The next step in the town’s effort to reduce the residential tax burden is about to begin, starting with a presentation from a Harvard lab group next week on the Brighton Street Corridor overlay project.
According to Director and Town Planner Chris Ryan, students from the Harvard Kennedy School Urban Politics Field Lab were interested in applying the skills they’d learned from the program to a “specific, on-the-ground, real-world project.”
“We thought it might be nice to connect them to our Brighton project, which is the next project coming along after the center,” said Ryan, adding that the work was completed free of charge to the town.
The lab group’s findings will be presented at a hybrid public meeting on Dec. 4 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. at Belmont Town Hall.
An overlay is a type of zoning that exists in addition to the underlying zoning for a particular district. The Belmont Center overlay project is currently underway. In the case of the center, the overlay the town is proposing would allow for increased building heights on Leonard Street and would include plans for mixed-use development.
The recommendation for an overlay in Belmont Center stems from a 2008 report, “A Planning Vision for Belmont Center.” “The reason the Brighton project is different is it did not have a vision plan or any kind of plan developed prior to doing the zoning,” Ryan said. Although the town was able to get some preliminary visioning done using the consultant hired for Belmont Center, the Harvard group engaged in more intensive public outreach specific to the Brighton Street Corridor.
Following a site walk of the property, the students engaged with a number of area stakeholders, including abutters and business owners, as well as respondents to a planning department survey about the Brighton Street Corridor project. The group also held focus groups, he said. Discussions were aimed at determining what people would like to see in the area.
“What we’re going to do is take the results and the findings of the Harvard project and we’re going to integrate them into the plan outline and then see what we have,” Ryan said. “We probably have some more work to do to develop some statistics and talk about existing conditions; then we’ll develop some goals and action items from there.”