The Boston City Council voted 7-5 Wednesday night to reject four nominees to its under-strength Zoning Board of Appeals at the urging of Councilor Michelle Wu.
Wu, who chairs the council committee charged with vetting ZBA nominees, said the move would help align the board’s membership with a recently-passed home rule petition that would require the board include experts on environmental and urban planning. The reforms must still be approved by the state legislature to pass into law, but Wu told fellow councilors she thinks the council should seek to take steps before that happens.
The reforms, which also include term limits, ethics requirements and quarterly reports on variances and conditional use permits issued, were drafted by Councilor Lydia Edwards in response to last year’s ZBA bribery scandal.
“Today I’m asking the council to think not about evaluating each individual nominee but the structure of the ZBA and its connection to the underlying issues we see across the city – issues of inequity, of disparities that our development process has been exacerbating,” Wu said.
Wu has been a frequent critic of Boston’s current development process, which due to outdated zoning requires most projects, down to small-scale work like residential additions or porch enclosures, to seek variances or conditional use permits from the ZBA. The process, she and others contend, helped lay the groundwork for the bribery scandal and has reduced public trust in city officials and the Boston Planning & Development Agency.
Wu added that Wednesday’s vote was not a reflection on any of the nominees: Timothy Burke, Ann Beha, Konstantinos Ligris, Eric Robinson and Kerry Walsh.
“These are all extremely dedicated Boston residents. They’re hard-working people who would add a lot to the ZBA. This is about the larger structural issues in this moment that we’re in,” she said.
The seven-member board, which needs five members present at any meeting to conduct business, is currently operating with four members and three alternate members after one member resigned in the wake of the bribery scandal. The effect has been to greatly slow down the speed at which the board reviews applications.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, in a statement to the Boston Globe, called the council vote “harmful to our residents” and said reforms he initiated via executive order earlier this year were sufficient. Wu is rumored to be a likely contender in the 2021 mayoral race.
Wednesday’s City Council vote, however, could mean only a month before new ZBA members are approved. The next scheduled full council meeting is Sept. 16, and Wu pledged to have new nominees ready for the board’s consideration by then.
The Boston Society of Architects, who along with other industry groups like the Greater Boston Real Estate Board have seats reserved for it on the ZBA, has pledged to submit new candidates to the city in time for consideration then, Wu said. GBREB, Wu said, has told her it does not plan to submit any other nominee.
