Manchester planners release Cell Signaling's $250,000 site bond and set a Dec. 3 forum on the rest of the business district

Manchester-by-the-Sea's Planning Board gave Cell Signaling Technology back the $250,000 security it had posted to make sure its building site would not wash into the town's streams, and it picked a December date for residents to say what should happen to the rest of the town's business zone.

Five of the board's seven members met Monday, Oct. 26, at Town Hall. Christopher Olney ran the meeting.

What happened

• The board voted 5 to 0, from the meeting video, to release the full $250,000 bond Cell Signaling Technology (CST) posted for site stabilization at its planned campus at the old quarry near Beaver Dam Road. The town's engineer had suggested keeping $25,000 back.
• The board began its study of the general district, the zone where shops and offices are allowed. A public visioning forum is set for Thursday, Dec. 3, at 6 p.m. The place has not been picked.
• The town's consultant split the roughly 100 acre district into six areas for discussion, from the boatyards on the harbor to the blocks along Summer Street.
• Town counsel sent four comments on the new sign bylaw. Any fixes will be offered as amendments on the floor of the Nov. 16 special town meeting.
• The board approved its Oct. 13 minutes.

Cell Signaling gets its bond back

CST's director of facilities, its surveyor and its construction manager asked the board to return the letter of credit the company put up when the board approved the project. The security was meant to cover the cost of stabilizing the site if the company walked away in the middle of construction.

The company's presenters said the site work started in August 2024. Crews blasted about 30,000 yards of rock and reused all of it on the site, they said. The ring road around the site has a binder coat of pavement. Water, sewer, electric and drainage lines are in, along with the geothermal wells that will heat and cool the buildings. They said 99 percent of the drainage is installed, with only the roof drain connections left for when the buildings go up. Hundreds of trees and about 6,000 plants went in around the edge of the site, some of them on berms built to block sound and views from the neighbors.

The company inspects the site weekly and after any storm of more than 2 inches of rain, they said. The whole site drains toward the building footprints and into a rain garden, and the lower detention pond has not yet filled enough to overflow.

Marc Resnick, the town's director of land management, read a letter from the town's consulting engineer. It said CST has completed much of the work the $250,000 bond secured and has made the site much better than the quarry conditions before construction. Because building construction is paused and erosion controls like silt fence wear out over time, the engineer called it reasonable to keep 10 percent, or $25,000, until the buildings are done. The letter added that the town could release the whole amount if it was confident the company would come back to fix any problem.

CST asked for the full release. Its representative said the company's investment in the site speaks for itself, that the Conservation Commission's order of conditions still requires the company to maintain erosion controls, and that the remaining bond was mostly an accounting footnote for the company.

Board members who had walked the site a few weeks earlier said the drainage works and the site is stable. One member said he would normally recommend holding some money back during a long construction project, but had no doubt the company would return to make repairs. The board voted 5 to 0 by roll call, from the meeting video, to release the bond in its entirety.

Asked when building would start, the company's team said the owner is still looking at a decision in the first or second quarter. The site is shutting down for the winter.

The rest of the business district

Last April, town meeting carved two new downtown zones, the Town Center district and the Harbor Edge district, out of the general district. The board's new study, paid for mostly by a state grant, covers everything that was left behind. (Read how the board hired the consultant on Oct. 13.)

The town's planning consultant brought paper maps and a handout for what she called a low tech kickoff. The general district, she said, was about 100 acres that wrap around downtown like a collar, plus about 7.5 acres on Butler Avenue and Raymond Street next to Magnolia. What sets it apart from the residential zones around it is that commercial uses are allowed, and over the years it became the catch all for uses the town wanted somewhere. Four uses are allowed nowhere else: turning an existing house into a three family home without adding floor area, greenhouses and nurseries, boat storage and repair, and fish and shellfish landing and storage.

To make the district easier to talk about, she drew six areas for discussion only:

1. The Magnolia end, between Raymond Street and Butler Avenue, about 7.5 acres.
2. The harbor, including the waterfront parcels on Ashland Avenue, the land south of Town Hall and Center Street and one parcel south of the railroad tracks.
3. Two steep blocks on Bennett Street north of Central and Bridge streets.
4. The north, or Sawmill Brook, area north of Center Street, east of Pine Street and mostly west of School Street.
5. The near northeast around Summer and Sea streets, with a northern edge that follows the historic district line.
6. The northeast, between Norwood Avenue and Summer Street up to Memorial School, with Lincoln and Brook streets as its northern edge.

Board members agreed to organize the study and the public forum around those areas. Sandy Bodmer-Turner, joining by Zoom, said the district is "a bunch of leftover pieces" and that waterfront land is worth the most as housing, so the board will need to find a way to keep boatyards and other water uses on the harbor. The consultant said the town's new Harbor Management Plan, prepared by the Urban Harbor Institute at UMass Boston, recommends zoning protections for the harbor, and a water dependent use district for the boatyards is one option residents could weigh.

John Harden asked the board to write down its goals for the study before the forum, the way it set out to strengthen the commercial core when it rewrote the downtown zoning. He also asked, as he said he would at every meeting, that the study look at allowing more housing density in the general district. The town's four unit limit and its 20 percent affordable housing requirement "don't work together," he said, so the rules will never produce an affordable unit. Other members agreed density should be one of the questions.

Members also asked whether the town still wants commercial uses along Summer Street and Route 127 far from downtown, or should concentrate them in the center, and noted that any property taken out of the district would keep its current use only as a grandfathered use. The consultant said the study is as likely to move district lines, in or out, as to shrink the zone.

The town's request for quotes had penciled in a Nov. 12 forum, but with town meeting on Nov. 16 and the Dec. 10 ballot vote after it, the board chose Thursday, Dec. 3, at 6 p.m. Members suggested the high school media center. The consultant will prepare a working agenda, digital maps and a list of questions for residents, hold one or two site walks, and come back to the board in January to build a work plan that could include zoning changes and new district lines.

Sign bylaw: four notes from counsel

The Select Board put the board's rewrite of the sign bylaw on the Nov. 16 warrant on Oct. 19 and asked the board to add a plain definition of a sign, so a holiday display is not treated like a store sign. (Read what the Select Board asked for.) Resnick said the draft already says every commercial advertising sign must comply and get a permit from the building department, and a sentence saying the same thing can be added to the purpose section. Because the warrant is already set, he said, any change has to be made as an amendment on the town meeting floor, which he called routine for zoning articles.

Town counsel's review raised four points. Limits on non governmental flags are hard to enforce because the flags are protected speech; the board had decided earlier to leave that language in. Several places tell a business to "file an application" under a section titled waivers, so Resnick will change those to "request a waiver." Counsel saw a conflict between the rule that a neglected sign needing more than 50 percent repair must be removed and the zoning bylaw's protection for pre existing structures; Resnick disagreed, because the rule covers signs that are let go, not signs destroyed by a storm, which can be rebuilt as they were. The zoning bylaw already has a severability clause, so none is needed in the sign rules.

Resnick will draft the amendments, review them with counsel and bring them to the board's next meeting. The board's public hearing on the bylaw is set for Nov. 9.

What was decided

• Release the Cell Signaling Technology site stabilization bond of $250,000 in its entirety: 5 to 0 by roll call, from the meeting video.
• Approve the minutes of the Oct. 13 meeting: all in favor, from the meeting video.
• Adjourn, at about 8:13 p.m.: all in favor, from the meeting video.

What happens next

• Monday, Nov. 9: Planning Board public hearing on the sign bylaw, as set at the Select Board's Oct. 19 meeting. Check the Agenda Center for the time and place.
• Monday, Nov. 16, 7 p.m.: special town meeting, where the sign bylaw is article 8.
• Thursday, Dec. 3, 6 p.m.: public visioning forum on the general district. The town will post the place and materials before the meeting. Residents can send questions for the forum to the Planning Board through the town website.
• January: a Planning Board workshop with the consultant to set a work plan for the district.

Where to find the records

• Agenda for the Oct. 26 meeting.
• Planning Board page, with members and past minutes. Minutes of this meeting will be posted in the Agenda Center, which also links the meeting video once the town adds it.
• Meeting recording (1 hour 40 minutes).

Earlier coverage: Monday on Cape Ann (Oct. 23), the agenda for this meeting; Manchester Planning Board chair tells Gordon Woods developer 245 apartments is still far too big (Oct. 16), where the board hired the consultant and sent the sign rules to the Select Board; and Manchester sets its Nov. 16 warrant (Oct. 21), where the Select Board put the sign bylaw on the warrant.

How we did this: Cape Ann Current watched the meeting online. Votes are as heard on the recording and are labeled from the meeting video until the board's minutes confirm them. These are our meeting notes, not the board's minutes.