Just as soon as the Burlington Town Center received the go-ahead from the Development Review Board Monday night, the opposition group Coalition for a Livable City announced that it would appeal the decision.
Burlington Attorney John Franco, who represents 57 Burlington residents who oppose the project, said Tuesday that he will file a challenge to the zoning permit by mid-April.
Franco said this latest appeal is not merely a Hail Mary effort to halt the development. He ticked off a laundry list of complaints, including the setup of proposed parking lots and the impact of the project on local businesses.
They’re issues that have been “completely overlooked by the media,” he said. Franco compared the project to putting “a size-14 foot into a size-10 shoe,” a reference to the 14-story towers included in the project design. “This thing is going to be a disaster,” he stated matter-of-factly.
Mayor Miro Weinberger called the DRB approval “a major milestone for the project.”
In an interview with Seven Days on Tuesday, he took the subsequent news of the appeals in stride. “It is neither frustrating nor surprising to me,” said Weinberger, who has thrown his support behind the project. “Many if not most of our projects in Burlington have an appeal … I understand that this is part of the process.”
Following the board’s decision, developer Don Sinex told reporters that construction of the $250 million project could begin as early as June.
Not if Franco and the coalition have anything to say about it.
Franco’s DRB appeal would mark the third challenge put forward by the coalition to oppose the multiuse development. Monday, Franco sent a request to the area Act 250 coordinator arguing that the 14-story development should in fact be subject to an Act 250 review.*
The initial ruling on whether the project qualifies for the Act 250 exemption should be finalized within six weeks. “It’s pretty straightforward,” said Keibel. But, “If it’s appealed, all bets are off for how long it takes.”
Franco is also representing the Coalition for a Livable City in an ongoing lawsuit challenging the validity of a $21.8 million tax increment financing measure that voters approved in November to help fund the project. The city is seeking to dismiss that suit.
“God only knows” how long the dispute will drag out, Franco said. He indicated that he and the residents he represents will fight to the end.
Weinberger and Sinex have suggested that “it’s a foregone conclusion and it’s a done deal,” Franco said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
*Correction, March 16, 2017: A previous version of this story misstated the status of an Act 250 review of the project proposal.
Related Stories
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
The latest private report shows rental vacancies in “healthy range” of 3-5% (Chittenden Regional Planning figure), first time in a generation–about 500 empty rentals in BTV today!–and likely to grow as student numbers drop at UVM/Champlain, 600 student beds get added at those two by summer 2018, and 75 new units come online at the BC orphanage building, many more at S. D. Ireland on Grove St;–part of over 2,000 units since 2013 building season jumping rental supply in BTV by 20%. Landlords are suffering from no tenants! Rents have plateaued–all without a single unit from Sinex where not one apartment will come in at 25% of a low income household. We need “livable rents” not the misleading “affordables” pedaled by the City Administration which start t $950 a month! Sinex rents if project were ever built–now very unlikely–might nudge into $2,000 a month–we do no know for sure because the rent numbers were censored in the economic study handed out the the public.
Tony Redington http://TonyRVT.blogspot.com
Charles Simpson warns, regarding BTC, there’s “…little or no consideration of the east wall of Macy’s.
As a result, Macy’s may well close.”
Before making ‘Chicken Little’ pronouncements about the retail sky falling, it might be nice to offer some evidence. Is Macy’s corporate whispering in CLC’s ear? Whatever the case, it might do well for the group to note Macy’s has been closing stores all over the country, so it would be tough to lay the folding of their BTV tent at the feet of Sinex and Weinberger.
I’m amazed by they way CLC continuously misleads the public in both large and small ways. If you want people to pull your way, you do it with concrete (pun intended) visions, but theirs are consistently not practical for a city that needs to figure out how to get past its growing pains to become a serious economic draw as well as a cultural one.
As the last election indicated, they are a squeaky wheel going nowhere.
An interesting comment from Don Sinex in another article saying the pending TIF lawsuit would not stop the project so it makes me wonder if the city leaders really needed to give him the $21M all along? Sounds like the Mayor and City Councilors gave away $1.7M in potential annual tax revenue for the next 20 years and didn’t have to.
The big selling point of this project to both the public and some City Councilors who admitted concerns about scale, was the affordable housing. 55 units out of 270 units are proposed as “affordable” but reports on their actual cost have me feeling that people have been duped. Is $950 for a studio and $1050 for a one-bedroom affordable? The housing crisis is actually an affordability crisis. In the last 2 years the vacancy rate has increased from around 1.5% to over 3% due to the many new buildings that have popped up in Burlington and surrounding areas. There seems to be a lot of market-rate housing available but it’s not helping most people, and the beefed up supply isn’t creating more truly affordable housng. There is a large segment of our population who are not eligible for subsidized housing but can’t afford Burlington’s market rate. The BTC does nothing to help that problem. The housing discussion needs clearer language. The term “affordable” is used far too casually to be descriptive of reality.