See also:
Summary of ABN's Proposed Changes to Article 80 - March 24, 2000
Sixty-one Modifications to Article 80, prepared by the ABN (PDF file, 764K) - March 24, 2000
March 28, 2000
Mark Maloney, Director
Boston Redevelopment Authority
City Hall
Boston, MA
Re: ABN proposed changes to Article 80
Dear Director Maloney:
We are writing about a three-year problem that you now have the chance to resolve.
The ABN's primary purpose is to improve public process, including development project review. One of our major efforts has been to try to reform Zoning Code Article 80. Although Article 80 was intended to streamline project review, in practice it often expedites project approval at the expense of both fair public process and project quality control.
Since 1997, ABN has tried to work with City and BRA officials to make Article 80 better serve the public process. Our efforts have been rewarded with three years of ignored phone calls and letters, postponed and fruitless meetings, broken promises, and outright denials by Linda Haar and Cynthia Barr that the problems we identified even exist.
As a result, ABN's members decided that we had no choice but to take on the very difficult task of doing what our City government refused to do for us. When we started on this revision, Cynthia Barr even refused to give us an electronic copy to work with, which added re-entering and proofreading the entire text to the tedious multi-year task of studying and marking up changes.
ABN's massive volunteer effort to read, understand, and evaluate Article 80 yielded sixty-one recommendations that address both public participation and quality control in the City's development review process. During this effort, our concerns were confirmed as we saw the loopholes we had identified used just as we had feared. To document these loopholes more systematically, we asked then-director Thomas O'Brien to give us a comprehensive log of Article 80 reviews, outlining how Article 80 was actually being applied (which steps were taken or waived, comments received, bases for approvals, etc.). The BRA should be maintaining records like this routinely, and making them easily available to the taxpayers as public information. Mr. O'Brien refused. For volunteers to have to retrieve and re-assemble the BRA's records is an enormous burden that should not be necessary.
We urge you and your staff to cooperate in good faith, meet with us, and seriously review each of our sixty-one recommendations and the careful rationales behind them. We believe you have the authority, and the obligation, to end the past years of obstruction. However, absent your cooperative response, we will seek redress through legislative channels.
Enclosed are: (1) ABN's 11-point executive summary; and (2) the full text of each recommendation (PDF file, 764K), and its rationale, inserted directly into the existing regulation for easy reference. So that you personally can be enlightened on the issues, we urge you to read this material yourself and not to relegate it to staff members, who have ignored community concerns for years.
The problems in Article 80 are symptomatic of a larger breakdown. The city is suffering from the routine manipulation of City and State regulations to benefit developers at the expense of communities, as evidenced by the misuse of ZBA variances to grant spot zoning, and the improper use of Planned Development Areas, Chapter 121A agreements, and Institutional Master Plans to evade zoning altogether.
I will call you next week to schedule a meeting with our Article 80 Task Force members: Ned Flaherty, Frank Jordan, Max Trager, Cynthia Steil, Bruce Bickerstaff, Alison Pultinas, and myself.
Sincerely,
Shirley Kressel,
President, Alliance of Boston Neighborhoods
Cc: Mayor Thomas Menino, City of Boston
City Councilors
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