said.

“No one waited around,” said Select Board member Yates. “The Planning Board, Office of Planning and Building, Select Board, and Town Counsel all reviewed the bylaw and are satisfied with it.”

For Town Meeting: keep it simple

The question now for us as Town Meeting members is “what to do” with these Amendments? To be clear, not all 12 of Mr. McGaw’s amendments are “poison pills.” One of two amendments Mr. McGaw proposed last week seeks to update the town’s zoning bylaws to establish regulations for Hotels and the classes of hotels allowed in Belmont as well as where they can be build. Specifically, that ”the Center Gateway Overlay District and other districts, should be the zoning sections that allow hotel use as defined by §6.15.” That seems straight-forward and focused so…sure.

As for the amendments that call for the gutting of Articles 2 and 3 based on vague criticisms? It is Town Meeting’s job to stay focused on the issue at hand and the facts (not innuendo) associated with that.

Mr. McGaw’s presentation on the articles should clearly identify any specific issues with the articles that warrant corrections. If the message is to gut the language of the articles, Mr. McGaw owes Town Meeting a better justification than spelling errors and missed punctuation. At the same time, we as Town Meeting members should be ready to call out any vagary and hand-waving by Mr. McGaw and others as we debate these amendments and articles and vote to reject or approve them.

That’s my 2c. If you support the Belmont Center Overlay, contact the Town Meeting members for your precinct and ask them to vote to reject Mr. McGaw’s amendments and pass Articles 2 and 3 as written.