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The Milton Planning Board signaled Thursday night that it intends to develop two zoning plans to comply with the MBTA Communities law, one if it is deemed a rapid transit community, as the state contends, and another if it succeeds in being reclassified as an adjacent community subject to a much lower zoning requirement.

The difference is substantial. A rapid transit community under the MBTA Communities law is required to come up with a zoning plan that could theoretically lead to the construction of 2,461 housing units. By contrast, an adjacent community designation would require a zoning plan with the potential to generate 984 units.

During a three-hour meeting conducted remotely, the board kicked around some ideas about how to gather input from the public and how to develop the zoning plans. Board members engaged in some interesting discussions about zoning tradeoffs and challenges ahead, but they didn’t lay out a timeline for action despite a lawsuit hanging over their heads filed by Attorney General Andrea Campbell.

Campbell is suing the town for failing to comply with the MBTA Communities law. The suit was triggered when a zoning plan approved at Milton Town Meeting last year was overturned by a town-wide referendum vote in mid-February. Campbell is moving quickly to force the town into compliance. She is pursuing a hearing before the Supreme Judicial Court in early May and seeking an injunction that would require a zoning plan from the town within three months of a court decision.

On Tuesday, Milton tried to slow the process down, asking for a two-week delay before it has to respond to the attorney general’s lawsuit and an additional filing.  On Wednesday, the attorney general’s office responded that the delays being sought by the town would make it impossible for the SJC to hear the case in May. Instead, the attorney general’s office suggested a deadline of March 20 for both briefs from the town, instead of the extensions the town sought to March 25 and April 1.

“The public interest strongly favors prompt resolution of the issues presented by this case, in view of the 129 cities and towns that are obligated to enact compliant zoning by December 31, 2024,” the attorney general’s office said in its filing. “Those cities and towns need this court’s guidance on the important issues that this case presents, and they need that guidance as soon as possible so that they have time to take the necessary steps to meet their own end-of-year deadlines.”

Town officials haven’t said how they will deal with the attorney general’s lawsuit, but the debate at the Planning Board meeting suggested the town will seek to be reclassified as an adjacent community rather than a rapid transit community and in the meantime develop zoning plans to comply with both contingencies.

The law and the accompanying guidelines describe a rapid transit community as a community that “has within its borders at least 100 acres of developable station area associated with one or more subway stations, or MBTA Silver Line bus rapid transit stations.” State officials have ruled that the Mattapan Trolley that runs along the border between Milton and Boston qualifies the town as a rapid transit community.

Town leaders, however, argue that Milton is an adjacent community under the law, meaning it “has within its boundaries less than 100 acres of developable station area.”

Cheryl Tougias, a member of the Planning Board, pressed her fellow board members to move quickly in coming up with new zoning plans in order to have them ready for a vote at Town Meeting in September or October. Board members declined to establish a timetable and voted 4-1 (Tougias was the lone no vote) to adjourn when Tougias pushed for quicker action.

The discussion during the meeting focused on outreach to the public to avoid another referendum, ways to reach the zoning goals, and the potential tradeoffs involved. Residents who testified at the start of the meeting urged the board to share information with the public throughout the process and to serve as a resource to clear up confusion.

Milton resident John Rowe said he voted against the zoning plan in February because he wanted to see all 2,461 housing units built and felt town officials were trying to avoid that by zoning an area owned along Granite Avenue for multi-family housing. Rowe said the 500 units proposed there would never get built because the Department of Transportation owns the property and would not give it up.

But Tim Czerwienski, Milton’s director of planning and community development, said the MassDOT land qualified for inclusion in the zoning plan because the town had talked with MassDOT about purchasing a portion of the property in 2013 and 2014. He acknowledged most publicly owned property does not qualify, but because of those past negotiations he said the Granite Avenue property did.

Board members spent considerable time discussing zoning tradeoffs. For example, board member Margaret Oldfield worried that rezoning two affordable senior housing complexes for as-of-right multi-family development could lead to the sale of the properties to developers interested in building more market rate housing on the sites and the loss of the affordable housing.

Board member Sean Fahy said the state zoning requirement is going to have negative consequences for senior housing and historic buildings in Milton. “When you apply zoning like this to a town like Milton, we are going to have losses,” he said.

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.