EIGHT TROUBLING TAKEAWAYS FROM THE LATEST WATERTOWN SQUARE AREA PLAN MEETING

The latest assault on the community took place on Thursday, June 13 at the Middle School, before a joint meeting of the City Council and the Planning Board. Call me crazy, but I had foolishly held out hope for an announcement of a course correction that would introduce nuggets of sane moderation into the current plan.

You can find a detailed and objective description of the meeting on Watertown News. Nothing written on this blog post pretends to be objective. In all honesty, I might describe this particular blog post as an all-out rant. 

My troubling takeaways begin here. They are not listed in the order of my perceived importance. They simply leaped from my agitated brain onto my keyboard like passengers off a sinking ship.

TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER ONE: Attendance at These Meetings Continues to be Poor.

By my count, the meeting at the Middle School that brought us one step closer to the ruination of Watertown drew about 150 people, which appeared to be about half of the auditorium’s capacity. Another 100 people watched the meeting on Zoom. Attendance at these meetings does not grow because no conscientious effort is made to cause it to grow.

TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER TWO: Low Participation Shall Continue to Be Called Great Participation.

At every meeting, including this one, the Manager and the consultants praise the high level of community participation. In a city of 35,000, with 25,000 registered voters, the best the administration can do is draw 250 people and treat it like a smashing success. I wonder how many City Councilors, who were elected to their positions by engaging in door-to-door community outreach, are buying this baloney.

TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER THREE: It’s a Compromise If They Say It’s a Compromise.

Once again, the state’s mandate for Watertown to rezone for 1701 by-right multi-family housing units was not up for discussion. And it soon became apparent that it would not be placed on the table at this meeting or at any future meeting.

The number 3,133 has been presented as a compromise between the never-mentioned 1701 units and the once-presented 6,320 units, which was never going to fly. 3,133 is a phony compromise and they know it.

TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER FOUR: The Toy Soldiers, Otherwise Known As Activists, Answered the Call.

The local chapter of Housing For All (HAW) showed up at the meeting in full force and dutifully marched to the microphone, one by one, to praise the Manager’s plan.

Most of them expressed their regret at not having a housing goal higher than 3,133 but were “graciously” willing to accept the phony compromise.  HAW wants taller buildings, more density, and more “vibrancy” in Watertown Square. Like their counterparts across the country, what they actually want is to plant as many housing units as possible onto every available plot of land as their contribution to solving the national housing crisis.  

Their battle cry: Give housing developers more incentives and fewer restrictions.

Their implied message to the City Council: Please endorse our moral crusade!

 TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER FIVE: A Big Land Grab is in The Works.

You know those wonderfully convenient public parking lots behind the library and CVS that you so take for granted? You can kiss them goodbye. Those tempting morsels of land are a developer’s dream. How many housing units can they squeeze into those currently wasted spaces? Enough for Maura Healy and Kim Driscoll to send us a thank you note.

TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER SIX: The Number Behind the Number Shall Not Be Spoken.

We have now been conditioned to hearing the phony compromise number 3,133. But not once have we heard an estimate of the number of bodies that will occupy those units. “It’s mostly up to the developers,” is the likely answer. But, wait! Don’t we have experts on staff and expert consultants who could put their heads together and give us a range? Could it be as many as 4,000 bodies? Could it be 5,000 bodies?

Perhaps getting down to that level of nitty-gritty would spark too many mental images of suffocating hyper-density and is, therefore, officially taboo.

TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER SEVEN: The Traffic Nightmare You Must Endure in the Name of Progress.  

Let’s just cut to the chase. Your motor vehicle, whether it runs on gas, electricity, or oatmeal, is the enemy of the greater good. Watertown needs to become Bicycletown, U.S.A. and you need to either get on board or get out of the way.

The plan to make this happen becomes clearer with each poorly attended meeting. Major roads will be narrowed to create bigger and better bike lanes and “calmer” crossings for pedestrians (“uncarred” people) to better access inadequate public transportation.

Are you already zig-zagging between neighborhood cross streets to be able to get through or around Watertown Square? Well, that’s going to get a lot trickier, and that’s a major part of the plan. The more suffering you are forced to endure, the more likely it will be that you will either ditch your car or pick up and move to Vermont, making way for your bicycle-riding replacements.

TROUBLING TAKEAWAY NUMBER EIGHT: The Wild Card Members of the City Council Control the Future of Watertown Square.

It has been this way since the local election of 2021 when progressives gained an edge on our legislative body. As it now stands, the Council is composed of three progressive ideologues, three pragmatic moderates, and three wild cards, whose votes on any given issue are less predictable.

If I’m correct, it will take two of those wild card votes, added to the three moderate votes, to send the Manager, his staff, and his consultants back to the drawing board with instructions to come up with a commonsense plan that truly fits this city.

Such a plan should call for the continued building of multi-family housing units along with preserving the endangered qualities of the still somewhat townish city that distinguishes us from Cambridge, Somerville, and Shanghai.

The briefest resident comment made during the entire meeting came in the form of a simple one-sentence statement, followed by a simple one-sentence question. Combined, they spoke volumes.

He came to the podium and said:

“You published the results of a poll of a sort that attracts primarily activists. Would you be willing to commission a polling organization to do a randomized poll of the residents of Watertown?”

And then, he abruptly returned to his seat.

How about it, members of the Council? Shouldn’t you insist on getting genuine, unbiased feedback, representing the whole community, not just the most informed, most available, and most vocal among us?

How about insisting that all available avenues of community outreach are exhausted before you vote to approve a plan? All it will take to design and execute that comprehensive outreach is for someone with the will and the know-how to be put in charge – someone who, from the beginning, has been conspicuously absent from the process.

In the meantime, how about hitting the pause button? 

 The real Watertown will thank you.

End of rant.

 

Bruce Coltin, The Battle For Watertown