The Fair Housing Committee discussed efforts to implement the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Section 3A zoning requirements in town at its meeting on Tuesday.
“The purpose of Section 3A is to encourage the production of multi-family housing by requiring MBTA communities to adopt zoning districts where multi-family housing is allowed as of right, and that meet other requirements set forth in the statute,” according to the Commonwealth’s website.
Article 36, which was proposed to bring the town’s zoning in line with the MBTA’s requirements, was rejected at Town Meeting on May 6.
“We have a deadline of Dec. 31, the end of this year, to pass the zoning in order to be in compliance with the state,” Committee Chair Thatcher Kezer said. “And if not, we start losing funding for a number of programs, and the list that keeps growing longer and longer.”
Marblehead is not eligible for many of the grants on the list, but the state is adding to the list and the town would be impacted, Kezer, who is also the town administrator, said.
“To be clear, there is a specific list of grants that we know if we go into noncompliance that we will lose,” Marblehead Sustainability Coordinator Logan Casey said.
Casey said with noncompliance, there is a “black and white” list of grants the town will lose, but there is a larger list of grants in the “gray zone.”
He described these as grants that the town would not explicitly become ineligible for due to noncompliance, but that there would be no “incentive” from the state to award them if the town is not a “regional player.”
“I listened as thoughtfully as I could to all the arguments (and) I thought that the arguments opposing the provision were put forward more clearly and more strongly than the arguments in favor,” Committee Member Dirk Isbrandtsen said. “If we have another opportunity to present, it truly has to be a concise, aggressive, clear presentation of our points of view and an anticipation of the arguments against with strong rebuttals.”
Casey said one of the goals of the new zoning is to provide more houses and affordable houses in Marblehead.
Isbrandtsen said from the perspective of homeowners, it is not easy to convince to public to vote to increase the number of houses and decrease the value of current homes.
Kezer said the next steps to get the town in compliance with 3A are to schedule a special Town Meeting before the end of the year and raise the votes in favor of the new zoning model.
“It’s not necessarily going to we the town that passes it, it’s going to we the citizens who advocate and organize and put the counter information out. It has to be a collective effort,” he said.
Nick Ward, a resident who spoke during public comment, said he spoke in favor of the new model at Town Meeting.
He said voting down 3A was the “best thing” that could be done for it because it served as a “catalyst” to organize residents who are in favor of passing it.