Williamstown Planning Board Refining Campus Overlay Proposal
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Planning Board last week discussed bringing a campus overlay proposal to town meeting as soon as this May.
One member of the board and the town planner have been consulting with officials at Williams College on a potential fix to a long-term issue: The bulk of the college's campus is in the General Residence zoning district, where the kinds of buildings the school needs do not fit the regulatory regime.
Much of campus was built out before the advent of zoning, and those structures are protected by the rules around pre-existing non-conformity. But a lot of the school's infrastructure has been built since the town instituted zoning under a state-mandated exception created for academia.
"This is how these things get permitted now: I write a scoping letter that says, 'Williams College, you cannot do this building the way you want to do because of all these reasons in zoning, which is just a 1- to 4-family zoning district that we're trying to apply to this large institution,' " Community Development Director and Town Planner Andrew Groff told the board at its Oct. 14 meeting.
"And then the college goes to the Zoning Board of Appeals and says, 'Here's this voluminous set of case law from the last 40 years that says, the town is wrong.' That's why it feels like the college can do whatever it wants."
Statutes and judicial precedents in Massachusetts make it clear that local zoning cannot "practically prohibit" an educational use.
The Planning Board's current exercise would eliminate the need for an appeal to a ZBA which, essentially, has to grant relief from local zoning. An overlay district would provide for more predictable development of the campus that lessens the impact on adjoining neighborhoods, planners hope.
"We can craft our rules on how big things can be and where it can be in a way that directs them to put the most impactful stuff in a place where the town says, 'You know what? We know you should have a field house, but it should probably go over here, not over there,' " Groff said.
"If you're going to build a big art museum, we don't want it to go on Southworth Street," Chair Kenneth Kuttner said, referring to the long-abandoned notion that the college's art museum, currently under construction at the Field Park rotary, would go at the corner of Southworth and Main Street.
Groff said he uses the same example "all the time" in talking about the overlay.
He told the planners that the town could set reasonable limits on the height and bulk of buildings within a proposed overlay district.
A big issue for the five-member Planning Board: the geographic definition of the overlay district.
Groff told the board that he and member Samantha Page went through a mapping exercise with representatives from the college, and there was "good consensus on what the highest densities are."
"There was great clarity on the peripheries — the Taconic Golf Course and football field [to the south] to Cole Field [to the north]," Groff said. "There was less consensus on where we're going around the margins. The southwest sector of campus is medium density and flows toward the [Milne Public] library here. Where do we go with that? Same with Poker Flats."
"What we're waiting on from Williams is a better understanding of what is the bulk, height and size of their structures today and how we can apply that to a loosely form-based zone. That's what we can regulate: the bulk, size and height of structures."
Groff discouraged the board members from thinking in terms of how a building might be used and instead told them to focus on the dimensional limitations.
"I think the mapping exercise was useful even just preliminarily to sort of identify the areas where we definitely wouldn't want to see a structure with a big bulk," Page said. "I think there are some areas where it seems super clear and other areas where it's a little murkier where it's harder to figure out what feels appropriate in those transitional areas between the center of campus and the neighborhood surrounding it.
"It would be really nice for the college and the town to know what, explicitly, is appropriate in those areas."
Groff and Page asked their colleagues to use large maps that were provided to sketch out their own thoughts on how to define the campus core in advance of the board's Nov. 12 meeting.
Last Tuesday's meeting also saw the board divide up the work on proposing revisions to the town's subdivision rules and regulations. Among the topics that need to be addressed are stormwater, roads, "other improvements," categorizing developments by scale and addressing the collective ownership of infrastructure (commonly through a homeowners' association}.
The town has a Community One Stop for Growth grant from the commonwealth to pay for consultants to work with board members on some of the more technical aspects of the regulation, like stormwater management and road specifications. That grant is set to run out on June 30, Groff said.
The plan is to do a major overhaul of the subdivision regulations before the end of next year, he said.
Those regulations, unlike the zoning bylaw changes that the Planning Board spends most of its time developing, are not dependent on town meeting approval. The subdivision regs are a creation of the Planning Board, which can approve revisions on its own, Groff said.
"They can be changed through a public hearing process," he said. "We have a dedicated public hearing where we take testimony as opposed to [the board] making a decision and then another body [town meeting] making the final call. This board makes the final call."
In other business on Tuesday, the Planning Board heard a report from Page and Cory Campbell, who have been working on a proposal for a bylaw amendment that would encourage more "mixed-use" development in the Limited Business and Planned Business zoning districts.
"We talked a lot about the goals behind this project," Page said. "There are a lot of different elements of it. One is to improve the regulatory environment within our zoning so it's really straightforward and clear to develop mixed-use in the town's business districts, so that it's easy to do residential/commercial/office, some combination of those, within the business district.
"We want to create commercial areas that feel really lively, activated. They're pedestrian friendly, they align with desired design characteristics. … A big goal for this project is to make residential development a more standard part of mixed-use, especially in the areas of town that are really well suited for it … in the areas of town that have easy access to public utilities, that are walkable and bikeable that don't have as many natural resource considerations.
"In line with that, it would also lead to the growth of the tax base in this strategic way."
Campbell said it is possible the board may be able to bring a mixed-use bylaw amendment to the 2026 annual town meeting, but the deadlines are coming up fast.
"We're going to know by December whether this will happen next year," he said. "What I'm hoping to have well before the [November] meeting is basically an assessment report — assessment and recommendations. Then at the December meeting, I'm hoping to have the equivalent of a draft warrant article and possibly a draft FAQ.
"If that doesn't happen, I'm going to ease off. The pressure is off, but I'll continue to work on it, and the focus will be getting it ready for [town meeting 2027]."
Tags: overlay districts, Williams College, zoning,
