I encourage all those interested who were not able to attend to watch the Q&A portion of the HCA meeting last night once it is uploaded.
- The committee spent a lot of time reviewing what has been accomplished to date and discussing amongst themselves but little time was dedicated to public debate. Few of the public questions were actually answered by the committee, at times the mic was just passed on to the next question without any response. This is similar to previous meetings, where there is little room for resident debate. In my opinion, the outreach has been one-directional. The working group is composed only of people who sit on other boards, are town employees, or work for the RLF. There is no opportunity for a regular resident or member-at-large to be part of the decision-making. There are outstanding resident questions that the committee hasn’t answered. - The town legal counsel was present during the meeting. When asked why the Committee was contradicting his counsel as stated on public record, he indicated that he had changed his mind on the enforceability of compliance. He did not provide any facts to explain this reversal. He said that his new stance had come from a collaborative effort with his partners. This was very surprising to hear, as this very same law firm is defending the town of Holden, which has decided not to comply with the HCA. Our lawyer's partners at his firm, KP Law, wrote a motion to dismiss the action against Holden. We should not be rushing to comply just because “non-compliance is a risk” given our own lawyer's firm seems to be giving other towns the opposite message to what they are telling us. There are other towns like Weston which seem to be comfortable taking a wait-and-see approach. - The committee repeated its claim that we will lose millions in grant money by not complying. However, we have never received any money from the grants named in the actual HCA legislation. When this was brought up, the committee did not respond. The committee claims we should comply because we could use one of the grant programs to update the Village Center septic system to benefit a private developer. I struggle to understand why the town would need to fund this private enterprise. Wouldn’t we be setting a terrible precedent? - The committee continues to quote a pandemic-era traffic study and a flawed financial analysis to claim there is "no impact" to current residents. The financial analysis used a cost per student of $6.3K, when our school's cost per student is at least 4 times that. This <https://www.doe.mass.edu/finance/statistics/per-pupil-exp.html> report from the Department of Education puts LPS (excluding Hanscom) at $27K per pupil. The town with the lowest cost per pupil in the state is at $13K, nowhere close to the $6K. Using accurate numbers for that financial analysis would imply steep tax increases for current Lincoln residents. Let's remember that in this case, we are talking about apartments being rented starting at $4K a month. - I strongly believe in providing full transparency on the impact of rezoning to the town. If there is a tax and traffic impact, we need to be clear on it. The town may decide to take on these costs in the spirit of increasing housing, but it should be up to each resident to decide that for themselves, after being provided an accurate cost/benefit analysis. Residents have volunteered to conduct this analysis, but the committee has not taken them up on the offer, so far. - There seems to be a reluctance from the committee to provide more than one option for residents to vote on. There is another option that would entail rezoning areas where condos are already extant and the probability of redevelopment is much lower. The committee is very reluctant to follow this path. I am unclear as to why we do not want to present more than one option up to vote, when we do so for other big projects like the school or the community center. Given such an important decision that may change the landscape of our town for decades to come, we owe it to ourselves to look at these issues more carefully. I struggle to understand why we are rushing to submit a proposal to the state when we still have time before the deadline, other towns are delaying and the guidelines could continue to change. The proposal wouldn't even be increasing affordable housing materially. Karla Gravis Weston Rd
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