A Proactive Plan for Large Mixed-Use Developments

You may have thought once or twice before, “Why do developers do our planning for us?  They tell us what they want, and we react.  Why don’t we have our own vision?”

Mayor Warren has convened a committee to create that vision–the Comprehensive Plan Mixed Use Task Force (MUTF). The group is led by the rightly esteemed Phil Herr, who led the Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee that gave us our 2007 Plan.

[NOTE:  Two Newton Villagers (Andrea Kelley and John Pears) are serving on the MUTF.  As updates on the MUTF work are available, we will post them here.]

The first two meetings were on the 3rd and 17th of June.  By this Fall, the MUTF aims to articulate goals, policies, strategies and actions to guide large-parcel mixed-use developments in the city.   The timing is chosen to allow the Task Force’s work to inform any actions the city might take on projects at Riverside and Chestnut Hill Square.

The MUTF’s official record is here.  Here’s a good summary, extracted from one of those documents, to get you started:

A task force is being formed by Mayor Warren to help the City to clarify its vision for mixed use centers such as those that have been proposed recently at three very different locations in the City. In each of those cases developers have sought special regulatory and perhaps infrastructure provisions in light of the scale and nature of their proposals. As has been said repeatedly in each of those cases, the City should clarify what IT wants with regard to such development, and let that guide what developers can expect, rather than the City always being a near passive respondent to what developers ask for.

A diverse group of citizens is being organized as a short-term task force to help the City to clarify that vision, using the preparation of a proposed amendment to the 2007 Newton Comprehensive Plan as the vehicle for doing so. That effort is anticipated to run for several months in parallel with efforts to develop appropriate provisions in relation to the mixed use development currently proposed at Riverside, both informing and being informed by the City’s zoning and other efforts in relation to that site.

The task force will be supported by City staff from a number of departments, chiefly Planning & Development, and will make extensive efforts to reach out to the whole community as well as to impacted neighborhoods and interests, including economic development, housing, transportation and environment, to the extent consistent with a compact time frame. The “product,” an amendment to the Comprehensive Plan, will entail approval by the Mayor, Planning & Development Board, and Board of Aldermen.