As a supporter of the Big Box retail ordinances about five years ago, due to
concerns about traffic proliferation in the city, it is disturbing that few
proposals have materialized under this zoning. The new owners of the former
Hill & Dale Mall are rumored to be considering re-using their existing
building, a component of Smart Growth by the way, instead of tearing it down
and complying with the new zoning. So be it. Perhaps though, it is time to
rethink our collective goals for the King Street corridor. Consider the
dichotomy in allowing big boxes near the downtown area with the advent of
Smith College’s Ford Hall and the Hilton Garden Inn, two projects
drastically impacting existing neighborhoods in grand ways, but limiting
retail big boxes on King Street, an area paved over long ago with fewer
residents located nearby. Who does this zoning protect on King Street,
Willard’s gravel processing and Kollmorgen? Lia’s car dealerships?
Perhaps it is time we better qualified and quantified for would-be
developers the rationale behind the retail ordinances, along with providing
the evidence that similar zoning works well elsewhere. Developers must be
convinced that the financial risks they undertake will be somewhat mitigated
by the local community, be it formally through zoning and informally by
where we choose to spend our dollars. We need our Economic Development
Coordinator and our Committee for Economic Development, Housing, and Land
Use to re-address these precisely crafted rules. If they aren’t working
quickly enough, let’s consider making adjustments that will still protect
smaller local businesses while providing more flexibility for new proposals.
The community conversation has now shifted to a focus on passing a new meals
tax, which could marginally stunt economic development. In my opinion we
need to refocus on King Street and pursue a mixture of larger scale and
smaller scale local establishments, within existing square footage requirements, that complement one another in order to
grow our economy. Relying absolutely on either component while excluding
the other will likely bring with it difficulties and unintended
consequences.
At the same time, also disturbing is the role commercial entitities have
played in helping to quash the King Street re-development proposal at the
former Honda dealership. Exactly who is acting unfriendly to new business?
The Gazette of October 18, 2007 outlines briefly that Cooley Dickinson
Hospital’s plans erased a medical component to this proposal (read
competition) and also reminds us that Florence Savings Bank [FSB] sued the
planning board once it was learned that a bank (also read competition) was
planned, citing the lack of adequate traffic studies.
Let’s revisit our recent history shall we, as the facts speak for
themselves. (Some of you are going to love this irony, others I’m sure will
not.) Note that FSB did not contest the state hospital re-development as
planned, a development that promises to bring with it 8,616 new vehicle
trips daily as well as new mortgage clients. I speculate that many FSB
customers will be negatively impacted by this traffic, but where was the
self proclaimed community bank when that issue was being debated? Rather,
the president of FSB sits and/or sat on the board of the Northampton
Development Corporation, a corporation that contributed to the Committee for
Jobs and Housing on Hospital Hill in 2003 thereby supporting the demolition
of Old Main and a poorly designed (in my view) and ever-changing site plan.
Some of us in the community feel the evidence presented by the Hospital Hill
traffic studies was basically ignored by some of the same people who have
now moved to prevent a nearby King Street development due, ironically, to
traffic concerns. Moreover, it would be interesting to research what kind
of traffic studies FSB was required to perform when they placed their
building at the Finn Street-King Street intersection. Are they now asking
for new development proposals to meet a higher standard than what they were
required to meet? I don’t know the answer to this.
This seems suspiciously like a case of commercial NIMBYism if you ask me,
but where are the ordinarily-vocal Smart Growth advocates pointing this out?
Moreover, if FSB is committed to "serving our community" as their
advertising campaign asserts, why move to inhibit a new commercial, somewhat
mixed-use, infill development project proposed within walking distance to
downtown and adjacent to a future bike path? Where are the critics who
quickly label residential neighborhood organizers as NIMBYs when they act in
order to protect their residential quality of life from infill development?
As well a few years ago Stop & Shop, a corporate entity I frequent and once
worked for, blocked the new food cooperative, of which I’m a member, from
building a facility in the Potpurri shopping plaza, another infill project
struck down in order to limit nearby competition. The local cooperative
would have been located nearby a bicycle path and nearer to in-town
neighborhoods. Stop & Shop’s move resulted in the cooperative moving to an
outlier site on North King Street, a street lacking sidewalks and
crosswalks, and a site that had been re-claimed by forest and undergrowth.
Almost everyone who frequents the new store will need to utilize a motorized
vehicle for access. More commercial NIMBYism, but where were the vocal
critics when this was occurring? I suppose naming and criticizing modest
groups of residents as NIMBYs is easier than doing the same for local
corporate officials who perform similarly when protecting their business
interests.
