MBTA zoning law subject of multiple amendments in Senate

The budget fight due to take place in the senate this week will apparently include at least specific discussion about revisiting the MBTA zoning law which has caused no small amount of trouble for a number of Bay State municipalities in up-to-date months The fiscal senate budget proposal includes hundreds of amendments and several are aimed at helping cities and towns deal with the impacts of a law that senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr commented is with us to stay We are trying to find a compromise we are trying to find chosen middle ground here Tarr recounted the Herald We are trying to spend less time and fewer information and less resource on confrontation and litigation and vilification of our communities and more time creating paths to build housing An amendment to the state budget offered by upper-chamber Republicans aims to help the Legislature understand the impacts of the MBTA communities law also known as Section A of the Zoning Act which requires towns and cities serviced by the state s community transportation system to provide multifamily zoning somewhere in the neighborhood The proposed rule change would require that every three years the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities assessment analyze and make determinations on the number of homes produced under the law the effects on municipal water supplies wastewater restoration and transportation infrastructure of such units and the impacts of increased housing stock on local school districts Another Republican proposal offered as more than one amendment would allow municipalities to appeal to the state for relief from the zoning law if they find that compliance would end in an inability to meet drinking water or sewage cure requirements for new units or would negatively impact the safety on municipal roads or for any adverse environmental impacts attributable to the developments of housing units A similar amendment offered by State Sens Kelly Dooner and Patrick O Connor would add any adverse impacts on historical properties as a reason for a city or town to seek relief from the zoning law A proposal offered by Sens Dooner Tarr Peter Durant and Ryan Fattman would aim to give those cities and towns not directly crossed by an MBTA direction but nevertheless defined as an Adjacent Society or an Adjacent Small Town a further two years to come into compliance with the law Another Dooner proposal would allow cites and towns to be exempted from the law if less than people live there the state hasn t approved an increase in the town s water withdrawal permit necessary to help additional housing improvement the municipality already has more than low or moderate income housing stock or the majority of the land in the municipality designated for rezoning is greenspace or contains protected natural support According to Tarr none of these amendments represent a free pass for cities and towns not to comply but rather an acknowledgement that very real problems have been identified by those municipalities attempting to We can t ignore those if our goal is to build housing as opposed to just the blind pursuit of strict technical compliance he explained The Senate will begin budget debate on Tuesday