On second thought, Longmeadow Shops zoning change passes

Date: 2/4/2015

LONGMEADOW – The Longmeadow Shops’ petitioned zone change from residential to business was approved by a landslide during the Feb. 3 Special Town Meeting by a more than a two-thirds majority consisting of 729 votes in favor with 168 opposed. 

Now that the zone change is official, the Longmeadow Shops will undergo a site and design review through the Planning Board for its proposed expansion project likely sometime in March, Steve Walker, manager of Grove Property Fund, which owns the shops, told Reminder Publications.

“That process is probably going to take four months just because you have to get plans in their hands [and] there's going to have to be a traffic study done,” he added.

The Planning Board would hire a company to complete the traffic study, Walker said; however, Grove Property Fund would pay for the study.

“You could start late summer [2015] or early spring of 2016,” he added. “It really depends on how long that process takes. If everything went really well, we could probably get in the ground in let’s say August. If things are delayed a little bit, it could be spring of 2016.”

Planning Board Chair Bruce Colton said the site and design review process, since its inception in 1991, is “arguably the most successful regulatory procedure in town history.”

He added, “The mere knowledge that it was looming over the horizon was sufficient to get the petitioner to submit two major revisions to its plan.”

Colton said Grove Property added about 100 parking spaces and revamped the traffic flow in the parking lot within its designs.

The proposed expansion consists of the addition of a larger CVS with a drive-thru prescription window, a new tenant in the space in which the existing CVS is located, and a redesign of parking areas, as well as traffic improvements, Matthew Wittmer, principal architectural designer for Phase Zero Design, said.

“This relocation allows us to also resolve many of the access and parking issues at the shop,” he added. “But it also requires a need to expand the site to accommodate these improvements. The area to the east of the shops is the area where we're looking at relocating the CVS, which is approximately 1.8 acres currently zoned A1 residential.”

Wittmer said the existing CVS is about 8,000 square-feet, the proposed expansion would include 13,000 square-feet for the store and would be located on the eastern portion of the site.

“The parking project provides 139 spaces, which are provided throughout the parking center as well as accommodating the farmer’s market at the west end and maintaining the ability for parents to park at the athletic fields,” he added. “I will also add that this achieves 100 percent compliance with the town's parking requirements whereas the existing parking situation at the shops today only achieves 93 percent compliance with Longmeadow zoning regulations.”

The zoning issue was the only article on the warrant for the Special Town Meeting. In a break from normal Town Meeting protocol, votes were tallied on paper ballots that asked residents if they supported or opposed the zoning change.

Both the town clerk and the assistant town clerk counted the votes in a separate room while several individuals watched the vote tallies to check for errors, Town Moderator Michael Kallock said.

Previously, the Longmeadow Shops zoning article failed at the Nov. 18 Special Town Meeting with a hand counted vote of 280 to 142.

A two-thirds majority was needed for the article to pass. Following the initial vote, a motion to revote was placed before the town meeting floor, which also failed by 240 to 144.

After the Nov. 18 Special Town Meeting, town officials became aware of voting irregularities and the Select Board at its Nov. 24 meeting voted 3 to 2 to issue a warrant for the Feb. 3 Special Town Meeting 

Colton said the Planning Board initially endorsed the zone change article by a vote of 5 to 0 at its Jan. 7 meeting. Prior to that time, the board had also endorsed the article at its Nov. 7 meeting by a vote of 4 to 0.