NAIOP Massachusetts is trying to spur development by filing a score of bills that would lower entry barriers and streamline permitting, but since Beacon Hill legislators have been embroiled in bitter, internecine warfare, the bills haven’t moved beyond the clerk’s office yet.
And they’ve got plenty of company.
The 2009-2010 legislative session is more than six weeks old, but it has yielded no tangible progress on any policy front. The House just debated its session rules, and, as of Thursday, the body had not formed committees.
A series of computer glitches have all but paralyzed clerks’ processing and publication of new legislation. Bills have not yet been numbered. Gov. Deval Patrick has significant transportation and ethics proposals idling, waiting to be assigned to committee. Most House members have busied themselves with palace intrigue and gossiping. Back-room maneuvering surrounding the elevation of two speakers, Sal DiMasi and Robert DeLeo, has monopolized most House members’ time. At a recent MassINC forum, even Beacon Hill journalists blasted the glacial pace, given the economic turmoil swirling outside the State House.
All About Access
NAIOP’s bills, filed in early January, seek to drastically reduce developers’ public accommodation requirements under Chapter 91, the laws governing waterfront construction. It’s proposing reducing public space set-asides for waterfront or filled tidelands construction to just 25 percent of buildings’ ground floors. A set-aside requirement over that level “just doesn’t work in many locations,” argued NAIOP Massachusetts CEO David Begelfer.
“It’s a waste of resources for the developer, as well as for the community.”
He pointed to the Charlestown Navy Yard as an example of a development whose public space is languishing in vacancy.
“Some have been sitting there for 10 years with empty space – it’s a pretty clear problem.”
One other bill would extend the reach of the state land court’s special permitting session. NAIOP had strongly supported the creation of the land court’s permitting session, which Gov. Mitt Romney signed as part of a broader permitting streamlining bill in 2006.
In December, NAIOP released a permit session report card that found the special session had dramatically accelerated the pace at which disputes moved through the courts – halving the time cases spent tied up in litigation, on average.
“Developers who long sought more predictable and faster timetables for resolving permitting appeals now clearly have that venue,” the report found.
Pushing It Through
The new land court bill would seek to carry that momentum forward by accelerating the transfer of cases into the fast-track permitting session. It would automatically transfer cases eligible for the special permitting session to that session, unless cases were judged to be ineligible by the land court.
“It has worked exactly as everybody hoped it would,” Begelfer said. “Now that we know it works, instead of going through two steps to get cases there, we’re saying, if it qualifies, a case should just go directly there.”
Begelfer also wants to give developers two-year extensions on their state and municipal development permits – projects that would be proceeding apace, he said, “but for the financial markets.”
“Financing is pretty nonexistent,” he said. He worries that, with construction loans virtually unavailable, large-scale projects will see their permits expire, forcing developers to re-run years-long permitting processes.
“A lot of work and time have gone into these projects, and to have them start from square one because of unusual circumstances with financing does a disservice to municipalities,” he said. The $2 billion NorthPoint project in Cambridge (and whoever, eventually, buys the thing from its feuding owners) would be one thrilled permit extension recipient, though Begelfer cast the bill as a proactive hedge against a prolonged downturn, saying he was “not looking to carve out [legislation] for one particular project.”
Another bill would amend current brownfields regulations to ease cleanup burdens on many would-be redevelopers of contaminated urban parcels.
“In some urban areas, there’s a lot of background contamination throughout soils,” Begelfer said. The bill “reaffirms that the statute indicates” that pollutants don’t have to be cleaned up past baseline levels that exist universally – a standard that would ease the entry costs for adaptive reuse projects in the state’s economically challenged post-industrial gateway cities.
“It’s foolish to clean a site further than the standard that exists throughout the city,” Begelfer argued.
