Burlington’s city council has agreed to increase the housing density on a vacant lot off of Lower Hopedale Road despite some misplaced concerns from a couple of neighbors about this property’s exposure to flooding.
The council ultimately voted 5-to-0 on Tuesday to allow high-density residential use on this 1.58-acre parcel, which a corporate entity called NCWR Investments owns near Lower Hopedale’s intersection with Ross Street.
The council arrived at this decision after Jamie Lawson, the city’s planning director, reassured its members that the proposed zoning change would merely smooth out the property’s existing zoning from its previous mismatch of medium and high-density zones.
“Split zoning of property makes it difficult for development and efficient use of the land,” Lawson explained. “So, the applicant has requested to rezone the entire the property to high density residential zoning district.”
Chad Huffine, a civil engineer in the property owner’s employ, went on to inform the council that his client has tentative plans to develop 19 single-family homes on this site.
Lawson nevertheless stressed that these particulars weren’t part of the rezoning request and would be nailed down with more specificity by a staff-level technical review committee.
Meanwhile, a public hearing on this request drew some remarks from Teresa Wiley, a regular commentator at city council meetings who identified herself as a resident of 809 Ross Street.
Wiley told the council that, in spite her desire to see more options for affordable housing in Burlington, she has some misgivings about the location of this particular property, which was addressed as “0 Ross Street” in the council’s supplementary materials.
Wiley went on to observe that the property records place 0 Ross Street within the bounds of a FEMA-recognized floodplain.
This is a flood zone,” she added, “and the people who are most likely to need affordable houses are also the ones who are least likely to absorb the health, financial, and displacement consequences of [flooding].”
Teresa Wiley’s concerns were later reiterated by fellow Ross Street resident Tony Wiley, who recalled living through three major floods over the past 25 years.
Lawson, for her part, tried to reassure the two neighbors that city and state regulations would prevent the proposed residential development from leaking into any areas that are susceptible to flooding. Meanwhile, Burlington’s mayor Beth Kennett observed that the city has a stormwater management program that aims to implement better runoff controls in areas where flooding is a perennial problem.
But it wasn’t until Huffine had Lawson bring up a digital map of the floodplain along Ross Street that the concerns of the two neighbors finally evaporated.
Huffine proceeded to ask the city’s planning director to mark the location of the subject property on the same map, revealing it to be well out of the way of the floodplain. In the meantime, he and Lawson located another lot inside the floodplain that was also addressed as 0 Ross Street. Lawson went on to elaborate that the city uses “0” as the default street number for any undeveloped parcel, which may result in any number of lots along Ross Street with this exact same address.
In the end, this explanation was enough to satisfy Wiley’s concerns about the property up for rezoning.
“It makes the comments moot in regard to the development,” Teresa Wiley conceded before adding that she stands by her broader concerns about the homes built in flood-ravaged areas.
The council went on to vote 5-to-0 in favor of the rezoning request.
