WAKEFIELD — Earlier this week, a group of residents filed a petition asking the Nov. 17 Town Meeting to cap the height of any structure built in the downtown Assisted Living Facility Overlay District.
As Shelter Development LLC and partner Brightview Senior Living seek to build a 137-unit facility between Main and Crescent streets, the petitioners feel the project is still too big and want to place a maximum height requirement on anything constructed there to 30 feet.
On Wednesday, the Zoning Board of Appeals held the first hearing on the new Shelter/Brightview plan. This is the latest in a line of proposals that were both conceptual and actual in nature. In October 2012, for example, Shelter had an early idea about building an 88-unit facility downtown that mostly would have housed Alzheimer’s patients. Company representatives approached town officials, including Selectman Brian Falvey and Town Administrator Stephen P. Maio, who suggested more independent living so those residents would patronize businesses in the Square. Town officials also wanted a parking garage build on land owned by the town and by The Savings Bank.
With the added land, Shelter proposed a larger facility and a parking garage. That plan was rejected by voters earlier this year. The 88-unit project, as far as Falvey is concerned, was a starting point and never a concrete proposal.
In an e-mail Tuesday explaining the maximum height restriction, MacKenzie Lane’s Pat Bruno wrote, “Earlier this afternoon, in an effort to allow our town leaders the opportunity to honor the original 90-unit assisted living community development being discussed throughout 2014, with Wakefield residents at two Town Meetings as well as the town forum held in March, a concerned group of Wakefield town voters filed a petition for a proposed zoning change with the Town of Wakefield to amend the assisted (living) overlay district which, if passed at Town Meeting, will help encourage the developers of the Brightview assisted living community to move forward with the original 90-unit assisted living neighborhood.
“Most importantly, the original 90-unit assisted living neighborhood will be a less dense development than the 137 units currently on tap, with the addition of a newly introduced property at 25 Crescent St.,” discussed during an initial hearing before the Zoning Board of Appeals Wednesday night.
Bruno and others insist that the smaller facility will be more in line with similar ones in the area, specifically the 92-unit Sunrise Assisted Living complex on Salem Street in Lynnfield.
The proposed change would amend Article 17 section 190-103 of the Wakefield Zoning Bylaw.
Bruno argued in an Item Forum letter last Friday that the Shelter Development/Brightview proposal is still too big.
“I trust that you will agree that most assisted living facilities built in Massachusetts are three stories or less, specifically for safety concerns of the elderly residents, as well as memory-impaired residents living in these apartments,” Bruno wrote in the Forum.
Drawings this paper has published of the new Shelter/Brightview plan shows a four story high facility, with frontage on Crescent Street. Shelter will purchase seven properties owned by the Fraen Corporation, which reportedly has expressed its preference to sell all the properties to one buyer.
The most recent plan was initially discussed Wednesday during a Zoning Board of Appeals hearing.
A previous proposal by Shelter/Brightview to build a 140 unit facility in conjunction with a public parking garage was approved at a Special Town Meeting last February but later defeated in a special election and defeated again in an attempt to revisit it at the Annual Town Meeting last May.
Voters at Town Meeting have twice voiced their approval of an assisted living facility downtown. The first time was when the Annual Town Meeting created the Assisted Living Overlay District on May 12, 2012. Town Meeting re-affirmed its wish for assisted living at the proposed location, according to Shelter’s lawyer Brian McGrail, when it rejected a move earlier this year to remove the Fraen properties from the Assisted Living Overlay District.
The Zoning Board of Appeals and representatives of Shelter/Brightview will deal with the new proposal’s size, density and architecture on Oct. 22.
