Needham residents struck down a zoning plan Tuesday that would have allowed the town to construct more units of multifamily housing than the minimum required to comply with the MBTA Communities Act, which demands new zoning in cities and towns served by transit.
Around 60% of the nearly 12,000 votes that came in during a referendum Tuesday were against the measure, which would have allowed the construction of some 3,300 new units of housing near Needham’s MBTA commuter rail stations — nearly twice the number required by state law.
Needham leaders brought two proposals to Town Meeting, one that would meet the state requirements and another that went beyond them.
Select Board Member Kevin Keane told GBH News that the town is generally supportive of more housing, but he said some voters felt the measure went too far.
“We tried to do too much,” he said. “We were the student that tried to bring the teacher two apples when one was sufficient.”
Other voters thought the plan was too vague to support, he said.
“I think some people want certainty,” he said. “I think some people want to see what the paint chips would look like in these buildings that were going to be built. But we don’t even know if these things are going to be built. There’s nothing in this requires anything to be built.”
Milton rejected a plan last year that would have placed the town in compliance with the state law, and around three dozen communities throughout the state have still not taken up the issue.
Needham Town Meeting members will now evaluate — either at the next scheduled meeting in May or as soon as February, depending on what the state requires — whether to move forward with a proposal that meets the lower MBTA Communities Act requirements and does not go further. Keane says he expects it will pass.
“At the end of the day, debate about the bigger plan might have made people who would have been opposed to it really favor the base plan,” he said. “Everyone is now just saying that the bigger plan is too big, which is a win for the town, because that’s what the state wanted.”
Needham is the first community to reject a zoning change proposal since last week’s Supreme Judicial Court ruling that state leaders can enforce the law as long as the state rewrites the guidelines through a regulatory process.
The Healey administration agreed to re-do the rubric, submitting new emergency guidelines on Tuesday and extending the deadline for non-compliance until July.
