Looking ahead at Royal Crest

May 22—NORTH ANDOVER — Planning Board member John Simons was surprised at how thoroughly the Royal Crest development proposal was defeated at Town Meeting on Tuesday.

"I was not surprised that the vote failed," he said. "I was a little surprised that it was two to one, that it was that one-sided."

Simons voted against the proposal, and the Planning Board failed to recommend it, 3 to 2, before Town Meeting turned it down by a count of 856 to 407. Laura Bates, a proponent of the project and chair of the Select Board that voted 4 to 1 to recommend it, was disappointed in that result.

"I think that the town had worked with the developer, and the Planning Board had worked with the developer trying to put together a good project that would have been beneficial for the town, and then would have improved that site," she said.

Royal Crest Estates sits on a 76-acre parcel that is owned by Aimco and is currently home to 1,600 people, about half of whom are students at Merrimack College.

Trinity Financial developers were seeking a zoning overlay that would have allowed them to transform the site on Route 114 into a mixed use development with a hotel, retail and office space, and a variety of market rate and affordable housing.

Rosemary Connelly Smedile, who was the only member of the Select Board to vote against the proposal, said that she was surprised at Tuesday's vote count, but not at the amount of passion people brought to the topic.

"People were really concerned, as I said in the meeting, about the quality of life issues," she said.

These included the impact of 8 to 10 years of demolition and construction on abutters.

"The windows closed, the dust, then they have very few options," Smedile said. "It's difficult to sell a house."

But John Watters, a former member of North Andover's Master Plan Committee, said he wasn't surprised either by Town Meeting's rejection of the proposal or by its margin of defeat.

"Last year, there was a discussion of a housing pause, and that brought a lot of passions out, and about 60 percent of the community wanted to pause building, and that issue was very related to this," he said.

The issue was better publicized this year, Watters said, and opponents prevailed when more than 1,200 people turned out for Town Meeting instead of around 500 that attended last year.

But Watters also said that opinions about the project were complex, because there was a list of issues associated with the proposal that everyone was concerned about.

"It wasn't a one issue project," he said. "It was a multiple issue project."

Along with features such as building heights and setbacks, topics of concern included open space, affordability, traffic, density and scale, the presence of Merrimack College on the site and the displacement of current Royal Crest residents.

But while the decisive "no" vote may have shelved these issues for now, it leaves a number of other matters for residents of North Andover to consider.

These include the fact that North Andover now remains at 8.8 percent of the state requirement for 40B, affordable housing, rather than the 10 percent that is mandated. The 400-plus 40B units in the Royal Crest plans would have more than satisfied these state requirements.

"It would have put us at 10.5 or 11 percent," said Eitan Goldberg, chair of the Planning Board.

This now leaves the town vulnerable to "hostile" 40B development projects, where the town wouldn't have much say in what gets built.

"There are very few limitations on that," Goldberg said. "Local zoning really doesn't apply."

An inclusionary zoning bylaw was passed at Town Meeting, which requires a developer to include affordable housing in 15 percent of any project of eight units or more.

But Goldberg said that is more of a tool for keeping the town at 10 percent, once North Andover gets there, rather than a means for reaching that goal.

The rejection of the Royal Crest project also now means that the town, as a community served by the MBTA, must define a district where multi-family housing can be built by right, as required by the Housing Choice Act.

"We saw Royal Crest as an opportunity to do that, but it's not the only parcel in town that we could use for that," Goldberg said.

Bates said that the developments that could potentially go into the Royal Crest property in a hostile 40B project include hundreds of rental units in large buildings on one or two sites.

"They could subdivide and do two buildings or they could do up to 944 owner-occupied, for-sale units at 15 to 24 sites," she said. "Then we lose control over the site, we have no choice, with no development agreement and no zoning oversight. They could put up dorms that would fall under the Dover Amendment and, on whatever land was left over, they could put up residential, by right zoning that they have now."

The Dover Amendment allows non-profit organizations like colleges to ignore certain zoning requirements.

"It does afford us the right to come in and say, we've made this decision, we want to move this project forward and we're going to advance through the permitting process," said Jeff Doggett, executive vice president of Merrimack College, at a Planning Board meeting on Oct. 12, 2021. "Our only obligation at that point would be to notify the planning board and the town."

Doggett also stated at that meeting that "Merrimack does not need the Royal Crest project," and said that the college's options following a "no" vote at Town Meeting would include reverting to earlier plans to build several multi-story buildings on the corner of Elm Street and Route 114. In addition, the college could also go "forward with our piece of this project" in a separate agreement with Aimco.

"Aimco gets nervous about this option because that is a massive deviation from what they're trying to do and we don't own that property yet, and they obviously know what happens if they start selling off parts of that property," Doggett said in October.

"So I just want to be clear that is something that could happen but it is not something that has been contemplated yet."

If there is no new development of any kind at Royal Crest Estates, that isn't necessarily a great outcome for the town, because North Andover spends more in the services that it provides to the site than it receives in taxes.

This, in spite of the fact that Royal Crest is the town's largest taxpayer.

"They could keep it as it is, and that would mean that Merrimack vacates, and then 185 units become available with potentially 333 new residents," Bates said. "That would be no increase in revenue now, and it would add to the negative budget effect."

One definite consequence of the vote is that more than $5 million from the development agreement is now gone that would have helped to fund the renovation of the Franklin School, along with new designs for Fire Station 2 and the Youth Center, as part of Facilities Master Plan ll.

"The development agreement could have freed up money that would have accelerated the project or decreased the burden on taxpayers," Bates said.

But no one knows what is going to happen at this point, and Simons counsels against reaching any conclusions about the future of Royal Crest.

"There are so many possibilities and contingencies going forward that I don't want to speculate," he said. "I suspect what will happen is everybody will take a week or so to calm down, reflect, and let some ideas germinate on what we should do next."