Let’s actually answer the question: Does Cambridge have a required master plan?
Dueling orders about whether Cambridge has a development “master plan” promise to make for a long Monday evening with the City Council as people arise to take their three minutes of public comment before councillors debate which to support.
Which is worthy? The answer is actually very simple: The one that asks for a concrete answer as to whether Cambridge has a development “master plan,” duh.
And only one does.
When given a choice between getting a question answered and having a question ignored, always get the question answered. And this is a question that’s been bogging down development in Cambridge for years already.
Sure, this is Cambridge and all the evidence shows we like to muddle about in obscurity and uncertainty. Our voting is tricky, NorthPoint is our easternmost neighborhood and we have “upper schools” filled with middle-schoolers – and our master plan is, by the explanation of our own Community Development Department, not a simple, readable document but
a set of documents: the zoning map and the zoning ordinance, the City’s growth policy document, ‘Toward A Sustainable Future,’ and the major areawide planning studies that are currently applicable across the city. These documents, taken together, reflect the evolution of the city over the last three centuries, and provide a planning framework into which new projects must be inserted with care and with attention to many trade-offs.
But if four of nine city councillors don’t think there’s a master plan or are even unsure, it’s time to find a way to answer the question resoundingly. (Not to mention that all but one of 14 council candidates responding to a questionnaire during the most recent election said a comprehensive master plan was needed, including Harvard-educated urban planners Dennis Carlone and former councillor Sam Seidel.)
So as promised during their winning campaigns for council, Carlone and Nadeem Mazen are asking (along with longtime councillor E. Denise Simmons) for a master plan process – starting with an Ordinance Committee made up of all nine councillors deciding whether the rapidly developing city actually has one.
It sets a July 31 deadline for meetings and reports, then asks for a roundtable that would set development priorities.
It’s that dueling policy order from Mayor David Maher, Vice Mayor Dennis Benzan and first-termer Marc McGovern that says the city has a master plan – but wants public meetings on it and a report back because it’s confusing to citizens. In the policy order’s language, “neighborhood organizations have expressed difficulty and frustration understanding the complexity of the city’s master plan.”
It’s hard to tell if the councillors are being polite or condescending with their language, or both. Even if they really think that’s the issue, their order is worth rejecting for the very reason that it somehow ignores that there’s a question out there from their fellow city councillors, development experts and some pretty smart citizens as to whether what the city has qualifies under the state’s requirements of nine specific components of a master plan, including how continuing development and population growth works with our transportation infrastructure.
There’s even a complaint with the state from resident Charles Teague saying Cambridge doesn’t have a real plan.
Whereas ordinary people and their towns acknowledge there are questions and just answer them directly, Cambridge has a weird little history of ignoring the obvious to avoid saying the uncomfortable (see Professor Gates, arrest of; and Cambridge Redevelopment Authority, former practices of).
Just this once, what say we actually just gather some experts and facts and answer the question, providing a real basis for conversation rather than just starting our conversation in the usual muddled middle?
Some resources
There’s a flurry of activity online about this, including explanation by the councillors (Carlone’s is here) and requests from organizations urging support for one or the other policy orders. The Cambridge Residents Alliance, saying a master plan is “the surest route to a livable, affordable and diverse city” is here; and here is the position of A Better Cambridge, saying the the order from Maher, Benzan and McGovern “recognizes the important work of previous community planning studies in Cambridge, as well as the critical role new development plays in expanding the diversity and livability of our community.” Online petition signatures and letters to the wider council are urged.
Of the three councillors who aren’t sponsoring one of the policy orders: Leland Cheung said while campaigning before the November election that he believed the city had a master plan (and that it “is the zoning code”); Craig Kelley told the Cambridge Residents Alliance he agreed a comprehensive master plan and citywide planning was needed; and Tim Toomey didn’t address it.
Going into Monday’s meeting, residents may want to compare the approach Cambridge’s neighbors have taken:
Somerville held more than 50 meetings, visioning sessions and public workshops resulting in a 2010-2030 “SomerVision” document that was adopted in April 2012.
Arlington is at work on its “once-in-a-generation master plan process on land use and physical development in town” to guide it over the next 20 years. Working papers forming the basis of the document are being presented through May.
Belmont prepared its master plan in a two-year process that ended with its adoption in April 2010. The document takes the town through 2020.
Watertown is preparing a comprehensive plan for the first time since 1988. It was expected to be complete by the end of 2013.
Medford has a “five-year consolidated plan” focused on CDBG block grants and the like that take the town through 2015, but there are residents who complain about the lack of an actual master plan.
Malden has a master plan prepared by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council that was adopted July 2010.
“…Harvard-educated urban planners Dennis Carlone…”
“…first-termer Marc McGovern…”
It’s hard to tell if the author is being polite or condescending with his language.
Let’s just call this process what it is – a CRA run operation to make sure that their candidate is in charge of the issue (Carlone is co-chair of the Ordinance Committee, chair of the Transportation Committee, and Mazen is heading Long Term Planning – the three committees named in Order 14) and another run at the idea of a city-wide moratorium.
At least Order 15, the one you call “worth rejecting”, doesn’t push out 5+ years of work that CDD has been able to get done. THAT’S that order we should all be praising here.
City government can be great, until you disagree and then we should burn it all to the ground. Is that how it works now?
Whether you believe there is a Master Plan might depend on how many clicks your willing to make to find the data. Starting with the basic City website, try to find the Community Development Department link. Voila, along the menu is listed Master Plan. Click deeper, and you’ll find very old reports on separate sections of the city, none addressing current issues and conditions. Just saying…
Joe,
I feel like we’re reading different orders. I’m not sure what you mean by the other order “push[ing] out five-plus years of work that CDD has been able to get done.” Can you clarify?
Marc
Marc,
One order places the discussion with the committees of the sponsors and the other allows the CDD to continue it’s work.
It’s no secret that many who support a master plan/moratorium do not trust the work CDD has done over the years (Central Squared, K2C2, etc)
I support answering whether there’s a legit master plan. If there isn’t, I support having one. If there is, it needs a holistic, overall freshening anyways, since the last one was in 2007 — but a moratorium is a whole other issue that is not in any policy order to be heard tonight. And I don’t know how I feel about that. I will say that it seems beyond odd to me for the city to have been approving Kendall Square and Central Square projects while simultaneously letting the K2C2 recommendations languish. I mean, just finish the job, right? Do something with them.
Again, that’s a way to eliminate uncertainty, just like answering whether the city has a master plan that meets state law. I don’t see the virtue in inviting doubt and delay this way.
As someone who has followed Cambridge development and zoning closely for years, I would say that yes, we do have many elements of a master plan, but they are not very well connected and the result is that they do not function very effectively as a master plan. No one should be criticizing the work we have done. The task is knit it together so that we can answer questions like how do Northpoint and Kendall Sq./MIT development affect the overall traffic situation in eastern Cambridge and the rest of the city, for example. Will it have spill over effects beyond, and will developments in other areas affect this and vice versa.
We’re probably 90% there already, but not having a mechanism to assess the whole picture is a huge lack, and leads to lack of surety and trust.
If you look at the towns listed in this commentary, none of their plans (they call them different things, not just “Master Plan”) were led by their elected bodies. They were led by their development departments or equivalent and included significant public input and then approval by their elected body. So, if we are going to hold these up as models, the order filed by the Mayor, Vice-Mayor and myself, actually is much closer to what these towns did then what is being called for in order 14.
As some of you may already know, both orders were “placed on the table” and will be addressed at the Council’s next meeting on April 28. During the next two weeks the Mayor will work with others to take the best of both orders and see if they can be meshed in some way.
I continue to believe that a process led by the Council through subcommittees is not the way to go. The trick is going to be how do we create a process that people can trust.
I agree with you, Marc. Trust is the big issue, and it will be hard—but not impossible—for the Community Development Department to win back the trust they so sadly squandered in C2 (for me). I witnessed a process where experts were brought in to feed disingenuous reports to the committee. Facts such as a 40% additional capacity remaining on the T during rush hour, or that 50% of the population living within a 1/4 mile of the Red Line owned no cars (forgetting to mention that many in the study population lived in student dorms) and, most egregious of all, when an expert was paid to report on traffic flow, she studied none of the 24 intersections that were cited as “problem intersections” in a previous study. In other words she was told to study only those intersections where traffic flow wasn’t an issue. There was much more I witnessed to undercut CDD’s credibility as an honest leader of the process. But the one question remaining, and it’s a big one, is how much of that biased leadership was committed under the direction of their boss (Brian Murphy) or his boss (Robert Healey)? CDD? Nice guys but right now I wouldn’t trust them to plan a party.
Point of clarification:
The Carlone/Simmons/Mazen policy order #14 from last night did not propose that the City Council actually create a new Master Plan within its subcommittees between now and July 31st, as some have suggested.
Instead, the order asks the City Council to hold committee meetings so that it can better “address the issue of a Master Plan” by July 31st.
In practice, this would mean that the council would explore the relevant issues — with the help of City Staff, members of the public, and all interested stakeholders — and from there, the council could decide on a path forward.