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Hello Ward 5! In today’s newsletter, I’m covering updates on Countryside, dog ordinances, remote participation in meetings after the pandemic, the gun store, gas leaks economics, and a debate on the Local Preference component of our Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance.
Reminder: The Friends of Hemlock Gorge’s annual spring cleanup is tomorrow (Saturday) morning! Volunteers should meet at Hamilton Place, rain or shine, between 9:30 and 10 a.m. See you there!
Earlier this week, I was invited to tour a backyard hive of honeybees in Ward 5, as a group of citizens and city leaders continue to discuss and debate safe, appropriate, and ecologically-sound regulation of local hobbyist beekeeping in Newton. It was very cool to experience this in person!
I have a number of constituents who already care for hives on their property, and I think that’s a wonderful hobby, but it’s in a bit of a gray area right now, and we want neighbors to feel comfortable. We also don’t want to be disruptive to the local ecology (especially to native, wild bee species).
We will probably end up with something along the lines of the current regulations for keeping a small number of pet chickens in the backyard for non-agricultural purposes, but it remains to be seen.
Gun store update
In my newsletter last week, I noted the recent controversy about a gun store attempting to open in Newton, to significant public backlash. The Zoning and Planning committee will begin deliberating on drafting an ordinance regarding firearms businesses in Newton on Monday, April 26. There is also set to be a public hearing on May 10.
No vote has yet been taken on a draft for an ordinance, but a Firearms Zoning Amendment was filed to the docket this week. The proposal requests to amend Chapter 30 of the Newton Zoning Ordinance to establish regulations for a gun establishment. Some of the proposals include amending the sections about Allowed and Restricted Uses to regulate the usage of land, structures, and buildings for the operation of gun retail and ranges. It also proposes to restrict these uses to Business 4, Mixed Use 1, Manufacturing, and Light Manufacturing Districts only. (We might restrict it even more narrowly as we move ahead in deliberations.) The City Council would need to grant special permits for these establishments by a 2/3rd vote, and the proposal also asks to establish minimum standards and criteria for the granting of such special permits. That likely represents a significant hurdle for potential firearms businesses.
The city now has a full FAQ webpage about the Firearms Zoning Amendment and the gun store seeking to open on Washington St in Newtonville.
Countryside update
Exciting news for many of our Ward 5 families on the much-needed rebuilding of Countryside! As you might have seen from the Mayor’s newsletter, on April 14, the Massachusetts School Building Authority voted to invite Countryside Elementary School into their funding process. The City and Newton Public Schools had identified Countryside as one of the top priority schools in the City needing improvements.
The Mayor explained that the next steps will be to establish a School Building Committee, including community representatives, to begin a public participation process and to develop a website for the project.
Programs & Services Committee work: Dogs; remote meetings
The Programs & Services Committee met virtually on April 21 to once again discuss dog ordinances as well as remote participation in meetings after the end of the COVID-19 emergency.
There will be a review soon of possible changes to off-leash dog ordinances, specifically with an eye toward increasing the fees required by dog walking companies, requiring background checks of dog walkers, and requesting regulations for dog walking and dog daycare companies to assure the appropriate care for dogs.
This week we were discussing another possible change: slightly increasing the fines for failure to license a dog or violation of leash regulations. Revenues from these increases would go to support dog-related services like city-installed dog waste bins.
I also suggested that we consider at a future meeting an automatic enrollment and billing process for dog licenses, similar to excise tax billing, rather than just mailing reminders to lapsed license-holders, since many unlicensed dogs in Newton are actually just lapsed licenses.
The vote on these dog ordinances was held for legal-procedural reasons this week, but we think we are making progress.
Regarding participation in City Council meetings, some remote participation was already allowed by the state in non-emergency circumstances, but this option had not been exercised pre-pandemic. The Rules Subcommittee of Programs & Services will consider rules within the City Council on how to make the permanent state-mandated/regulated remote participation work in practice.
State law still requires in-person participation by the elected or appointed officials unless it is "unreasonably difficult" to attend. However that is not well defined – other than encouraging in-person attendance whenever possible. We might add some rules to encourage early notification of planned in-person or non-in-person attendance by members to the presiding officer, whenever possible, so that we don’t have to cancel meetings for quorum reasons.
Some elected members would still always need to attend in person because there is a state requirement for a physical quorum that must be held in the room (even if other participants are present remotely). And our general sense was that members should try to be there in person after the pandemic whenever possible, but that we will be relatively liberal about remote participation, since we certainly don’t want members to be forced to attend while ill or if they have a family emergency.
We also recognize that some members might have ongoing medical or physical reasons that make in-person participation difficult on a regular basis and we want to accommodate that in the same way we won’t be expecting a member in a wheelchair to stand during an in-person meeting.
The Open Meeting Law and other state rules also only govern elected members and appointed commissioners, so the Council could (and we feel should) make it possible for staff members and the general public to attend meetings virtually after the pandemic without restrictions.
Gas mains: Replace or repair?
Frequently, the Newton City Council is asked to vote to approve grants of location for replacement natural gas mains by private utility companies. Sometimes these requests are in areas with no leaks and sometimes they are in areas with many leaks. But are gas main replacement projects always the appropriate solution compared to repair projects?
I observed this week in the City Council while voting in protest against a gas main replacement project in my own ward that it’s counterintuitively more profitable for the gas company (and its shareholders) to do a replacement project, even when a repair project would be more appropriate – and I don’t think that’s the right move for our neighborhoods. A councilor asked me for an explanation of the financial point I was making, and I thought it might be useful for Ward 5 constituents to receive that explanation as well.
Gas leak repairs, as opposed to new (replacement) gas mains, cost about $3,000 to $5,000 per leak, but the company has to absorb the cost of the repair. Pipe replacement costs $1.2-1.8 million per mile, which would be much more expensive except that the Gas System Enhancement Program (GSEP) allows the company to charge the cost to the ratepayers, among other financial advantages.
Replacement projects also inherently represent a deeper, longer investment in continued natural gas infrastructure when we should be moving away from it, whereas gas leak repairs represent temporary safety fixes that can tide us over until our community gets off of natural gas.
Of course, if some pipes are so degraded that they're like swiss cheese, pipeline replacement may be the only option, but all leak-prone pipelines should be considered for repair before deciding on complete replacement. That's the kind of question that needs to be asked well before a final vote by the City Council. (Unfortunately I always have a conflicting committee meeting when these gas main items come before Public Facilities, and so I have only occasionally been able to press the company’s representatives on the point about whether a proposal is for safety or for profits, masqueraded as safety improvements.)
The gas company is also consistently unprepared in committee meetings and late in submitting materials to the full Council, which is frustrating for being able to evaluate the merits of a gas project in a timely manner before a vote.
Reconsidering Local Preference in affordable housing
The City Council’s Zoning & Planning Committee (ZAP) last week took up a review of and possible amendment to the Local Preference component of our Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance. It currently provides for a preference for local applicants for up to 70% of the Inclusionary Units – i.e. legally-required affordable apartment units in housing developments – in the tenant applicant lotteries to lease those units.
Local Preference is actually defined in state law more broadly than you might think, which makes it more complicated to evaluate. The state categories include:
1.) Current residents: A household in which one or more members is living in the city or town at the time of application.
2.) Municipal Employees: Employees of the municipality, such as teachers, janitors, firefighters, police officers, librarians, or town hall employees.
3.) Employees of Local Businesses: Employees of businesses located in the municipality.
4.) Households with children attending the locality’s schools, such as METCO students.
Last week at ZAP, the city’s consultant presented her analysis of the data on the demographic breakdown of tenants (local vs non-local, White vs non-White) applying to and receiving those units in three developments as case studies: Hancock Estates, 28 Austin St. and Trio (Washington Place).
Some of the questions the consultant urged the City Council to consider about our Local Preference policies are: What does Newton want to accomplish with a local preference policy, if one is retained? Does our current policy meet the City’s expectations? What are the advantages, disadvantages, and unintended consequences? And, how do the costs compare to the benefits?
As noted in the docket item currently before the City Council, various groups including the Fair Housing Committee and the Newton Housing Partnership have questioned whether the percentage of Local Preference set aside for current Newton residents should be lowered, with a specific, stated goal of increasing racial diversity in Newton. But there are also other considerations such as whether Local Preference might be useful in helping city employees, METCO families, or local workers be able to afford to move to Newton, a community they already have a strong connection to. In many cases, that might not be in conflict with the diversity objective. The question then becomes whether or not these goals are actually being served by the Local Preference policy, or if it isn’t working for those objectives either.
Some groups in Newton have taken a firm position that the preference should be reduced or even abolished. Other peer communities have recently undertaken similar studies or simply moved ahead with a policy change.
Some takeaways from the local preference study
The review of the three Newton case studies found that, overall, White, non-Hispanic local households had benefited the most from Newton’s local preference policy. This is based on the fact that selection rates were higher for White applications in each development than for applicants of color. When split into local and non-local households, White applicants were favored in local households, while selection rates were higher for applicants of color (highest for Asian households) in non-local households.
Regarding applications for affordable units, Newton’s lotteries unsurprisingly receive far more applications than there are units available: 1,157 applicants vs 61 units in the case studies. Some 73% of the applicants were non-local applicants, vying for just 30% of the units available to non-local applicants.
In the consultant’s case studies, local applicants were significantly more likely to be selected by lottery and then successfully complete the leasing process than non-local applicants, reflecting both the larger number of units set aside for local applicants and the larger pool of non-local applicants for a much smaller number of units. (14% of local applicants and 2% of non-local applicants moved into a unit.)
Moreover, it is not just a concern that local preference sets aside for 70% of affordable units in a project. This, on its face, means local applicants have more units they qualify for that are unavailable to non-local applicants, but also it must be emphasized that the local applicants who don’t win the lottery for the units reserved for local preference can also apply for the 30% of generally available (non-locally-reserved) affordable units, which puts them in further competition with non-local applicants, compounding the problem.
One other finding from the case studies: The proportion of local White, non-Hispanic tenants in the affordable units of the developments is also greater than this population’s share of the applicant pool.
The City Council will need to keep reviewing the data and debate what to do about the findings, especially in light of the question posed to us about what our policy objectives really are.
Additionally, while the review has so far focused on racial demographics, we might need additional information on whether or not the Local Preference policy is having any effect (or could be revised in some way) to help the other categories (mentioned above) of people who do not live in Newton but work here or attend school here.