Category: news

This is peak time for Acton democracy: A Special Town Meeting on Wednesday April 17, Town elections on April 30, and the annual Town Meeting on May 6 and 7.

Here are some thoughts on these events. This is a long post, so for those that don’t have the time or inclination to read this long letter, let me start with the main conclusion:

Please come to the Wednesday April 17 Special Town Meeting that starts at 7 PM, to vote NO on this Trojan Horse citizen petition. The article is designed to set back attempts to bring a variety of less-expensive  housing to Acton, in places that support the environmental changes we need: walkable to public transit, and buildable without any need to clear out greenspace.

Here’s more background, with some side trips on the way.

Annual Town Meeting, Monday and Tuesday, May 6-7,

The final warrant isn’t totally ready, but here’s the latest draft as of April 11: https://doc.actonma.gov/dsweb/Get/Document-90697

I wanted to bring your particular attention to two articles scheduled for the second night:

Article 12: Amend Zoning Bylaw and Map – MBTA Overlay District (starts on page 44)

Article 13 Amend Zoning Bylaw and Map – South Acton Village Districts (starts on page 55)

These have been under development, with a plethora of public workshops, for almost two years. They are in response to the MBTA communities law (article 3A) and the input received as part of updating the South Acton Village plan. 

Some background:  The period in the 1960s and early 1970s when multi-family  housing was allowed by-right in Acton resulted in the construction of most of our existing apartment buildings, which provided a nice range of affordability in a town that has since developed extremely high housing prices. But these buildings are mostly more than 50 years old, and many are at risk of becoming unsafe, or at risk of being replaced by higher-cost homes. To allow more of the people that work in Acton to live in Acton, and to allow more economic diversity in Acton, we need more places to live that aren’t huge single-family houses on large lots.  

Articles 12 and 13 are designed to help do that. 

Article 13 allows two new development patterns in the commercial core of South Acton and along the rest of the historic district.  

• It allows residential uses above commercial uses, which is a pattern that many developers find attractive, but it is not currently allowed.  These sorts of apartments have market rents in the lower end of what’s available in Acton, and  there are very few of them currently. 
• For the many old large residential buildings in the area, it lifts some restrictions on converting these houses into (up to) 4 separate units. These sorts of units will also be more naturally affordable than large stand-alone single-family houses, 
• The zoning changes have additional regulations to support walkability and a safe and pleasant pedestrian experience.

Article 12 allows multifamily development by-right in some areas in South Acton. By-right development means that no special permit is required. Acton’s bylaws still need to be adhered to: our building code, our wetlands and stormwater bylaws, etc. Three districts are defined: 

• Along Main street, from Central St to Prospect, the same pattern of residential over commercial defined in Article 13  is allowed 
• Along Central Street, almost up to Windsor Ave, multifamily development (duplexes or multi-story apartment buildings at up to 10 units per acre) is allowed. Since this area is already built up, very few multifamily buildings will be built anytime soon. The MBTA zoning law does not require the local bylaw to force any housing production, just zoning changes that would allow more multi-family housing.
• In two special areas, multifamily development is allowed up to 25 units/acre.
  • The first is the 25 acre parcel that includes the Dover Heights apartments, which has 71 units on 3 acres. The owner there has said that he would be interested in adding an additional building or buildings at that same density, in the 5 – 6 acres of buildable land on that lot. Since the existing building is already close to that 25 units per acre maximum, there would be no economic incentive to tear down the existing building. (Right now, the zoning there only allows single family housing). 
  • The second is the area north of Powdermijll Road, between Old High Street and the Maynard  border. This area has a multifamily development already in the permitting process.

The law allows Acton to require that that at least 10% of the units in any multifamily development  be deeded as affordable to families living at 80% of median area income. Acton has included that requirement in our bylaw. The rest of the units would be sold or rented at market rates. Market rates for units at 10 or 25 units per acre are naturally lower than most of the housing in Acton, which is at 4 units or less per acre.

The planning department has a lot more information here:

http://doc.acton-ma.gov/dsweb/View/Collection-17878

(This also covers two other zoning articles which the Select Board also recommends, but seem to be less controversial)

The only citizen petition for the Spring Town Meeting is article 16, about phasing out the use of gas leaf blowers. The Select Board recommends this article as well. There is a plethora of information about this one at https://greenacton.org/leafblowers 

Town Election Tuesday April  30

The big item on the election ballot is the operating override. Serving on the Acton Leadership Group this year, I worked with the finance committee and school committee representatives to grapple with big gaps between expenses and revenue, in this year and next year, and we all slowly but surely came to the same conclusion: an operating override was needed.  Even after pressing the schools and town hard to  reduce their budgets and find additional ways to increase revenues, we were left with a gap that could only be filled by raising the tax levy beyond the 2½ percent allowed by law without an override vote. It’s been 20 years since we’ve had an operating override in Acton. We don’t want to make it a habit. The size of the override leaves room for some unused levy capacity to be used in future years, and the schools and towns have additional structural ideas for increasing revenues and decreasing expenses that will take a couple of years to research and implement. We know that even if this override passes, residents will look unfavorably on another operating override in the next few years. 

A group has come together to educate and advocate for the override, a registered ballot advocacy committee called “Together For Acton”. Their material is over at TogetherForActon.org. That group includes two people from the Select Board, two people from the School Committee, and many other folks. Another source of information is the Town’s website: https://actonma.gov/813/FY2025-Override-Information

The Select Board unanimously voted to put this operating override on the ballot.

There is also a contested School Committee election on that ballot, but I have no recommendations to pass on. Do you have any recommendations about the choice between Benjamin Bloomenthal, Andrew Schwartz, and Jason Fitzgerald?

Special Town Meeting, Wednesday April 17

You may have already gotten the mailing already, for a one-question special town meeting on a citizen’s petition with this language: “We urge Town leaders, before recommending any major zoning proposal, to perform [and release for public review] detailed impact studies, which examine the maximum impact of such a proposed zoning proposal”. The person who filed the petition has been clear that the reason for this petition was to add extra time for persuading town meeting voters to vote against the MBTA zoning bylaw, and, if this resolution passed, to stand up at Town Meeting and encourage people to vote against Article 12 because there are not “detailed impact studies” in the “maximum impact” of the zoning proposal. The filing of the petition was timed to require a special town meeting before the regular town meeting. If it had been filed earlier, it could have been discussed at the regular Town Meeting as a citizen petition.  If it had been filed later, we would have been able to insert a special town meeting at the beginning of night 2 of the regular town meeting. Instead we were required to have a special town meeting on its own night, with all the extra time and expense that entails. The main signature gatherer for the petition, Acton’s most frequent citizen petition filer, explained that this timing was deliberate.  

The Select Board urges a NO vote on this article. To defeat it will require folks to show up. Here are some of the reasons I heard from Board members:

• The language of the petition requires the impact study to be of “the maximum impact”. That’s putting time and money into a very unlikely outcome. Studying the range of likely outcomes is useful, but that’s not the language of the petition.
•  ‘Impact studies’ is not defined. The planning department already studies the possible impact of zoning articles. What else would this require?
• Petitioning for a special town meeting just to debate a non-binding petition is a waste of the Town’s money, and we would like to discourage that. If this had been done earlier, this could have been done as a petition at regular Town Meeting. If it had been done later, we could have called a special town meeting on the second night of Town Meeting. The timing was chosen deliberately to require the extra expense of a Special Town Meeting on its own night.
•  The purpose of the petition is to help gather additional ‘no’ votes for the MBTA zoning article at the regular Town Meeting. That is, the language is  expressed as a message to ‘town leaders’, but it’s really just an extended advertisement against a particular zoning article, done at Town expense.

Thanks for reading this far!  I’m happy to talk or exchange emails with any of you about these topics, especially if your recommendations are different from mine, or if you have questions.  

Please, if you can, come to the Wednesday Special Town Meeting, and let others know. You are welcome to point others to this post, or copy & paste & edit any parts of it you like.

Yours in community,

-Jim

Jim Snyder-Grant, currently the Select Board chair, will be at the Memorial Library first-floor atrium on Sunday October 8 from 3-4pm in case anyone wants to drop by and talk about Select Board and Town of Acton issues.

(You can also reach Jim at jimsnydergrant@actonma.gov or 508-572-2985 for texts or calls).

Excerpts from remarks delivered Sep 9, 2023

Welcome to this dedication  of the revitalized East Acton Village Green. My name is Jim Snyder-Grant, chair of Acton’s Select Board. With me is Bettina Abe, recently retired from the Town of Acton, who has been taking the lead on this project.  Each of us has a few words to say, and then we will be witnessing a ceremony led by Strong Bear Medicine  of the Nashoba Praying Indians.

This park is dedicated to the memory of three of Acton’s environmental foremothers, Alice “Mikki” Williams,  Carol Holley, and Mary Michelman. Each was deeply concerned about the health of Acton, and their sense of what health meant clearly included plants and animals, earth, air and water, and their sense of caring extended well beyond the boundaries of the present Town of Acton.  They were each taken from us way too early, but many of us got to know them while they were with us. They helped to start and run organizations that are still with us, and their spirit of environmental care sparked a lot of us in Acton to seek to do the right thing.

Here’s just one example. Mary Michelman started the stream teams in 1998, organizing volunteers to do the first stream survey of Fort Pond Brook, Nashoba Brook and most of its tributaries. The data still serve as a baseline for stream conditions in Acton. 

Nashoba Brook is right over there, one of the two brooks that together gather all of the flowing waters of Acton and bring them to Concord and beyond to the sea. The name Nashoba comes from the name of the are where the brook begins, the Indigenous territory of Nashope. Part of Nashope became the Praying Indian village of Nashoba created by the cooperation of the local Indians of the Massachusetts tribe and the  Rev. John Eliot, Puritan missionary. The village lasted as a sanctuary for only a part of the second half of the 17th century. We are blessed today to have direct descendants of these Praying Indians who are still keeping their culture alive, including Strong Bear Medicine, who has recently moved back to Littleton, on land that was part of Nashope and the Nashoba Praying indian Village.  If you want to learn more about the  history of the Nashoba Praying Indians, one good way is to seek out Dan Boudillion after the ceremony and ask him about how to purchase one of his new books.  

I would like to invoke the possibility that all of us here today, and everyone who comes here to this inspiring new park in  the future, will learn from Micki, Mary, Carol — and from Strong  Bear Medicine and his family — how vital it is to wake up to the aliveness and light all  around us, how it is our joyful duty to protect and nurture it, as it nurtures us in turn.

(Delivered Friday Sep 8, 2023 to Town of Acton employees)

Good Morning!  I hope your morning has been as fun as mine.  

The most important thing I have to say is “thank you for all you do” but I get almost 10 minutes up here, and it would get boring to just say thank you, over and over again, so I’m going to add a little bit of context. A little bit of history, a little bit of commentary on how things are organized now, and a tiny sprinkling of speculation about the future.

It’s 1610. If we’re living here we are people who speak an Algonquin language and we are part of the large tribe known as the Massachusetts. Our great Chief is currently Tahatawan, and this time of year Tahatawan has assigned us an area in Acton for our family grouping to hunt and fish. 

A couple of decades later diseases brought in by European settlers have decimated our population causing a lot of rearrangement of what tribe we are in, who our chief is, where we live, and where we get to fish and hunt. Most family bands consolidate mostly to the West of here. The area just west of here is known as Nashoba. The area Chiefs sign paperwork with European settlers to give over control of a big area that includes present day Acton, Concord, Sudbury, Lincoln and more. 

It’s 1725. if we live here, we are European settlers, or their descendants, trying to make a living on our land, by farming mostly, or maybe working in one of the mills. We are one of  just a few dozen families living here and each Sunday we are required to travel all the way to Concord Center to go to the mandatory church services. That’s enough of a pain that we go to Concord and then the Commonwealth legislature and say “Hey, how about we build a meeting house where we can go to services and we will hire a minister. What do you say?” Concord and the legislature allows the creation of Acton in 1735. In addition to church services, we have Town Meetings in that new meeting house where decisions about how to run the town are made by all the residents, or more precisely, since it is 1735, all the land-owning white men.  At first, the only employee is the minister. We do have a three-person Select Board chosen from the town meeting members, but no Town Manager. There are some very part-time jobs for certain specialized important roles like the constable, the assessor, the clerk and the moderator.

It’s 1845. The train now makes it all the way out to Acton and beyond, the new noises pissing off Henry David Thoreau who is camping out near Walden pond at that point. The trains allow the expansion of the industrial operations and the mills around Nashoba Brook and Fort Pond Brook. The Town starts hiring more people, but we’re still working out the budgets line item by line item at Town Meeting.

After World War II, people who commute to the Boston area start moving into Acton in big numbers with their families, and Acton makes a rapid transition from being a town to being a suburb, doubling in size each decade for three decades. Increases in population leads to increased complexity. More people are hired and finally in 1969 Town Meeting adopts a new charter that allows the hiring of our first Town Manager, and an expansion to 5 selectmen. 

Today, with a vibrant and skilled staff of more than 250 people, an excellent Town Manager, a 5 person select board, and almost 50 volunteer  boards and committees, we are a complex organization trying to do our best.

So, I want to take a pause to say “Thank You” again. We are in a time when many people don’t understand or appreciate the work you do; the complexities you deal with every day; in a situation constrained by the realities of our budget. You are getting so much important stuff done. Thank-you.    

The boards and committees, including the select board, proceed openly and democratically to make recommendations, permitting decisions, policies, and a very small set of staff appointments. That democratic aspect means the volunteer side of the operation moves relatively slowly and deliberately, taking time to have public input and have open debate about alternatives. The employee side, on the other side, needs to work much more quickly and decisively. You are organized via an organization chart that gives individual people or departments clear authority to make important decisions and execute complicated projects that often can’t wait for a long public process. The big differences in speed between the volunteer side and the employee side requires a good synching-up process. That’s the job of the Town Manager and the Select Board. Think of us as the transmission between the volunteer side and the employee side. 

I believe the most important annual decision made by the Select Board is our annual list of short and long-term goals, where we take public and staff input and create a list of priorities. The Town Manager then has the job of working with the department heads to work out how what combination of budget and personnel allocation can best get these goals accomplished while still doing all the other regular work that needs to get done because of the multitude of requirements from state regulation, union agreements, the health and safety of residents, etc. 

You can see the last few years of goals linked from the select board web page. This year’s top three short term goals are:

1. Make progress with Great Road safety and complete street improvements
2. Advance efforts to study and implement services and programs that address housing insecurity
3. Explore ways to diversify and expand our public transportation program 

There are many more (probably too many more, but that’s a story for another day) that cut across most of our departments.

What happens from here?  I did the brief history review to remind us that our structures keep changing. Change doesn’t stop now. Some possible changes to consider:

•  Do we find a way to add more democracy to the employee side without slowing down the need for quick and certain decisions?
• Do we find a way to add more professionalism to the volunteer side, while still keeping the process open and democratic ?
• The internet has enabled many-to-many communication (and then distorted it by creating advertising driven social media), and we’ve only begun to figure out how that changes what we do. 
• Right now, it is more and more difficult for those that work in Town to live in Town, or even in nearby Towns. What sort of transformation will allow that to change?
• The climate struggles we are being driven into may mean that larger systems around us may be changing or even collapsing, which will call on all of us to build more resilience and interdependence within our town and our region.   

Whatever the future may bring, I know this group is ready to meet the challenges. I’m proud to be a part of the municipality of Acton, alongside all of you, doing our best to understand and meet the needs of a 21st century Acton. Thank-you.

Town Meeting starts May 1st at 6 PM at the ABRHS Auditorium. The warrant is available at ActonMA.gov/warrant.

Here are the videos explaining the warrant articles

Hope to see you there!