Sounds good to me.
Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS On Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 6:29 PM, Karla Gravis <[email protected]> wrote: I encourage all those interested who were not able to attend towatch the Q&A portion of the HCA meeting last night once it is uploaded. - The committee spent a lot of time reviewing what has beenaccomplished to date and discussing amongst themselves but little time was dedicated to public debate. Few of thepublic questions were actually answered by the committee, at times the mic wasjust passed on to the next question without any response. This is similar toprevious meetings, where there is little room for resident debate. In myopinion, the outreach has been one-directional. The working group is composed only of people who sit on other boards, are town employees, or work for theRLF. There is no opportunity for a regular resident or member-at-large to bepart of the decision-making. There are outstanding resident questions that thecommittee hasn’t answered. - The town legal counsel was present during the meeting. When askedwhy the Committee was contradicting his counsel as stated on public record, heindicated that he had changed his mind on the enforceability of compliance. Hedid not provide any facts to explain this reversal. He said that his new stancehad come from a collaborative effort with his partners. This was very surprising tohear, as this very same law firm is defending the town of Holden, which hasdecided not to comply with the HCA. Our lawyer's partners at his firm, KP Law, wrote a motion todismiss the action against Holden. We should not be rushing tocomply just because “non-compliance is a risk” given our own lawyer's firmseems to be giving other towns the opposite message to what they are tellingus. There are other towns like Weston which seem to be comfortable taking await-and-see approach. - The committee repeated its claim that we will lose millions ingrant money by not complying. However, we have never received any money fromthe grants named in the actual HCA legislation. When this was brought up, thecommittee did not respond. The committee claims we should comply because wecould use one of the grant programs to update the Village Center septic systemto benefit a private developer. I struggle to understand why the town wouldneed to fund this private enterprise. Wouldn’t we be setting a terribleprecedent? - The committee continues to quote a pandemic-era traffic study anda flawed financial analysis to claim there is "no impact" to currentresidents. The financial analysis used a cost per student of $6.3K, when ourschool's cost per student is at least 4 times that. This report from theDepartment of Education puts LPS (excluding Hanscom) at $27K per pupil. Thetown with the lowest cost per pupil in the state is at $13K, nowhere close tothe $6K. Using accurate numbers for that financial analysis would imply steep tax increases for current Lincoln residents. Let's remember that in thiscase, we are talking about apartments being rented starting at $4K a month. - I strongly believe in providing full transparency on the impact ofrezoning to the town. If there is a tax and traffic impact, we need to be clearon it. The town may decide to take on these costs in the spirit of increasinghousing, but it should be up to each resident to decide that for themselves,after being provided an accurate cost/benefit analysis. Residents havevolunteered to conduct this analysis, but the committee has not taken them upon the offer, so far. - There seems to be a reluctance from the committee to provide morethan one option for residents to vote on. There is another option that wouldentail rezoning areas where condos are already extant and the probability ofredevelopment is much lower. The committee is very reluctant to follow thispath. I am unclear as to why we do not want to present more than one option upto vote, when we do so for other big projects like the school or the communitycenter. Given such an important decision that may change the landscape ofour town for decades to come, we owe it to ourselves to look at these issuesmore carefully. I struggle to understand why we are rushing to submit aproposal to the state when we still have time before the deadline, other townsare delaying and the guidelines could continue to change. The proposal wouldn'teven be increasing affordable housing materially. Karla Gravis Weston Rd -- The LincolnTalk mailing list. To post, send mail to [email protected]. Browse the archives at https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/private/lincoln/. Change your subscription settings at https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/lincoln.
-- The LincolnTalk mailing list. To post, send mail to [email protected]. Browse the archives at https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/private/lincoln/. Change your subscription settings at https://pairlist9.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/lincoln.
