Council welcomes mayor-elect; Planning Board addresses Master Plan

By Neil Zolot

The Everett City Council meeting on Monday, November 10, was short, at approximately half an hour. It opened with Ward 2 Councillor and Chair Stephanie Martins congratulating Councillors-elect, reelected Councillors and “last but not least,” Mayor-elect Robert Van Campen, which elicited loud applause. With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up and a new Mayor entering office in January, agendas are liable to be “light.” Agenda items other than appointments or license renewals were tabled.

The Planning Board started the process of applying the Master Plan to 52 Beacham St. within the Docklands Innovation District owned by The Davis Companies and totaling 106.21 acres of land and 5.04 million square feet of development. Mixed uses of residential, manufacturing, industrial, lab/office, and research and development are likely amid 10,000 linear square feet of new roads and infrastructure and over 15 acres of open space and public parks. Director of Planning and Development Matt Lattanzi said discussion will be about “the land use elements and the proposed amendments to the Design Regulations for the Master Plan proposal. Our Peer Reviewers — namely, our engineering, civil, and traffic peer reviewers — are still waiting on some information from The Davis Companies before they are able to produce a final peer review report.”

It has nothing to do with the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) proposed by Jupiter, which, although slated to be located on Davis land, is not a consideration in the Master Plan, as BESS sites are exempt from local approvals.

The Docklands Innovation District is in the area south of Revere Beach Parkway/Route 16 and east of Lower Broadway. The Commercial Triangle Economic Development District runs along Revere Beach Parkway, with the Docklands District south of it along the Mystic River and the Lower Broadway Economic Development District to the west on Lower Broadway between Sweetser Circle and the Mystic River. The planned Sofia apartment building and the proposed soccer stadium, as well as the battery storage facility, will all be in the general area and have been described as transformative for the city by several parties.

During the March 24 City Council meeting, representatives of The Davis Companies and Speck Dempsey planners displayed artist conceptions of what the Docklands Innovations District off Revere Beach Parkway might look like, but some Councillors were skeptical, particularly Ward 1 Councillor Wayne Matewsky, in whose district the area is located.

At the time, Davis Chief Development Officer Mike Cantalupa and Planner Jeff Speck of Speck Dempsey brought up the possibility of 1,000-3,000-unit apartment buildings and open space with access to the waterfront as an important feature of a new neighborhood in the area, which Speck characterized as “public space beyond the streets where people can come together that form a heart for the community and allow social life to grow.”

On Monday night, Lattanzi acknowledged “there will be a community down there,” with the Master Plan setting up the infrastructure for it. “It will set parameters for projects’ blank slate to build around,” he explained.” There’ll be building on land that hasn’t had this use before. The framework will help us determine best uses and avoid inappropriate ones and install infrastructure, so we don’t have to rip up streets all the time.” It’s the opposite of development on existing streets and over infrastructure laid out decades or centuries ago.

He thinks it’s important for people to know “once we approve the Master Plan, not a single building is approved. Anyone will still have to go through site plan reviews like every other project.”

“This is going to be a significant and pretty involved process given the size and scope of things, with different considerations than a single project,” Planning Board member James Tarr added. “It will be longer than it would be for a single development to align with a comprehensive vision of what we want to do.”