The full Somerville City Council will vote whether to recognize formally the Davis Square Neighborhood Council, but the DSNC passed a test Tuesday as a five-member Legislative Matters Committee gave its unanimous endorsement.
The recommendation was a measured one, with concerns expressed about how big an area the DSNC considers its domain and how many members make up a quorum. It came only after city lawyers agreed that the group could include residents of Cambridge, Arlington and Medford.
“It was always my intent to give neighborhood councils broad discretion. This application found the edge of where that comfort zone was,” said council president Lance Davis, who represents Davis Square’s Ward 6, with tepid support: “I’m okay going forward.”
While praising the DSNC’s leaders and their advisers and mentors on the Union Square Neighborhood Council, officials used discussion leading up to the vote to cast shade on the groups’ existence and reason for being: to negotiate community benefits agreements with developers.
The Davis Square Neighborhood Council was expected to be formed in time to sit down with the developer Copper Mill, but that company pulled out of building a 502-unit, 26-story residential tower. Its counterpart in Union Square was created around nine years ago to negotiate with the master developer there, US2, in what councilors described as something of an accident.
The new council in 2017 felt forced by then-mayor Joe Curtatone to enact a law allowing neighborhood councils, Ben Ewen-Campen said.
“One of the things agreed to by the Mayor’s Office and by this developer is that the developer will sit down with a ‘neighborhood council’ and negotiate a community benefits agreement. That’s what it said. But there was no neighborhood council,” Ewen-Campen said. “We thought, ‘Okay, we need to make sure that that doesn’t just get kicked under the rug. We need to create a body called the neighborhood council.’”
Legislative Matters chair JT Scott agreed that “the whole reason that this ordinance had to exist is that a previous mayor signed a contract with a developer that had some unfortunately amorphous language in some places and, unfortunately, specific language in others, which required that a duly recognized neighborhood council be the one that the developer engaged with. This council, in response, had to generate an ordinance in order to match the language of a contract that the mayor had already signed.”
That was Davis’ assessment too: “The administration at the time signed a binding legal agreement without any of us having any clue what was going on.”
As a result, on Tuesday there was a caution against anyone overestimating the power of neighborhood councils: “The recognition process does not grant a new legal authority to a nonprofit that’s not part of the city. Period. End of story,” Ewen-Campen said, while Davis expressed a wish that the city could focus on extracting community benefits from developers through zoning.
Davis did grant that the councils created legitimacy through successful negotiation of a community benefits agreement from a developer. “If there’s payments, where does it go?” Davis said. A creation of a community benefit stabilization fund “feels pretty official.”
Nonresident membership
The biggest outstanding question about the DSNC was about it allowing membership from outside the city, a result of its location near the Cambridge city line, its mix of uses – including as a gathering place for the Tufts University community – and large catchment area; the council defines residency as being within one half-mile of the square. Davis, who called that “unwieldy,” nonetheless read a letter from the city Law Department answering concerns about whether it was legal and allowed. “The short answer is yes,” he said.
In a letter dated Monday, city lawyers said the law’s requirement “shall not preclude a neighborhood council from, at their discretion, expanding their membership criteria to include other groups with close connections to the neighborhood.”
“The Davis Square Neighborhood Council has fully complied with the letter of the law here, and it may be that if if one were to decide that this catchment area is too big, that’s on us,” Davis said. (Ewen-Campen suggested that the council look at amending that part of the law.)
Not everyone was so negative. Councilor Will Mbah said he had been a frequent attendees at DSNC meetings and appreciated its members’ diligence and the “robust process” that’s drawn such intense engagement. “I’m so excited to move forward,” Mbah said.
Recognition now moves to the full council.
Pet sales and rat poison
Legislative Matters also gave unanimous recommendation to animal-related proposed laws.
One prohibits animal sales in Somerville but allows stores to facilitate adoptions from a shelter or rescue organization. “I believe the only retail animal store in Somerville recently closed,” Scott noted. That was Big Fish Little Fish, which closed in January at 55 Elm St., Spring Hill, after 55 years in business.
The councilors also took action against anticoagulant rodenticides, which kill rats but then poisons animals such as raptors, coyotes and other scavengers that eat the rats. “The secondary impacts far outweigh the benefits,” said Colin Zeigler, the city’s director of public health.
The use of bait boxes would continue despite a ban on toxic rodenticides, but they would be stocked with such things as vitamin D concentrate, which has a much lower risk of secondary poisoning, Zeigler said.
The committee okayed a local law codifying an existing practice against using the dangerous rodenticides on city-owned property or in city-run pest control programs. It also advanced a home-rule petition asking the Legislature to let Somerville impose the same practice on private pest-control companies serving customers here, though if other pest management strategies are not working, the city can grant a waiver.
There seems to be nothing lost by ending use of the poison, considering its lack of impact on Somerville’s rat population, Ewen-Campen noted.
“It’s not working, and we just can’t say that enough,” Ewen-Campen said. “We’re having these extreme kind of negative effects on the rest of the ecosystem, and we’re not managing the problem.”
