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| 1207 Mass Ave - Proposed Hotel Site |
The Heights Hotel - History and Details
In our blog entry this week, we look at the hotel currently proposed at 1207 Mass Ave.
There is a meeting on this issue on July 22nd (this) Monday night at the Arlington Redevelopment Board (ARB) session at the Town Hall Annex 2nd floor conference room.
It was news to many Arlington residents this week that the Town was negotiating the development of a hotel on Mass Ave in the Heights. Actually, it has been a long drawn out process that has not gone as first envisioned. Here is the background story…
It starts about six years ago when the Select Board discovered to its great surprise that it had owned the land at 1207 Mass Ave for more than a century and was landlord to the soon to be vacated Disabled American Veterans club. A working group was formed, including Selectman Steven Byrne, to figure out what to do with this newly found asset.
They looked first at ways to utilize it as a town building for office or meeting space. They considered it for a food pantry site. There was much talk of a shared space/incubator. They looked at rental options. The Select Board concluded that the best option was to simply sell it outright and use the money to help pay for the Stratton School renovations. They went before the 2015 spring Town Meeting with their case and received approval to dispose of 1207 Mass Ave.
The optimistic view presented to Town Meeting was that the sale might realize $1M or more, and the 2016 fiscal year Capital Plan actually earmarked that amount for paying for Stratton School costs. Four years later, the funds from a sale have still not materialized.
The first round of RFP bidding did not go well, with a few nibbles but no bids. The Town lowered its asking price to $750K and in late 2016 received one offer from the owner of an abutting property.
The Select Board had to deal with an awkward situation. The sole bidder was James Doherty who had been on the Board of Assessors during the early days of the process. He had purchased 1211 Mass Ave next door just a few years earlier, and the town lot was probably more valuable to him than other buyers because of the development possibilities. His proposal was based upon the new mixed use bylaw passed by Town Meeting in 2016. He proposed combining first floor retail with some sort of residential use above, specifying either apartments or a small hotel. The latter was particularly attractive to the Select Board with its promise of revenue from hotel occupancy taxes. Remarkably, no one seems to have noticed that the hotel use was prohibited in the B2 district of the DAV lot.
The awkwardness of the sale arose from selling town land to an "insider," a recent member of the Board of Assessors who also had a personal connection to a Selectman who had served on the working group exploring options for either keeping or selling the property. The Select Board handled it with great delicacy. Selectman Byrne properly recused himself quietly from deliberations and voting in March 2017, and the name of the buyer was not uttered during the meeting. The Town Manager was authorized to enter into negotiations.
The negotiations dragged out for a year and a half, finally concluding with a Purchase & Sale agreement last fall. The buyer ended up with a very nice deal for himself, receiving a waiver of all special permit and building fees. In appearing before the Redevelopment Board next week, he will not pay the approximately $5K fee set by the Board. Going forward, he will not pay any building permit fees.
This is not chump change. For a project of this size, the building permit fees will amount to many tens of thousands of dollars, likely topping $100K. It is not clear that the Select Board or Town Manager even has the authority to waive these fees; they are set down in the Town bylaws. It also seems that if the developer does not get the Special Permit he seeks, he can back out of the deal and the Town gets nothing for its efforts of the last five years.
And that sets the playing field for next Monday’s hearing...
