• The Belmont Center Overlay has many serious flaws, including no financial benefits, no parking plan, no traffic mitigation, and the undermining of our current small businesses. The zoning language is unclear in many places and incomplete.

• The Select Board and Planning Board should revise the current proposal to address critical open issues,  reduce the scale, eliminate the by-right provision, phase in the proposal and tighten up the zoning language. These and other changes could be made and presented to a fall Special Town Meeting.

• The Select Board has repeatedly claimed that the overlay will provide property tax relief and funding for our schools, but in reality the town may actually lose money. Our detailed independent analysis concludes that a full buildout will result in an annual loss of approximately $250,000 in net revenues.  And that doesn’t account for the inevitable infrastructure costs for electricity, water, sewer and public safety. As a result, the overlay will neither delay overrides or alleviate pressure on the school budget.

• Even under the most optimistic scenarios put forth by the Warrant Committee, net revenues would barely exceed 0.5% of the town’s current budget, and could take a decade or more to arise.

• The large scale renovations of the center will force closure of most existing businesses, as has happened in other communities such as Newton.

• Town promises to regulate the pace of development have been removed from the current bylaw.

• Rents in the new buildings will be much higher; the retailers able to afford them will be very high-end or part of large chains.

The zoning proposal is seriously flawed.

• The bylaw is confusing and includes many drafting errors.

• The bylaw's by-right provisions deprive the town of adequate control and protections.

• Many Rules and Regulations and zoning changes needed to implement the overlay buildout have not been developed. Town meeting will be voting with incomplete information on critical issues.

• Four and five-story buildings will overwhelm the Center. No comparable town in Massachusetts has undertaken anything of this magnitude in such a concentrated area.

• The town has not provided up-to-date accurate renderings of the Center Overlay; the one image provided is highly misleading and grossly incomplete.

• There is no parking plan for 500 new residential units and 1,200 additional employees beyond overnight parking, neighborhood streets, or church parking.

• While town officials and boards often claim there will be no overnight street parking as a result of the overlay, they have provided no realistic alternatives.

• The town has not produced a realistic plan to mitigate the impact of the overlay on an already heavily congested area.

• The Select Board on January 26th declined to participate in a public forum that included presentations both by those in favor and those against the overlays. The objective would have been to educate citizens on the approved zoning, its tradeoffs, and the impact of recent changes. The Select Board claimed there had been enough public forums.

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• The Town Moderator decided not to allow a presentation at Town Meeting by those opposed to the Belmont Center overlay proposal. This decision reverses a practice at Belmont’s Town Meeting that goes back more than 40 years and is followed by all other Representative Town Meetings in Massachusetts.

The purpose is simple — to allow both sides to present their arguments and then have a full discussion by the legislative body. Not only is it the fair thing to do, but it answers questions for Town Meeting members in advance and ensures that the discussion will be more coherent and more informed.

One recent example in Belmont is instructive. On November 6, 2023, Belmont’s Special Town Meeting debated the Select Board’s proposal to remove the police from Civil Service. Select Board member Roy Epstein presented the case in support of the motion. Paul Roberts, Town Meeting Member from Precinct 8, was then given the opportunity to make the case against the motion.

Mr Robert’s opening words: “First, I would like to thank our Moderator for giving opponents of this article the opportunity to present our case to Town Meeting.”

To quote a long-time moderator in Massachusetts, “It is universal practice to allow an opposing presentation on major proposals coming before Town Meetings."

While we support hotels in Belmont, a 150-room hotel on the proposed Concord Avenue site is not commercially viable. The claimed tax revenues from this proposal will not occur.