Hamilton Planning Board Backs ANR Buffer Plan for Winthrop School Rezoning

HAMILTON — March 16, 2021 — Hamilton Planning Board strips inclusionary housing requirement from flexible zoning bylaw draft and backs a town-retained buffer strip for the Winthrop School rezoning. Meeting on March 16, Chair Brian Stein led members Rick Mitchell, Bill Wheaton, Richard Borough, and Marnie Crocker through a section-by-section review prepared by Planning Director Patrick Griffith, reaching informal consensus on a series of edits including keeping the 80,000-square-foot minimum lot threshold carried over from the senior housing bylaw, allowing parcel assemblage, and cutting the compact-unit incentive from 50 to 25 percent. The board voted slim majority to remove Section 8.1.12's inclusionary housing provision over the objection of Crocker, who chairs the Affordable Housing Trust and said she "can't go with the majority on this one." On a proposed business-district expansion around the Winthrop School and public safety campus, the board converged on using an Approval Not Required land division to keep a vegetated buffer strip in town ownership rather than attempting a separate overlay district — a workaround to the business district's lack of mandatory setbacks.