Tewksbury to overhaul zoning rules
Officials try again after the move narrowly lost last year
Tewksbury » After a major overhaul of the town’s zoning bylaw was shot down by just two votes at May’s Annual Town Meeting, the town is getting started working on a second attempt at the project.
Since the bylaw was rewritten two decades ago, it has been amended close to 150 times. Officials say the current bylaw contains a number of overlay districts, contradictory sections and confusing, disjointed rules that in some cases are not in compliance with newer state statutes.
“We’re driving a 20year-old vehicle and the car is at its end of useful life,” said Todd Johnson, Select Board member and chair of the Zoning Bylaw Committee. “Everybody tried to do the right thing along the way, but it’s time to say we need to update it and set a new foundation to work from.”
Before the draft was presented at the May town meeting, the committee had been working on it for five years (Johnson was not on the committee at the time of the failed vote, but had served on it previously). They had held working sessions, hired consultants, hosted public forums and solicited feed5:30 back on the new bylaw, but it wasn’t quite enough to get past the two-thirds majority needed to pass.
The final draft eliminated almost all of the overlay districts, which layer additional rules onto existing districts, making the original map virtually impossible to read for a layperson.
Another major update was eliminating “fees in lieu of” affordable housing units required in multifamily developments. Previously, in certain districts, developers could pay a fee to the town instead of including the required subsidized units for projects of a certain size; under the proposed bylaw, that option would be eliminated, effectively forcing developers to incorporate the affordable housing units.
The draft also included an updated set of definitions for its districts, a new use table to lay out exactly what is allowed in each district, regulations for recreational marijuana businesses and other changes.
Johnson said that while the committee has been back at work for about a month, it is still trying to process what went wrong the first time around. He said