The Planning Board race has two challengers, Gary Lesanto and Oscar Mertz, vying for the seat being vacated by Natasha Espada. Both candidates have been active in large house zoning issues. Lesanto, a home builder and property professional, was on the committee that set single family home size rules in 2017 after a three-year process. Mertz, an architect for large commercial and residential projects, was on the committee that made new recommendations this year after a mandate from Town Meeting last year.
The Observer interviewed both candidates for this story.
Role of the Planning Board: Vision or implementation?
Both candidates said a planning board has to be both a big-picture committee and a careful reviewer of individual projects.
Mertz would like to see the Planning Board become more strategic, which, in his experience, attracts developers. “Part of the charter is to actually be planners and to establish some kind of a framework for towns to look at their growth — because towns are going to grow. And so it’s having an alignment of incremental change with something that’s a bigger picture. I think if you try and accomplish all of that work as one-offs, you are either standing still or you’re always kind of playing catch up.”
“The Charles River [ the industrial area off Wexford Street between Rte. 128 and the river) is interesting. But that’s a big picture, and that’s long term. So what do you do in the short term that might tee that up?
“A community with a shared vision, that’s pretty powerful. You have a broader group of the development world that wants to get involved … coming in to provide their expertise and their investment and their time because they see that there’s a framework and a direction.”
Lesanto said he sees differences between development that’s happening as one large project — he mentioned housing developments a friend has done in Florida which start with large undeveloped tracts of land — and individual tear-down, fill-in projects. “Planning in that [large-scale] aspect is a lot easier, isn’t it? If you’re going to be preemptive, right? You have a blank piece of paper. And I think that that’s great and fine in that application.
“I think that when you’re in an existing town, that becomes harder depending on whether or not you want to preserve what’s already there.”
He also said he’d like to see a general plan for the Wexford Street area, but that in other parts of town overarching planning may not work as well. His example related to a personal situation with a commercial property he owns in Newton: “I’m very concerned when you look at a 50 foot building coming up against something that was zoned for 24 feet; [the owner] didn’t do anything wrong, and they built a nice 24 feet, maybe they don’t want to sell yet. I think that those have to be looked at on a more of a project-to-project basis than like a broad plan.
“So for me to come in and say, well, let’s do a blanket proposal for an area like that. [It] would allow for high impact urbanization to come in. The problem is that’s not how it’s going to come in. Because it’s not like the Florida tract, right? You’re going to get a hodgepodge of stuff.”
How autonomous should the Planning Board be?
Lesanto and Mertz each talked about how the town’s administrators, Select Board members, and other boards need to interact. They both also stressed the board’s obligation to understand the opinions of the residents and businesses.
“I think all town boards have to communicate,” Lesanto said. “You have to understand what the needs and desires of the town are from the other committees. With that said, I’m a steward of the community, right? And I think if I was to get on the planning board, the most important thing to me is to represent the residents.”
Mertz mentioned the two town multi-board summits that have been convened around the Pollard project.
“The Planning Board could become the entity at a summit that brings people together.” Superintendent Dan Gutekanst held pizza dinners with other town entities, he said, and the Planning Board could do the same “What does everybody feel about the Charles River? What does everybody feel about how we do better with Chestnut Street?”
“I think we have to do the work to get to that community understanding. It does not have to be confrontational. It should involve all of the diverse needs.”
New revenue in Needham comes almost exclusively from growth. So, is growth a goal?
Growth should be a goal, Mertz said, but without relying heavily on the single family home tear-downs which have provided much of Needham’s recent increased tax revenue. “If we’ve heard the discussions from the large house debate about how the tax increases have given us the wherewithal to do things. I think there’s always the balance that we want to make sure we’re not sacrificing certain qualities of our character, of our community in town, the things that we love. There are a lot of people who feel like a lot of really big houses are changing the character of some neighborhoods.”
“And there’s a huge benefit to having a very powerful commercial sector. No question about it. We do have foundational areas that we could develop for commercial use.”
Mertz brought up multifamily building and accessory dwelling units as ways to increase the tax base without replacing small homes with large ones. “Matt Borelli is doing smaller units up by the senior center and his new project across from McDonald’s [339 Chestnut St.]. Those kinds of things serve our businesses as well as our residents — our seniors and our young families and young professionals. So zoning is important for our businesses, but all of the services — thriving downtowns, different kinds of housing — all that stuff creates a dynamic, healthy town.”
“We know we need to modernize and have growth,” Lesanto said. He’d like to see growth without “urbanization”, at least not near the center of town. He said he was a supporter of the MBTA base plan and that the larger-scale neighborhood plan would have allowed for too much density. “I think that there’s density and then high impact density. I think our town spoke loudly in that regard. It tells me that in large part my fellow residents aren’t against growth. They’re against it too quickly.”
He referred back to the Wexford Street area. “I’m going to be very cognitive of a large project coming in, understanding that any project’s going to be larger, they’re all going to grow. But if you have a 24 foot building next to, I don’t know, a 50 foot — and I’m not saying that it can’t — I mean it depends how a 50 foot building appears next to the 24 foot.”
“How can that [growth] be done with the least impact to my fellow residents?” If new residences will affect the school systems, he gave as an example, “maybe there’s a 55-plus component, maybe it’s mixed use. So it’s not all residential.”
The zoning bylaw for Single Residence B districts is clearly an important issue now. What’s your take on adoption and its impact?
Lesanto has been a regular speaker at the current Large House Review Study Committee meetings, and Mertz sat on the committee. They both say they’d like to change some of the single family home bylaws to place new limits on home sizes. However, Lesanto thinks the proposed changes are too restrictive in some ways — lot coverage and the way attic space is counted in particular — and perhaps not restrictive enough in others. Mertz stands by the work of the committee but points out the proposed changes are not yet approved, and the Planning Board can make adjustments if it agrees with analyses like Lesanto’s.
Lesanto said the approach of the prior committee, of which he was a member, worked but left a gap builders exploited. “Smaller lots,” he said, “we restricted fairly well.”
“We integrated FAR [floor-to area ratio], which Needham didn’t have at that time. We reduced lot coverage. We integrated some language in the height. A lot of the same things that are being discussed today.”
“I was more happy with the fact that it offered architectural incentives,” he said, referring to the way houses that used stepped-back floors or roof gables were able to take more advantage of the FAR allotments. “I think that you see those in the houses. I think Needham has some really beautiful homes.”
It is for lots 10,000 square feet and up, he said, that the current rules are too generous — and had said so at the time the bylaws were implemented. He thinks the current rules could be adjusted without effectively starting over, and the new approach offered by last year’s committee will have ramifications both in potential building size and in design — he predicts much smaller houses and a future of flatter roofs and bulkier second and third floors due to the way attic space is counted in the proposed bylaws.
Mertz said some of the more negative consequences predicted by those who do not want the recommendations adopted are misleading. For example, the potential for very large (25%) reductions in maximum building size assumes that builders would use the largest allowable footprint, but that’s not what has been happening in recent years. The committee’s research showed — and planning director Newman concurred — that, for 67% of the homes recently built, the proposed rules (version A) would have reduced their size by less than 15%, and about half would not be changed at all.
“We have been playing with a set of rules that are more lenient than every other town for a long time,” Mertz said. “It’s hard to put the horse back in the barn … [Larger houses are] just going to be on this size lot, not on that size lot. It’s going to be better for the neighborhoods, for the house-to-house daylight, for the experience of people in one small house next to a big house.”
“I talk to the building department a lot. Those guys are telling me that, you know, 40 to 50% of [houses that] are going in the dumpster are okay. They need a coat of paint, then somebody could have bought it. But no, they’re gone.”
The issue is more than house prices and tax revenue, Mertz said. “We have the quality of the neighborhood, we have the character of Needham, we have appropriate sizes of things. We have to decide as a town how are we going to grow.”
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