The developer of the (former) Skipjacks and International Bicycle Center sites has filed for a special permit to significantly redevelop the Needham Street site under the name Needham Street Village Shops. The new project will include retail stores, service establishments and restaurants.
Documents for the project, which has a public hearing on Sept. 11, can be found here:
The site plans and application are on the aldermanic website (#213-12): http://www.ci.newton.ma.us/
None of the links above seem to be working.
Very curious – they used to work. The link’s themselves don’t seem to be broken (i.e. there’s no ‘page not found’ message). The city server’s just spit out an empty page for those links.
The plans must have been drawn in disappearing ink … or bits.
These documents are now posted on the Special Permit webpage of the Aldermanic website, archived under “Special Permits 2012.” Scroll down to “300 Needham Street” and you should be able to find the plans and application materials.
Board Clerk David Olson, IT Director Joe Mulvey, Network Engineer Greg Ansalsi and I met yesterday for a teleconference with the city’s website provider, Civica. Briefly, Civica is incompatible with the search engine that the city has used for years and workarounds are required to access documents, old and new. As I understand it, Civica’s search engine can’t find PDF documents, which is just about everything on the website. In addition, some of the security features that prevent hacking into the city website also hinder possible solutions to this problem. So if you go to the aldermanic website and search for, say, “Angier School” or “Riverside Station” in the aldermanic pages, you come up with bupkis.
The IT Department, Clerk’s Office and Civica have been working on a solution for quite some time but, long story short, I believe that Civica was the wrong choice for the city website, based on what the IT Task Force recommended and the fact that you cannot do a simple search for most of the documents the city posts on the website. You can use the Google search engine on the city’s webpage, but you still will not be able to access all of the documents posted online. The best results are obtained using Google’s search page, but that generally brings in way too many results.
Because I value transparency and free access to government documents–which are after all “public records”–as chairman of Land Use I asked for all of the special permit applications and backup documents to be indexed and linked on the Special Permit webpage, which can be accessed by clicking on the button at the bottom of the Board of Aldermen webpage. Because of space issues, the archives only go back to 2012, but as I noted above, we are working on a way to improve access to older special permit and other materials. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (they named a university in Waltham after him) famously said: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by email at [email protected].
*Greg Ansaldi*
The correct address for the project is “71 Needham Street” not “300.” It is actually on three parcels located at 49, 55 and 71 Needham Street.
At last, an explanation as to why documents show up on the City’s website and then disappear. Kudos to Alderman Ted Hess-Mahan for his efforts to enlighten!
Yeah, Ted’s pretty good and I believe he lives in Ward 3….maybe he should run for alderman!!
Excellent idea!