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The Winchester Planning Board has declined to rework its approval of a five-story downtown development, telling the town bodies and developer trying to settle a lawsuit over the project that it will not move until the suit is gone.
In an executive session on May 18, the board voted unanimously to authorize its chair, Jack LeMenager, to respond to a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) reached among the developer, Urban Spaces LLC, and the plaintiffs in a pending lawsuit over the project at 10 Converse Place, also recorded as 33 Mt. Vernon Street.
LeMenager, who is among the five Planning Board members named as defendants in that suit, laid out the board’s position in a May 18 memo to the Winchester Select Board and Winchester Town Manager Christopher Senior.
The board said it has a signed special permit negotiated over several meetings and sees no reason to revisit it to satisfy a settlement it was not a party to.
“We see no urgency to re-negotiate the terms of this Special Permit to meet the conditions of a Memorandum of Understanding between the plaintiffs and Urban Spaces,” the board’s authorized statement reads.
The board said it will take no action on the size, mix and number of affordable units in the project until the plaintiffs either withdraw the suit with prejudice or the suit is dismissed. Only then, it said, would it consider convening a public meeting to deliberate on the changes the plaintiffs propose.
“Agreeing to changes under this duress could not lead to a more advantageous outcome than the one arrived at after our thorough process,” the statement reads.
The memo lists as plaintiffs the Winchester Affordable Housing Trust, the Winchester Housing Partnership Board, Martha Jones, John Suhrbier and Allan Rodgers, with Urban Spaces named as a co-defendant.
What happened
The standoff traces to a permit the board granted in the winter.
On Feb. 27, the Planning Board voted 5-0 to approve a Center Business District dimensional planned unit development special permit for Urban Spaces at the site. The decision was filed with the Town Clerk’s Office March 31.
The permit allows demolition of the existing building and construction of a five-story mixed-use building with two ground-floor commercial spaces, a commercial unit dedicated to wireless communications and 34 residential units, totaling roughly 66,000 square feet, and grants relief from certain height, setback and floor-area limits.
Instead of on-site affordable units, the permit allows Urban Spaces to make a $2 million payment in lieu to the Winchester Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
Under the town’s inclusionary-housing bylaw, the project would otherwise have to include three units affordable to households earning no more than 80% of area median income and two units affordable at no more than 120% of area median income.
Those percentages measure a household’s income against the area median income; the dollar value of area median income for Winchester buyers was not included in available materials, so they cannot be converted into dollar figures or specific income limits.
On April 17, the Winchester Affordable Housing Trust and three members of the Winchester Housing Partnership Board — Rodgers, Jones and Suhrbier — filed a civil complaint in Middlesex Superior Court, civil action No. 26CV1040, against the five Planning Board members and Urban Spaces.
The suit asks a judge to overturn the special permit, arguing the board departed from the bylaw’s affordable-housing requirements and relied on subcommittee meetings that, the complaint alleges, violated the Open Meeting Law.
The same day, Planning Board member Brian Vernaglia filed a separate Open Meeting Law complaint against the trust and its chair over an April 14 executive session.
On April 22, Town Counsel Karis North sent the Select Board two memos concluding that neither the trust nor the partnership board had legal authority to bring the lawsuit, and noting that a full analysis of the plaintiffs’ standing would be part of the town’s defense.
The MOU grows out of a settlement framework the Housing Partnership Board endorsed this month. On May 6, the board voted 8-2, with one abstention, to back a draft settlement and authorize its chair and counsel to negotiate and carry out an agreement among the trust, the partnership board and Urban Spaces.
Under the draft framework, three one-bedroom units in the planned building would become deed-restricted homes affordable at 80% of area median income, and the trust would spend $1.685 million of the $2 million payment in lieu to secure those units and prorated affordable parking.
The framework contemplates the lawsuit being dismissed once an agreement is reached.
The Select Board, which must respond to the lawsuit, has not voted on the framework.
LeMenager’s memo did not say when the Planning Board might meet on the matter, and it did not include any response from the plaintiffs or Urban Spaces to the board’s position.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He runs The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
