The Newton Planning Department and their consultant, Civic Moxie are hosting a community open house to help create the future vision for the Riverside Station site on Sunday Feb. 10 at 4-6:30 p.m. at the Williams Elementary School (the presentation will be at 5 p.m.)
Go online to see more about the vision plan and to sign up for occasional emails: www.newtonma.gov/riversidevision
A vision plan for the area will assist the city evaluate future development proposals for the site and address how to better integrate the site into the greater community.
Initial thoughts from the meeting:
+The stations and ideas around the site itself were decent. In particular they had one dedicated to potential improvements to the walking paths around the Charles river that are currently disjointed and broken due to bridges in disrepair. It would be great to get these fixed up and have a full walking path from Auburndale down to Riverside again.
+Both the planning dept and CivicMoxie were engaged and receptive to feedback. Had a few discussions around traffic concerns and they were interested to hear and document. They were very clear that the client is the city despite the funding ultimately coming from Mark Development.
-Timing is a problem. It was raised that all of the potential bidders, including CivicMoxie, said that the time frame for this process was a concern. There’s only one more public meeting in March before the final presentation in April. I feel like the city is playing from behind here and we’ve got to figure out how to get ahead of these. The developers should not be driving this process.
-Traffic and environmental impacts were called out as NOT in scope for this vision process. Considering that there’s currently nothing on the site but a giant parking lot and the Indigo this concerns me a lot. Auburndale already has horrible traffic on Rt. 30 and especially the Comm Ave/Lexington intersection, I’m sure Lower Falls also has it’s own problem areas. If the vision process isn’t looking at this how can the city account for and mitigate the potential impacts?
Overall I’m still.. confused around the ultimate goal of this. We know that Mark Development and Normandy already have a plan that they’re finalizing and they want to move forward with a special permit ASAP. With the timing as-is I’m going to assume that they’re not going to make any major changes to their design and just from the whiteboards the vision is going to be significantly different than what they have in mind. I almost feel this effort would be better spent deep diving on their plan as that’s what is going forward for the special permit.
One other aside, Robert Korff was also in attendance and got a bit of a muted reception when Mayor Fuller announced his presence. Few claps and a boo or two which led to a scolding from the Mayor. I felt that was unnecessarily dramatic, certainly wasn’t anywhere near Roger Goddell levels of booing, couldn’t even hear it from where I was in the back.
The coUrbanize site is also up which has the content from the meeting along with public comments:
https://courbanize.com/projects/riverside-visioning/information