Framingham Councilor King Deftly Blocks Victory for Nobscot Community

Note:

Here is the MOD 4A parcel so you can follow along in the article.

On Tuesday, December 17, 2024, the City Council was poised to finalize its rezoning plan for the city to comply with the MBTA Communities Law. With a 'final' draft plan in hand, a joint meeting of the City Council and the Planning Board commenced at 7pm. After a few standard business items had been handled, a public hearing on the plan was opened by a unanimous vote of the City Council just 13 minutes into the meeting.

The public hearing was expected to occupy a few hours, with participants on Zoom and in the meeting room, each allowed up to 3 minutes to say their piece on the latest plan. The meeting room was packed and at least 8 community members were ready to provide their input on Zoom.

Following that initial community input, the hearing was going to be suspended to allow the Planning Board to immediately deliberate and orally submit its recommendations to the City Council. The City Council was then going to vote to accept those recommendations and resume the public hearing for further comment. The City Council was then going to discuss the plan and vote on a final package to submit to the state in compliance with the MBTA Communities Law prior to the December 31, 2024, deadline. A further City Council meeting was scheduled for Thursday, December 19, 2024, if more time was needed to complete City Council deliberations and vote.

That was the expectation, and many community members were in attendance to provide their input.

For the benefit of the community, the Planning & Community Development Director Sarkis Sarkisian started things rolling for the public hearing by providing a summary of the draft plan, which can be found at:

December 17, 2024 MBTA Proposal Maps

The Director also confirmed that after consulting with state officials, the December 31, 2024, deadline for submission of the city’s compliance package was not negotiable.

The Beginning of Trouble

Although the expectation was that the public hearing would proceed, Councilor King interjected with two questions, just 13 minutes into the public hearing following Sarkisian’s briefing:

1. Should the city meet the December 31, 2024, deadline at all?
2. Should the controversial MOD 4A Nobscot parcel be included in the package?

The implicit suggestion was that the City Council should speak on these two things to ‘streamline’ the public hearing. As the City Solicitor then correctly pointed out, no vote could be lawfully taken until the public hearing was conducted, and the Planning Board recommendation received.

Neither of King’s questions were pertinent to the public hearing and the Chair should have made that clear and proceeded with input from the community.

It would have been immensely helpful if the City Solicitor had more forcefully asserted that the correct process was not to divert the meeting away from hearing what the public had to say, but she stayed silent as the meeting went sideways, with multiple City Councilors weighing in on the draft rezoning plan, engaging in discussion which should have been held after the public input and the Planning Board’s recommendations accepted.

Remarkably, the Chair also engaged in this diversionary discussion making the problem worse, even though he observed that “this is what we weren’t supposed to get into”.

Chairman Phil Ottaviani effectively lost control of the meeting at that point.

The Move To Delay Discussion

Councilor Cannon then initiated discussion regarding motions to table the discussion, i.e. to postpone the discussion to a later date. Two motions were then voted on. The first motion, moved by Councilor Leombruno, was to table the discussion to a later date in January. That was amended by George King to make the date when the SJC decided the Milton case, where that municipality is fighting the MBTA Communities Law. That date was expected to be sometime in March but, as in all court cases, had a degree of uncertainty and could occur at a much later date.

That motion failed, 5-6, with (King, Cannon, Leombruno, Long, Ward) losing to (Ottaviani, Steiner, Bryant, Alexander, White Harvey, Mallach).

<< 27 minutes into the public hearing - still the public waited for their chance to speak >>

In truth, that motion was bound to fail due to the SJC decision date uncertainty.

Then followed a further a wandering, roiling discussion by City Councilors on whether to delay or not to delay, which burned another 43 minutes, as the community members attending the meeting waited patiently.

Success In Delaying Discussion

Finally, the somewhat heated discussion and the failed first vote set up the next motion, again moved by Leombruno, which was to postpone further City Council discussion until February 4, which passed 6-4-1, with (Ottaviani, King, Ward, Long, Leombruno, Cannon) prevailing over (Steiner, Bryant, Mallach, White Harvey) with Alexander abstaining.

<< 80 minutes into the public meeting - still the public waited for their chance to speak >>

Then the meeting was adjourned.

The impression left by all of this was that of a chaotic, disorganized City Council, poorly led by the Chair, who allowed the meeting to run right off the rails, catalyzed by King, then Cannon, then Leombruno.

However, the outcome was exactly what the Mayor wanted: delay.

<< And the public never got to speak >>

The Mayor’s Calculation Behind All the Chaos

Coming into the December 17, 2024, City Council meeting, it was clear to insiders that there were 6 City Councilors ready to vote to remove the controversial Nobscot MOD 4A parcel from the submission to the state. That would have been a simple and justified victory for the Nobscot community in its fight to stop the Mayor from driving a high density housing stake through the heart of Nobscot.

But the Mayor and his City Council allies can count votes.

They knew that a motion, voted on in a prior meeting, aimed at excluding the MOD 4A Nobscot parcel narrowly failed 5-5-1 with (Steiner, White Harvey, Long, Bryant, Ward) for, (Ottaviani, Cannon, King, Leombruno, Alexander) against and Mallach abstaining.

Just one more Councilor needed to come on board to exclude MOD 4A.

And that had happened, as Councilor Mallach, who had abstained on that vote now is a YES to exclude MOD 4A. She confirmed that in an email to her supporters on Thursday, December 19.

So, going into the December 17, 2024, City Council meeting, the fix was in.

Any vote on MOD 4A had to be delayed as much as possible by the Mayor’s allies on the City Council, to keep alive the Mayor’s plan to force high density housing on Nobscot.

A vote on MOD 4A would have been fatal for the Mayor’s plan.

Tabling the debate was the tool to stop a vote by derailing the public hearing, the Planning Board deliberation and subsequent City Council deliberations.

The ringleaders of that effort were King, Cannon and Leombruno, who steered the City Council meeting off course, and made the tabling motions, with the assistance of Chair Ottaviani, who helped create the chaotic atmosphere by his lack of control.

Now the Mayor and his City Council henchmen have 7 weeks to work on the 6 City Councilors to get just one of them to turn, and then the MOD 4A parcel will be included in the rezoning.

Then a huge high density development will be built on the shovel ready site, where developers are champing at the bit to get going, and in the next few years up to 400 new students will flood into the Framingham Public schools, quite apart from the explosion in Nobscot traffic and the transformation of a quiet rural village into an urban center.

Don’t think that won’t happen.

We just saw another masterful derailment by George King, when he killed the School Committee solution to the late bus problem in a December 10, 2024, City Council meeting.

In a prior City Council meeting on December 3, 2024, he knew the City Council was going to vote 9-2 to approve the Anderson Motors lease-to-buy contract, so he pulled a tabling maneuver there, using an arcane City Charter provision.

In just a week, he managed to shift that 9-2 approval to an 11-0 disapproval.

In that effort he was helped by the City Solicitor who suddenly changed her assessment of that Anderson Motors contract triggering adverse and expensive litigation against the city, from very low risk to very high risk.

When George King wants to block something or get something passed, watch out.

There is a lot of behind the scenes pressure and the City Solicitor keeps playing a role in helping George get what he wants.

You can bet there is a lot of horse trading going on between George and the Mayor over all of this, as the upcoming FY26 budget process includes a lot of concessions George wants to squeeze out of the Mayor and George can better achieve his budget objectives if he works to get MOD 4A into the MBTA Communities Law zoning package to gain credit with the Mayor.