The town has hired Brovitz & Associates to re-imagine our Main Street from Railroad Square to the Peter Fitzpatrick School. Initially, the new Main Street would be a Mixed Use Overlay District (MUOD). MUOD would be enhanced by new building standards and design guidelines and a variety of housing concepts for future town center “infill” development.
A quick visit to our Zoning Bylaw’s TABLE OF USES is instructional. This table lays out what can be built in each of the town’s building zones by right, and which uses require special permitting approval (the table is at the back of the Bylaw). An overlay district is zoning placed on top of existing zoning - like stacking pancakes. The original zoning doesn’t go away.
At the 2022 Spring Town meeting, voters approved an adaptive reuse of selective structures (ARSS) bylaw to save the Peter Fitzpatrick School as Town Residential zoning did not allow for commercial uses (which ARSS would allow). ARSS only applies to buildings, not the land surrounding the buildings. The school property is still zoned Town Residential.
While ARSS and MUOD captured the public’s attention a third initiative was underway - 40R. NMCOG, the North Middlesex Council of Governments, was engaged to identify eligible sites for a 40R housing proposal. The plan was presented in a memo to the Town Planner just before Spring Town Meeting, 2022. (The memo references a 40R working group but there are no publicly recorded posted meetings of this group.) The Town Planner was already discussing 40R build-outs with various parties for the Mill Street and Leighton Street sites. By early July, MUOD and 40R merged into a Town Center Base Zone Overlay District. The rollout occurred at the Planning Board meeting of June 6, 2022 with a rigid timeline of August to submit a letter of eligibility to DHCD in order to present the 40R bylaw at Fall Town Meeting.
The Town Center Base Zone can be seen here: There were three 40R sites: the Peter Fitzpatrick School, Mill Street and Hotel Place. Infill development provided possible affordable housing development such as the Peter Fitzpatrick School site which has subdivision potential.
Floodplains and wetlands are everywhere in our town due to our rivers and streams. FEMA revises floodplain maps every ten years. Town voters have yet to be presented with these new maps but they are extremely important to town planning because in the coming decades flooding will be a critical threat to our town. (Climate Change Impacts and Projections for the Greater Boston area, August, 2022 specifically details trends in groundwater recharge and flooding for Pepperell).