January 26, 2026 – Zoning Board of Appeals – Video & Transcript
January 26, 2026 - Zoning Board of Appeals
we are we it's seven o'clock so i think we're ready to get started um so hang on let me read the uh
there is someone there is someone listed as a wayland zoom meeting manager
okay is that right i'm not sure who that is i don't know who that is but okay do we have a quorum uh looks like it appears looks like we do all right so all right we'll kick this off uh this is the january 2020 january 26 uh 2026 meeting of the wayland zoning board of appeals this is a remote access only meeting due to the storm and the town building being closed um so just read the preamble here and then we can get going this meeting may be recorded and if recorded it will be made available to the public on wacom as soon after the meeting as is practical the public is excluded from any executive sessions uh pursuant to chapter two of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted via remote access in accordance with the applicable law
if this meeting is remote only access no in-person attendance by members of the public will be permitted uh one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that i think all of you have were required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so uh using the remote access link public comment should be limited to two minutes per person um so this is the call to order so we don't have any other items on the agenda so um we'll get right into this this is the continuation of case zba 2602 the building permit appeal for the veritas christian academy um adam scari is appealing issuance of a building permit for the veritas christian academy project the appeal raises concerns regarding compliance with the aquifer protection overlay district discrepancies between the building permit and planning board approved site plans and potential environmental and storm water management issues the applicant seeks a review of their permits validity and compliance with zoning bylaws so uh with that out of the way um i just wanted to sort of produce a couple sort of go through actually a couple of quick procedural uh procedural items one um i want everyone who is uh in attendance or perhaps watching this meeting to be aware that the zoning board has received numerous letters on this project uh i have personally read all of the letters that have been sent to us and i know that uh the board has uh endeavor to review all of these things um hang on it looks like carolyn has raised her hand but i don't know what to do with that can carolyn unmute herself i think i've just done it now can you hear me now yes perfect sorry mr chair i i just think that since there's a lot of people and we are on zoom that uh you should call for roll calls for the board members to identify themselves oh sure thank you um all right so we'll do this by roll call if everyone can uh uh announce himself i'll start with myself uh tom white chair of the zoning board of appeals hunter i'm sorry go ahead add it uh i eat a janice hunter perry adam hirsch just seemed paul okay all right great thank you um so just to resume uh the board gets all of these letters um they're all sent to us individually and also they're uploaded to the uh to the sharepoint for all of us to review um i also want to recognize that at our last hearing uh we we heard from a pretty extensive presentation from the appellate we did not have a chance to hear fully from veritas so uh i do want to set out that that's primarily what i'd like to do this evening i also um i've spent a lot of time looking at the materials on this case and i wanted to sort of give a quick overview and kind of set the expectations for what i think i'd like the board to to consider for this um we understand that uh this process is spelled out in the bylaw about the the zoning board being the venue to overturn a application of a building permit or granted a building permit and a site plan review uh we understand this is not a perfect process a large amount of time has gone by between the initial planning board hearings and uh the subsequent matter that we're hearing tonight uh so this is the process we have in town unfortunately it is we recognize that it is a little less than ideal uh i also want to note that the board understands the difference of opinion on the issue regarding the timeliness of the appeal we've heard uh sort of i think specific arguments on both cases here i just want the everyone to understand that the board is aware of all of these conversations um also the board here is really being specifically asked by the applicant to overturn an issued building permit and reject a planning board approved site plan um this is a very unusual request for this board it's not something we've done before and it isn't something necessarily to be taken lightly uh with that in mind what i'd what i propose that we do is really very narrowly focus the work of the board on the specific things that are being asked and in this case i think reviewing all the material that we have and looking very carefully at uh general law uh 40 a section 3 regarding the dover amendment the zoning board really needs to do something very specific here and that is understand specifically the review of the planning board's material and the granting of a building permit through the lens of what is required in under the dover amendment also reading what the applicant has proposed to us the applicant has sort of given us a very specific set of things they're interested in looking at and i would propose that the board really focus their efforts on the three things that we have been tasked to look at now this is my opinion um but this is summarizing all of the materials we have to date that uh the applicant is asking us to review so uh in general i think it's important for the board to understand this and to sort of very specifically focus on this so what i want to do is to just quickly go through uh my reading of the material that we have and sort of let that out to the board before we hear from the council for veritas um by my reading of the uh appeal here i think the applicant is asking us to look at three specific and very focused things does this project comply with the provisions of the aquifer protection district zoning bylaw does this project comply with the lot coverage requirements in the bylaw and or the planning board subsequent decision and does this project violate the separate setback requirements in article 7 or the setback requirements that are determined in the planning board decision i think those are the three main elements that the uh appellant is asking us to look at so before we go a little further into that um i just want to ask that does that does that summation uh make sense both to uh the appellant and to the board that is how i read it uh mr white i have my hand raised peter durning on behalf of adam maskari yes so i i appreciate your summary there mr white and indeed in the letter that we submitted um at the end of last week i think we tried uh as best we could to frame those issues much the way that you had just characterized them um in particular that the site plan approval did not sufficiently consider and did not comply with the aquifer protection district the issue of lot coverage and the setbacks which we highlighted in our initial letter but we amplified in our additional submittal on friday and um i think you framed it well those are our concerns that the planning board action the planning board site plan approval did not comply with uh the regulations in respect to those rulings and therefore this appeal is to the zba to have that reviewed and potentially remand it back to the planning board for further consideration of those issues um i know also mr chair i know you've asked to hear from veritas i just add that mr muscari is present i don't see him up as a panelist necessarily but he's here and prepared to speak and in addition we have scott horsley who was intimately involved with this matter before the planning board and he has prepared to speak also and he is on um here as a panelist as well so i fully expect that you wanted to hear from veritas we just got their letter i think at 4 30 this afternoon uh just before this meeting started but um when they're done we'd certainly like to circle back and have mr horsley and mr muscari have an opportunity to speak yeah thank you yes my intent is to have uh is to allow everyone who's here sort of the opportunity to speak i just wanted to sort of set out some overall uh an overall framework for this because i know that there have been some concerns expressed like as to whether or not this board is going to re-litigate the entire planning board process that occurred months ago um and that's that's not the intent of this process here i think the intent in my mind is very narrowly focused on those three questions that you've asked as the applicant for this board to consider um and i i sort of i would like to keep the like to keep the process in a way sort of narrowly focused on on those three things it's not my intent is not to sort of reintroduce a process where we need to bring in a series of consultants to answer uh additional questions or sort of kind of further of the investigation that was uh i think exhaustively done during the the planning board process thank you mr white i'll i'll unmute myself again in a minute i just want to say again i think we tried to do that through our submission on friday and and i think you summed it up fairly well towards the close of the last meeting that this is not an opportunity for um really re-litigating if you will all those technical aspects but we've alleged certain non-compliance with the planning board's action and decision with respect to the bylaw and we're asking this board to re-evaluate it and potentially uh remand so thank you i understand thank you um all right i guess with that um what i think it makes sense for us to do is to uh have a presentation um by um veritas that in a way is uh i suspect is going to largely mirror the the letter which was sent today which is actually a summary response to the uh letter that uh veril has prepared for us and i think i tried to summarize as a non-lawyer the best that i can uh for for everyone right now so i guess if we can do this if we can elevate um i think it's attorney silverstein um i believe i'm already here i think you are great thank you very much okay as i said um i know you didn't have an opportunity to present sort of a detailed analysis at the last hearing so i wanted to make sure we have we give you this opportunity to sort of to go forward with that this evening i appreciate that mr chair um i guess i want to know one thing and then with your permission i know there's some other members from the veritas team who are hoping to give um sort of short statements before i run through um the legal analysis um the one thing i want to say before um turning it over to them is as mr jernan indicated i submitted my letter this afternoon as you said it's a response to a letter i received friday afternoon so i i didn't want the board to think i took lightly submitting something um at the last minute but obviously um i had a limited amount of time to respond to it um the other thing i wanted to note is that uh i think i was very clear at the last hearing session that this project is 100 privately funded there had been uh consideration about taking some state grant money uh or loan money uh earlier in project concept again i don't think this board has jurisdiction over mepa but um i did see that this afternoon mr derning uh copied the board on a request for mepa advisory opinion um which was premised um incorrectly on uh the notion which i thought i had very clearly uh addressed at the last hearing session which is that there will be no public funding of the project so i just wanted to put those out there for the board's information and and hopefully mr derning will uh withdraw his uh request for an advisory opinion from mepa since i have uh reiterated that fact um with that uh with your permission i would um like to turn it over to some members of the team um i think we're going to start with uh joseph mendendorp um if uh joseph um isn't already he is yeah and that's that's that's totally fine uh the only thing i would ask is that um i'm not sure necessarily how many people are aligned up to speak we just want to be as concise as possible and i know as i said last time if there are several people i mean i i want to allow everyone the opportunity to speak but if if we have five people that will say you know almost the exact same thing i would prefer to have the comments be as differentiated as possible just to be as efficient with time as practical understood absolutely am i good to go yes all right so just give us your name and address my name is joseph medendorp i live at 3 nolan farm road here in weyland appreciate everybody's time tonight and we will do what we can to keep it concise here and get to the legal and the technical details of the project for my part uh i will also just say uh mr white the comments are differentiated so we do have some speakers that are lined up and each one has something different so they this will not be uh redundant information okay so thank you get to it uh if you happen to see friday's uh weyland post uh you may have noticed that there was a snowman directing traffic uh i've got two daughters in elementary school here in weyland i've got one in middle school so that was um our family contribution to law and order here in weyland it's a small thing um but i i mentioned it only just to remind everybody that we're we're neighbors first and we're we're parents just like several of the people that i know are here on the board and as well as here in the town uh when we first when we first came to the planning board we were given the opportunity to just simply make an introduction so there are real questions there are real concerns that are being raised from the community and we're going to get to that but before we get into that information we wanted to just share what exactly this project is and of equal importance what this project is not so i'm talking to the zoning board i'm also talking to the people that are our neighbors that i know are on the call my family lives here we've lived here for almost eight years we chose wayland um we chose it because of the school so when i see that people are concerned with traffic when they're concerned with safety when they're concerned with scale when they're concerned with the experience of our kids in the town i share those same concerns that you do this isn't some abstract concept this is a personal issue for me just like it is for everybody else that's on this call so i'm just going to kind of unwind a couple quick things let me start with traffic because i know that's something that's top of mind the peer-reviewed study that we submitted back in april of 2024 was done for a maximum of 108 students cachituate road at the site carries 11 000 vehicles per day so half of those are going northbound half of those are going southbound so what our traffic study showed is that we're going to add 48 cars during morning drop-off 34 cars during afternoon pickup so the peer-reviewed study confirmed that the site design sight lines line queues all of that is adequate and that there is no impact there's negligible impact to the traffic at that intersection that we also live with so we know that people are concerned with shaw becoming a cut through woodridge becoming a cut through and people are concerned that they're going to see more traffic on those spots and none of this means that we don't care about the traffic i drive through that intersection every single day multiple times so i care about it too what it does mean is that like every other aspect of this project we've studied it and we're committed to managing the traffic at that spot responsibly second thing i want to clarify is the number of students that we're actually talking about so there's been a discussion about this being a high density 450 student and faculty campus i've seen this online i've seen it in print and i just want to clarify a few important details our entire school is 150 students so for those of you that are in wayland that are familiar with six loker the celebration international church we have 150 kids there and it's taken us 15 years to grow to that size so our full middle school is 77 kids today and what we're talking about right now is the first phase it's not even a full middle school so we're talking about renovation of an existing building this is 172 constituent it's the same footprint that it's been since 1958 when the building was built we're talking about adding three classrooms to that now the other building that we've got permitted is another mid to large size house it's a school house building and when that is complete then we can bring over the rest of the middle school again at a maximum of 108 kids so if you're wondering where the other 300 kids are coming from so are we because that's not an accurate representation the third thing i wanted to address is the the number of buildings so there are some conceptual sketches that we shared that were interpreted to be nine buildings that will be built in the near future and i just wanted to be crystal clear the only things that are permitted today are the renovation of 172 and the addition of a school house every other building that we've seen on that master plan is years if not decades away and is going to require multiple trips back to the planning board for approval we're small we're fully self-funded we don't receive state funding i know that has come up again we don't receive outside assistance so every building that we add is a major fundraising effort for our school that just takes substantial time to get to so we did share a master plan and that's what it is it's a long-term concept it's not a construction schedule so i think we just wanted people to understand the reality today is that we're far smaller than what we're seeing represented and we're a much more modest school than i think um you you would see the last thing that i wanted to mention then i'll hand it over to lisa gurdy's i just wanted to talk about how we would how we would really like to engage with our neighbors from the very beginning we did reach out to our neighbors from there we we sent 50 invitations out we tried to get people to come to the site to hear the vision share concerns ask questions and then give us the opportunity just to learn what um what the concerns of the community are we hosted site walks we invited the planning board we had neighbors that also joined for the site walks and at present we're working with members of the select board to create more opportunities for just open face-to-face dialogue i think that a lot of the backlash that we're seeing is really based on a misunderstanding of the project and and a misrepresentation of what it is that we're trying to do on this site so facebook posts headlines they're just not telling the full story here and we want the opportunity to actually speak directly with people and meaningfully exchange information we're not trying to push something through we're trying to be good neighbors we're trying to be responsible neighbors and you're going to see that as a theme come through over the course of the conversation with that i'll close thank you i appreciate the opportunity to speak um if you haven't seen our traffic directing snowman open invitation to come by and check it out anytime uh with that can we elevate lisa gerties please thank you thank you um hi i'm lisa gerties um and i'm actually speaking for cindy who actually is um one of the co-founders of veritas so to introduce myself i live at 8 beverly road natick massachusetts i am a co-founder and former principal of veritas christian academy and i currently work as a senior consultant for veritas and other schools so i just wanted to address this to our neighbors and to just give you a little bit more background about who veritas is because so much misinformation as mr medendorp just shared has been circulated um first of all to to our neighbors um we've just been here for 15 years we we love this community um we've talked so extensively that that we understand what it would be like if it were our homes um and and if a big project was going near us we understand that this is stressful especially when the kind of information has been circulated that you've heard so we do want to correct it um a lot of things have also been said about veritas that i think it's important to correct as well um i would say that the only true thing that i have seen so far printed in social media is that uh we're a non-profit who's tax exempt the rest has largely been fiction so when um cindy and i and three other families founded the school 15 years ago this was just a vision that we create a school that was excellent to create kids nurture them to have excellent moral fiber a strong educational foundation that would put them out there in the world to make a real difference and we can see firsthand how needed that is in our country um we have core values and you know if you know anything about organizations core values often are written put on the shelf our core values are values we develop and we live by and they are they spell the word truth truth resilience unconditional love teachable heart high expectations our children to our board to our staff we evaluate on this we talk about this we live by this and i say this this is our dna because it's also how we behave to our community so we believe in integrity from our finances to our educational standards to how we interact with our community so i'll give you an example it's been printed that we don't meet mass standards well that is true but not true because no private school has to meet math standards actually but most of us as private schools meet and even exceed them what does that look like well for us at veritas our kiddos since 2010 have scored an average of 90 percent on a math standardized test since 2018 we worked hard to get those scores up they also do that in english language arts one of the funnest things about starting a new school is you get to do the best possible curriculum and we developed a rich and wonderful curriculum almost what i call garden of delights for our kids now they don't always think of it as delayed but generally when they leave they do so kids learn history in tandem with literature they get to read about the period of history we teach latin and spanish in third grade and believe it or not lots of them like it our seventh and eighth graders read wonderful books like the little prince kill a mockingbird animal farm our fifth and seventh graders do science fairs and they learn about why controls are important for the scientists in the room uh our kids can take math at their level which means that they can go into high school from everything to algebra one to pre-calc and they test into it um one of my best memories when i was principal was during covid when dr art yanowski who is the former wayland uh superintendent came to visit us as he was assessing our curriculum and we absolutely i'm gonna geeked out about some of the sixth grade novels we had so much fun and because they were novels he knew and recognized and we had um such a great visit and he said he left very impressed by what we were doing we've been represented as a rich school because of our tuition and by the way how else do you pay your teachers to live here and our tuition is maybe half of what most of their private schools like us are um in truth our student body is very very diverse and we provide financial aid for about a third of our students and we do take special needs students again that was said that we don't take special needs students and we work hard to work with the towns they come from to make sure that we implement their ieps our students 20 of them go to some most exclusive private schools in massachusetts and it's not because they're from rich families it's because they earn it and the number one feedback i get two big feedbacks from other heads of school your kids know how to work and they love to learn they have a joy in learning how do we do it we love our kids we come alongside we do some old-fashioned stuff we teach them how to study we make it interesting and we get them to the point where they believe in themselves and that's what we do so our kids have gotten into our hundred of 151 of our eighth grade graduates uh several have gone to roxbury latin saint sabs montrose milton nobles phillips exeter phillips and over and this is a small part of our list um mr white i i just need to hey excuse me you are not you're not speaking right now but okay so uh please do not interrupt so yeah all right how do we how do we control excuse me here how do we control this um in this process uh since they we're not in a room i can't i can't do anything so if people are just going to cut in and speak uh i'm not quite sure so maybe this is a question for the town attorney i i think you just have to do exactly what you did mr chairman in terms of folks need to raise their hands to be recognized and yes we should give whoever the speaker is the floor um but perhaps we also need to remind folks of uh the focus that you sort of outlined mr chair yeah yeah i was i was actually about to do that so um so uh i do i do really appreciate uh this this presentation but i i do think it's important that we focus the comments on the matter we have before us which is the question about uh overturning the site plan approval and overturning the building permit so as much as i appreciate the the character you're describing of the school and the students and i i absolutely can appreciate your passion for that and i don't in any way want to denigrate that but i think it is important that we keep it focused on um on the matter we have um do i have i have two comments related to that and i can skip the rest is that yes if you can that would be great thank you sure i'm happy to do that um we just spent a year in a grueling approval process um and i attended all the planning board meetings so and i can tell you having been there personally not a single stone was left unturned uh i went through every single memo from dillis and roy and took every issue to its completion and i can tell you today in confidence um that you're not going to unearth anything surprising this project is very complex i am a chemist by training um and so i read every memo and i get the data and i appreciated the professionalism thoroughness i saw at the planning board the number of times i saw either annette or jennifer steel say hey let me look up the bylaw and check it and i'll come back to you later and we were sent back to do more research more test pits more modeling this project meets the bylaws and not only that we care about meeting the bylaws and you've all heard a lot about the dover amendment and we are entitled to a lot of protections as an educational institution the abutters council has asserted that we have used the dover's amendments to cover a lot of things that we have not can i tell you that in the end we only asked for one single waiver not to have to cover 10 percent of the parking with landscaping that's it and we want you to know that we were willing to make these accommodations because we just care about the people of whiteland we genuinely care we know what this means to the community and we wanted to make the modifications needed so thank you for this time to make the comments and um i apologize if i went a little bit long thank you all right so what i what i cannot tell right here is um i have no way of ordering the number this sort of responding to and order the number of people that have raised their hand i just get a notification that someone has raised their hand i don't have a list of people um so i guess what i'd like to do is sure yes uh the point of order this is uh uh sorry uh this is the zoo meeting coordinator i'm with the i.t department um great i just wanted to let you know that when people do raise their hands um it they do get self-ordered in in the in like the participant link okay so whoever raised their hand first so to speak uh it gets ordered in that from top to bottom so there are two people that raise their hand the person that raised their hand first is the person that's going to be above the other person so if it if that's what you're looking for uh yes the only thing is i don't have like any kind of a control panel i just have a tab at the bottom that says there's 58 participants and and it says three of them have raised their hand i can't say which who has raised their hand or in what order they want to speak so i'm just saying okay i'm bringing this up because it's like this meeting is without without some organizational structure this meeting is going to uh it's going to be unmanageable would it help mr chair i completely understand if i identified for you who on my team is raising their hand uh i guess it would be what i what i'd like to do is i know you said there are there were a couple of people that wanted to uh to speak before you gave your presentation i'd like to just kind of proceed in that order so if i could at least have an understanding of how many additional individuals there are and um i would also like to stress that i'd really like to keep the comments on topic if possible i understand um i've i've heard that loud and clear i'm sure that uh the people on my team have as well right now aline caldwell uh from our team is the next person and on my list she was going to be the last of five so i'm assuming that that that might mean that um the other two have um decided to defer um in in recognition of your admonition and that aline may be the last one right that'd be great i'm i'm not trying to be difficult about this it's just like it's virtually impossible to control this over zoom it'd be way easier uh in person but yeah let's let's hear i think you said um eileen yes aline aline all right yes good evening thank you so much so my name is aline caldwell um i am a resident of weston actually um but i am here just to speak very very briefly no more than two minutes um of your time here just want to boil it down i am a parent of two students at veritas i volunteer on the veritas parent association and i'm a class parent and so with that i'm just very in tune with the family needs and the real impact of this project any any delays related there too i thank the board for your time i know that you guys are volunteers you don't have to be here especially on a you know even virtually after a snowstorm so i really appreciate you i also just want to say especially as we get into public comments um there's a lot of emotion in this and if any of you on the board or parents i'm sure that you can appreciate that when a parent feels like something relating to their children is at risk or threatened it might exert a certain emotion and so none of that is intended to in any way um imply that you're not doing your job or that you know we're upset with you it's just emotion and we're going to try your best to try and harness that um so i just wanted to say that on the front end there are some real practical consequences of delaying this um project we have entered into a six million dollar construction contract and we remain financially responsible under that contract irrespective of any delays that are caused from here on out as you know there's been site work already done to prepare it including tree removal and any delays in that can cause not only problems with our site but the aboveers um and so stopping construction site prep once it's underway is extremely dangerous and so i just i just also wanted to share kind of the practical implications of that i know i speak for my children that they're so excited about the school so the thought that this might not move forward or could be delayed is just is really is really uh unfortunate um at the last meeting there was a comment that kept coming up which was that litigation is going to happen no matter what um and that might be true but i respectfully just wanted to point out that even if that's the case i really hope that that does not in any way sway the board in ruling one way or another and i would argue that veritas should not bear the burden of having to initiate a suit to defend a permit it obtained properly after full compliance with this process and that if the appellant here feels like he has standing and he's been wronged i would just encourage that that that he then take that recourse and not be on veritas after following those rules strictly the last thing i just wanted to touch on quickly is the precedent that's being established and i know um mr white that you had talked about this and that the board is aware of this but the last hearing there was something that wasn't discussed that i think is really important to address and that is the precedent that's being established by the board deciding to rely on this land court case and my fear is not only just for veritas and for this appellant but in perpetuity that this by looking at intent and utilizing that as the new standard for meeting the standards of filing a timely appeal that any abutter any abutter can send an ambiguous email to a board not even the zba with no financial consideration wait the 30 days hope that someone else lawyers up puts skin in the game files an appeal and if they don't then they'll go and file and in this case it was six days later but i asked the board what is that standard is it six days six weeks six years and then what assurance does veritas have or anyone for that matter when they do have a building permit that they can go and incur costs and start developing their sites it's really really problematic it's problematic for the building permit holder it's problematic for the town and especially for the zba because no matter how good the intentions are of the zba that standard it will be impossible to be able to implement it fairly across the board it just it's an impossibility and you're just opening yourself up to lawsuits and so i just wanted to highlight that last final thought mr muscari was part of this process i know that because i looked at the planning board decision and references him and while again i sympathize with any concerns i know we're going to get into those and address them one by one i just want to really highlight that there was a process and nothing being raised today was not raised and addressed beforehand and so in closing i leave you with this in my humble opinion once deadlines become optional approvals are no longer final and that uncertainty harms everyone in this case the residents citizens of whalen and our children at veritas thank you okay thank you so i still see three additional participants uh have raised their hand but i don't uh you know just two it looks like um but i guess what i'd like to do is still like to proceed i think everyone will try to afford everyone an opportunity to speak but i want to proceed as we originally planned which was to hear from uh attorney silverstein um thank you mr chair uh so again for the record jonathan solferstein i'm counsel for um veritas uh i'm going to uh follow the order of my uh letter of earlier today which runs through um the three main types of allegations that mr muscari's counsel has asserted i will note that there are other issues that have been sort of peppered in um throughout some of the different submissions on behalf of the appellant i'm prepared to respond to them but i'm going to focus on the three main issues uh mr chair that you raised um so the first has to do with the um aquifer protection overlay district so uh i'm gonna in and the primary issue there is the question of impervious ground coverage so um mr mustari's council asserts that this that our project should be regulated as a residential lot and not only that but that only a very small piece of the property should be considered when determining compliance with that standard so i'm going to address those pieces in order um first of all we're not a residential lot when you look at the bylaw admittedly it's a little bit ambiguous it in right in imposing regulations on properties under the um overlay district it refers to residential lots being subject to one standard and non-residential uses being subject to a different standard but i submit that clearly what's intended there especially since when you look at it more than five residential lots is subject or are subject to the same standards as non-residential uses right so i think it's very clear that the structure of the bylaw is that if you're a single family residential structure on a lot you're not being forced to um employ costly best management practices rain gardens um you know uh storm scepters you're not a commercial project so you're just subject to a very straightforward and for a residential for a house a single family house on a lot your only requirement is really pretty easy to meet and that's 30 percent ground coverage however when you get to five or more residential lots or any non-residential use you're subject to much more onerous and technical requirements and those are best management practices you have to demonstrate compliance with the mass stormwater handbook all these things that our single family residents would not be subject to that's the clear structure of the bylaw and we've complied with all that i submitted to the board as an exhibit our groundwater uh permit from the conservation commission the conservation commission recognized that we've met all those requirements the planning board recognized that we met all those requirements requirements and clearly the intent of the bylaw is that non-residential uses need to meet this higher standard and we have met it so that's the threshold now let's say that we are a residential lot i don't know how you could call it that no one's living there but let's say we're a residential lot subject to the 30 percent impervious coverage limitation the planning board recognized in its decision that our impervious coverage is 21.9 we have a single lot the property is a single lot was it at one point multiple lots yeah and the planning board endorsed an approval not required plan long before issuing its decision that erased all those lot lines and made it a single lot it is a single lot when you look at the definition of lot it is an area of land in in single ownership this is one lot now what is the 30 coverage requirement it is 30 of the upland lot area which in section 1602 is defined as the total area of the parcel of land in question not the total area of the parcel so much of the parcel as is in the zone 2 or in the apod the total parcel that's what the planning board looked at that's what the engineers agreed was appropriate and that's the only possible reasonable reading of the bylaw so we easily satisfy the 30 percent lot coverage limitation which in any case does not apply to us now um in their letter uh from friday afternoon mr muscarry's counsel said well you really have to read it this way because it's important to further the interests of the bylaw including nitrogen loading well first of all when the language of the bylaw is clear which this is you can't try to you know change the language and read language in that's not there just because you think it should say something else but and i know i know i know we'll be hearing from mr horsley later and i've never seen mr horsley comment on a project that he was not opposing uh often on exactly the same bases in every case but he tried to make this argument to dep and they shot him down they said no you consider for nitrogen loading you consider the entire property and i attached that email chain to my letter as well so that's the um impervious law coverage issue under the apod i don't know mr chair if you want me to pause there see if there are questions or just plow on to the next issue um i am satisfied uh with with that uh that piece of the presentation um i don't know if there's any other questions from the board not as of yet all right yeah then let's uh let's keep going thank you mr chair so there was also sort of a throwaway um reference in um the letter from friday afternoon from mr muscarry's counsel that suggested well we admit that there's over you know there's 21.9 percent impervious lot coverage so that shows that we violate article 7 which has a 20 percent lot coverage uh uh maximum in the single residence districts but those are it's apples and oranges in the apod the 30 percent limit for single for residential lots is impervious lot coverage that's buildings parking roads any impervious surface the 20 percent lot coverage limit referenced it by mr mustari's counsel and it's i'm at a loss because it wasn't difficult for me to look at this and see that it's referring to building coverage so i'm really at a loss as to how those two issues could have been conflated by competent counsel um but the difference between impervious coverage and building coverage is obvious for building coverage for that 20 percent limit you don't count roads you don't count parking you don't count anything except for buildings so as explicitly stated in our plans and in the planning board approval we're at 4.1 percent building coverage so no we're not in excess of 20. last i checked four is less than 20. so those are the uh the lot coverage and apod issues and now i'll move on to the setback issues the first one is really um surprising to me uh if i could mr chair can i share my screen uh yes i don't know how to enable that unless you can just i think it's enabled it looks like it's enabled so um so i'm just bringing up for now um you should see uh the letter that i submitted earlier today to the board yes um and i know that the state zoning act section three on the dover amendment explicitly prohibits or exempts any handicap ramp from application of the bylaw okay so this is what mr muscari is complaining about you see this little circle less than 10 square feet on the corner of a handicapped access ramp so that handicapped students can get into their school and let's look at where it is almost 800 feet from the closest place on mr muscari's house and what's in between there
dense woodland now in order to bring an appeal to this board mr muscari is supposed to demonstrate standing how he's going to be harmed how is mr muscari going to be harmed by us having handicap access for our students that extends maybe three feet at one corner not into his setback but into the setback of this property now bearing in mind it's not even into the setback near this property's house it's this little tail for all intents and purposes it's really a setback to yeager way but if you actually measure to yeager way we're well over 30 feet so i felt it was important to show those details to show how petty this is mr muscari doesn't care about this setback this isn't hurting him what does he want to do he wants to stop the project he wants to get a stop work order so that it becomes for this small nonprofit educational entity cost prohibitive and he can accomplish through delay what he could never accomplish on the merits and i hope the board will uh not accept that this is a handicapped ramp access ramp in fact if you see it's referred to wood deck and ramp it's five feet wide for handicapped access it's got a maximum grade why to comply with handicapped access requirements it is exempt on its own even independent of the fact that this is part of a dover project it's exempt from setbacks so there's no violation there so the next argument with respect to setbacks is that the engineered slope which is a fancy term for an earthen grassy slope next to the road that happens to have some stabilizing material under it to prevent erosion we substituted that for retaining wall in that location of the road because there were objections raised to having a retaining wall within the setback so it has to be one or the other something has to hold up the road unless as the true goal clearly is you want to just prevent the road and therefore prevent the project but that's not how the dover amendment works so first of all this grassy slope is not a structure there is no evidence in the bylaw in the language it uses or in the way it's ever been applied in wayland to my knowledge that would support the notion that setbacks apply to subgrade or at grade features why do i say that well the definition of a structure that's subject to setbacks gives examples buildings frameworks walls tents stands platforms bins fences signs flagpoles recreational tramways and antennae these are all things that extend above grade they are all structures that you can see above the ground to my knowledge and i've been practicing municipal land use law for 30 years i'm not familiar with anyone ever trying to apply a setback to a grassy slope which is what this is does the fact that there might be landscaping fred fabric or these geotech reinforcements to prevent erosion does that turn a grassy slope into a setback i mean to a structure of course not and why do i say that also because look at your definition of setback it is the shortest distance from a lot line or right of way to the wall of a building or structure if something doesn't stick up out of the ground you don't need a setback has anyone here ever had to show setback compliance for a brick patio or for a sandbox i mean these are common sense obvious facts it's never been applied this way and it shouldn't be applied this way here but let's pretend we're just going to throw common sense out the window and call this grassy slope a structure
let's pretend it would in the normal course be subject to the setback even though i bet you can go to every single subdivision that's been built in wayland and find engineered slopes reinforced slopes holding up subdivision roads all over the place would that mean that it's okay to strictly apply that requirement to this project to prohibit construction of our road no because under the dover amendment you can't do that it's unreasonable under the law to apply a dimensional requirement even if it would otherwise apply if it would unduly interfere with the dover project and it wouldn't further some compelling zoning objective but what's the compelling zoning objective here that the neighbor closest to this who isn't complaining mr muscari can't see this grassy slope through all the woods and the hundreds of feet from his house but that a neighbor might have to look at a grassy slope and think there might be something under that grassy slope that turns it into a structure there's simply no reasonable basis to apply this 30 foot setback which would prohibit the project there's no way to install the road without holding the road up and we agreed to remove the retaining wall and substitute it with a grassy slope and now mr muscari doesn't want the grassy slope not because the grassy slope hurts him or that he could even see it but instead because he thinks that's a way to stop the project um finally thank you just before hang on just before we go on to that i see one of the board members has a question for you i think i'm one of the points you just raised so i'll let adam ask that question first yes mr silvenstein i used to have a clarification question if you could just pull up what you were just uh showing about the the pictures and stuff i just want to make sure i have a a clear understanding of something really quickly certainly uh not that one it was the next one uh yes right there uh the the trees and the tree line just scroll down just a little bit um i know that there have been a lot of trees that have been taken out from the property are any of these trees that are part of this picture uh removed as part of the project um i just wanted to get a clarification on that and what the time stamp kind of was in comparison to before versus now and i just wanted to get an understanding sure so i want to be really clear when i show this and in my letter you may have most noted um that i'm talking about the wooded buffer on mr muscari's property i don't know the answer others on my team may as to whether we have removed trees sort of on the eastern portion of the property but even if we clear cut up to our property line this is all on mr muscari's property and so so this is this is all part of his property right here i mean yeah i mean i will be able to speak to that anywhere but i just wanted to get a clear understanding of it yeah i i didn't i'm not the most technologically savvy and and i was obviously under a bit of a time constraint i didn't know how to plot the actual lot line on here but my best guess is that the lot line is somewhere around here and so there's still a significant and dense okay so it's about it's about half it's a it's a i have no idea uh okay it might be a half it might be two-thirds i don't think it's um less than a half okay i just wanted to get a better understanding of of what that was and you know because those have those have leaves and we're not in a leafy time period now yeah so i just wanted to get the other thing i want to know um actually i realized yes we certainly have cut some of these trees this is actually the property i believe um so this is the structure so he this house is complaining about a two-foot encroachment here for a handicapped access ram yes okay so it's tough it's tough to tell it's it's tough to tell the the expectations then from the photo it is all it is a fairly big distance overall but um yeah it's three football fields um okay all right but thank you mr silverstein again i just wanted a clarification just get a kind of an understanding on it all right so yeah so uh mr silverstein if you could continue to sort of uh thank you articulate the uh i guess you were on the setback issues um right now i was um so the uh i think the one other thing i wanted to mention is again this was not none of these were issues that were ignored by the planning board planning board didn't ignore anything this was an extremely detailed and burdensome review project in its decision and this is uh on page six paragraph or section four two one the planning board quote approves the location of the proposed buildings internal roads stabilized slope and sports court as well as specifically noting the lot and building coverage of 21.9 and four point one percent respectively these issues were explicitly addressed by the planning board after the better part of a year and the benefit of many consultants so for this board to be asked to substitute its judgment for that of the planning board that conducted this analysis on all of these issues i think makes no sense um this is not a situation where the planning board didn't address or didn't consider certain issues all of these issues were considered we have the transcripts of all the planning board meetings should the board want them i doubt you will um but i did think they're important to note that um so the uh sports court it's the same argument it does not extend above grade there was discussion about a fence there's no fence proposed it's landscaping um the uh property two door two uh properties away from us has a sports court that looks like it literally extends onto one abutting property and very close to mr muscari's property i don't think it's ever been considered a structure it has no walls so it's not subject to setbacks but even if it were subject to setbacks we are talking about a minuscule encroachment and the placement of that sports court was discussed as ad nauseum during the planning board hearings it's obviously a necessary aspect of an education of a school we need sports courts and there is another place to put it so again when you go to the dover amendment case law about when it's reasonable to strictly enforce a dimensional requirement it has to further a legitimate zoning objective and not unduly impair the dover protected use and neither one of those standards would be met here um finally there's reference in the uh correspondence from mr muscari's council about you know it's very vague uh about us not meeting screening requirements for the parking areas now first of all we're not required to meet screening requirements case law is crystal clear that dover protected uses cannot be subjected to landscaping or screening requirements but that didn't stop us we did it we're proposing a great deal of new trees shrubs and other landscaping including to screen abutting properties from the parking areas so even though we're not required to do it we are doing it um finally i don't think it was mentioned in the letter from friday but the previous letter from mr muscari's council suggested that there was some sort of violation of of the earth movement bylaw um the appeals court is actually held in another case in weyland that the earth movement bylaw may not be applied to dover protected uses i cite cited to that case um but the fact is that we're not violating the bylaw anyway because by this the clear terms of the bylaw earth movement necessary as part of a use protected under 48 section 3 that's the dover amendment is not subject to its terms so the bylaw explicitly says we're not subject to the bylaw and even if that language wasn't in there it also says that you don't need uh to comply with the bylaw for earth movement in connection with constructing buildings roads septic systems and that's all we're doing we're not going in there and you know selling loan to raise money for the building project the only earth movement that's taking place is in connection with the approved site plan so i know i've thrown a lot of information at the board i'm happy to answer any questions i really do appreciate the board's time uh and and consideration of um some of the the statements of members of the um the schools board so that you could get a sense i i think it's easy to lose track of the fact that this is a small non-profit school that's just trying to make things better for its students um and uh and the impact even of having to have its full suite of consultants here tonight um is significant so i appreciate the board's consideration well uh thank you um thank you for that um so uh i guess before i see several people that have um raised their hands but i guess does the board have any questions uh for mr silverstein before we hear from anybody else i have no additional all right it sounds like there's no additional so i can't tell again who is who has raised their hand first but i'm assuming they'll automatically be elevated to ask a question in the order uh that their hands were raised
this is peter jerning i don't know if you want to hear from mr muscari side or were you looking for other general questions uh i can't again i can't tell i only see three participants have raised their hand that you are you are one of them um and mr muscari is one of them um mr white may make a suggestion sure uh that we listen to add uh mr muscari or counsel for mr muscari uh as they had an opportunity to speak and let them speak and then from there uh we can listen to attendees or anybody else at that point and then um you know after mr muscari or counsel end up speaking i think we should uh limit uh discussions to 90 seconds like we usually do okay i guess with that um let's uh let's have let's hear from mr muscari because i recognize it yep sorry this is peter turning i'll just jump in on our side we'd like to you to hear from adam mr muscari um scott horsley and gail hire from our firm will will also talk and i'll just start before asking mr muscari to pick up just to say that you know i think what's important and i think i tried to frame and actually mr white i think you did a good job of uh framing this at the top why we are here is because we alleged error we alleged that the site plan review process had error we believe that this the planning board did not appropriately apply the aquifer protection district zoning bylaw to this project among other infirmities and you know i think that there was a lot of statements at the top that seemed to attack i don't know things that are occurring um on facebook or elsewise but some of that seemed to impugn the the action that we've brought before the board today and i take some umbrage at that um but i think we'll get past it before i turn it over to mr muscari i would like to share my screen if i could just to illustrate um what i believe mr hirsch was referencing before and that is an image that we shared during the last hearing that showed the extensive amount of clearing on the property um and the assertion that mr muscari is just benefiting from a great densely wooded area um maybe there was a clarification that there's a densely wooded area on his property but um from what we're witnessing on the site and what this aerial footage shows uh to the extent that was represented on the image that attorney silverstein included with his materials um you know that i think that's not an accurate depiction of of the situation um and just to highlight again the concerns that we raised i understand the focus that mr silverstein has had on the handicap ramp i'll acknowledge i didn't realize or appreciate the purpose of that so point taken but we did raise uh other setback issues particularly with the parking these are much more approximate to mr muscari's uh property and the even in the recitation that mr silverstein ended with where the planning board made certain um approvals for a for the structured slope i believe is the term that he used and that the planning board used that's that area here um and again we assert that that's an error we assert in our papers that that should rightly be considered a structure i understand he has his arguments against that but you know and then his arguments about you know certain structures in subdivisions or backyard patio you know those are likely not going right up to the property line within a setback and these this structured area these geo cells uh we believe should be found to be a structure they are this is an engineered slope it's not merely just a a grassy area there's a i understand that mr silverstein says the earth movement is permissible um i understand his comment there but again there's a massive amount of restructuring of earth uh on this site and this structured uh slope is required to offset the the slopes that have been created and caused on this property therefore we believe you know those are serious considerations so i'll stop sharing now just or slight uh elucidation of those issues and adam if you're ready we'll go to you and then scott and then gail thank you okay thank you thank you peter um can everybody hear me okay yes is my my camera a little bit more stable this time sorry yes you're not walking around this time yeah i i will make sure i don't give you guys motion sickness again um look you guys just heard a lot all i want to do is just thank you all for allowing us to continue the appeal tonight um it's it's not lost on me how difficult the decision was to move forward and ensure that our voices could be considered today um it's been a long process for everybody involved and i'd like to sincerely thank the board for the time you're taking to hear this appeal um i also want to thank veritas for your comments it's good to hear from them directly finally after such a long process and i want to again reiterate that we are in no way opposing this school or religious institution and we've been clear about that from the start um we're just here to make sure that they're held to the same standards that any of us would be um i'm not complaining about a handicapped ramp um i'm just asking that the project um protects our town's drinking waters and respects our property lines just as we would like to respect theirs um i i also know the board's in a really difficult position right now and i just want you guys to know we genuinely appreciate the work you do for the town it's really not easy to do what you guys do and it's often very thankless and so just thank you for hearing and ensuring that the abutters have the opportunity to share our voice um many fam my family our neighbors everybody who's on this call the many residents through wayland who voice concern about projects such as these we're just taxpayers and we care deeply about our home and the neighborhood and just because this is closest to me and it happened to be the one who's who's kind of the one appealing it the issues here matter that they're to the entire town as a whole so we may sound very passionate at times and i apologize for that um but that's because we just feel a responsibility to speak not only for our street but for the fellow residents who don't have the ability or opportunity to show up and advocate in this way so in in no means is this meant to be a reflection on the work you all do each day to keep the town running we're not here to be adversarial we want to be respectful we're hoping to be heard we trust in your judgment and fairness and we understand the constraints that you're under so truly just appreciate the opportunity to share our perspective again tonight and i just wanted to say thank you thanks adam scott you want to jump on yes uh can you hear me okay mr chairman yes great well very briefly in the way introduction i am a hydrologist i have more than 30 years experience a lot of my work has been for the us epa nationally i've worked in all 50 states i've worked for many municipalities in in massachusetts i served as an expert witness in federal and state courts interestingly worked for mr silverstein as an expert witness as well and contrary to his representation of me i've worked on many development projects you may have heard of the pine hills probably the largest development projects in the commonwealth i worked on that i did the design and permitting on that i'm also working on three affordable housing projects right now so i just wanted to clarify i think some of his comments about perhaps whether i'm objective or not i believe i very much am and i'm very proud of my my credentials um if i may mr chairman i would just like to share my screen just to show two quick slides and i'll be very very brief sure i think it may be enabled here can you see uh let's see not yet but it looks like something is happening okay hold on can you see that slide now no okay how about how about now you cannot see it let me go let me go back and try again my apologies that's okay
easier in person right because we would have our built-in tech support with us that could solve solve this issue yeah let me go back here and try again all right yep something's happening yes we see that okay now it's going to get the right slideshow up here that's not the right one i'm sorry mr chairman i had this all set to go it's okay we don't have any other cases tonight we literally have this one on purpose so i think we'll be all right all right how about that can you see the parcel yeah my apologies okay so um very briefly i guess the the one issue i'd like to speak to is this act for protection district now i will say that most of my career has been focused on groundwater protection i mentioned epa i actually uh helped epa develop the national program to protect drinking water supplies while their protection areas i helped massachusetts dep develop the zone 2 delineation procedure so i'm quite familiar with the subject matter this graphic you're looking at here is the the dark outline is the parcels the blue area is the zone 2 area which is essentially what the town adopted as the act for protection district as you can see the majority of this parcel is outside the zone 2 and outside the act for protection district a smaller part of it is within the district and that happens to be where the storm water issues the impervious surfaces as well as the wastewater is concentrated within the zone 2 area now it's going to show one other slide this is a slide that i actually developed for uscpa for national training on how to protect uh wellhead drinking water areas and this is a 3d dimensional picture and frankly i'm not sure this was fully understood by the planning board there's a number of discussions uh and it wasn't very clear to me that they really understood this so i thought it would be worth taking a minute to make sure that everybody does understand what is at stake here my understanding of the act for protection district the purpose of that law that violates to protect groundwater drinking water the town's drinking water supply so what we're looking at here is in the front is a cross section on the top is the land view so this is a drinking water well the yellowish greenish area represents the area that flows to that well when it's pumping that's the that's what we call the zone 2 area when that gets projected up to the land surface we see this dotted line or dash line that's the what gets put on the map that's the zone 2 or act for protection district now the way this works is the water that gets to that well comes from within that zone 2 area none of the water outside the zone 2 area gets to the well so when we develop regulations to manage the types of uses and in this case the density of uses amount of wastewater amount of impervious surfaces we are focused only on the zone 2 area because that's where the water comes from that's why we delineate zone 2 areas in massachusetts we want to know what are the critical protection areas and when i read the purpose of your bylaw act protection bylaw it is exactly that to protect land uses within that act for protection district now what i've done here is just shown a parcel and i'm going to suggest that this is represent representative of this subject parcel we're talking about tonight part of it is within the zone 2 and part of is outside from a actual impact to the well standpoint the part that's outside the zone 2 has no impact and it doesn't contribute any recharge so both the wastewater provisions within the a pod as well as the stormwater impervious surfaces work on the basis of the amount of impervious surface which is then diluted by the amount of recharge because that's how you manage concentrations so the portion of the parcel that's outside the zone 2 is completely irrelevant now i understand that the attorney is trying to make an argument using the definition of a lot and and yes i he can probably read read that correctly but what i'm here to tell you is in the deliberations with the planning board i'm not sure that this was fully understood because when i read some of the performance standards for a special permit uh the finding has to be made that the project is not going to contribute to degradation of groundwater supply and by by taking into account the land area outside the zone 2 uh it provides a really inappropriate and and i would say um insignificant part of this so i think for the purpose of both the wastewater nitrogen loading as well as the impervious surfaces i believe that the way this has been looked at by the planning board is inaccurate and and and does not does not um connect to the intent and purpose of the apod and i'll stop there mr chairman be happy to answer any questions
thank you thank you uh yes i do have a quick question for you you you mentioned that and i i i tried to write this down but i i don't know that i got this correctly you talked about something about the application of a special permit and sort of making sure that uh there's no degradation of the water supply in there could you could you read that seems to be the crux of your argument that you're saying the planning board failed to consider that well there's there's a section i'll see if i can find it quickly within the apod district here can you see the bylaw i've tried quickly here there's a section that i've highlighted down here that says the decision and i'm obviously paraphrasing here i'll let you read it in detail but the decision must include these provisions here will not during construction or thereafter have an adverse impact on any aquifer area or recharge area in the district now that would exclude the land area outside the zone 2 area the other one is will not adversely affect an existing or potential domestic water supply so these are the these are the performance standards and which they relate right back to the intent and purpose of the bylaw and again the 30 impervious surface the nitrogen loading uh relates to those those um impacts within the zone 2 not outside the zone 2 those are irrelevant so again i guess what i what i want to be very very clear is is you are you are saying that in your opinion the planning board did not ask you this question in a in a clear enough way with uh in in to help them render their decision so in other words you're saying that regardless of the area regardless of how the the lot area is calculated whether we're calculating lot area just inside the aquifer protection district or we're taking talking the the total lot because i think that's a that's a legal question what you're what you seem to be saying is that regardless of the legal definition of the lot you feel the planning board did not adequately understand what they were approving i i think that that is true the i believe that the standards the intent of the standards are in here the 30 percent impervious surface and the nitrogen loading pertains to only the part of the lot within the zone two for from a from a substantive uh technical basis and and again when i look at these standards here these performance standards those are the things that go to this the lot area outside the zone two uh which i believe they considered when they did their calculation of the 30 percent uh is irrelevant to these uh performance well i i i understood that you you feel i i i understand that you feel that that's irrelevant however that's not exactly what the bylaw says so i guess this is this is the core of the question that i'm asking are you saying that in your opinion the planning board needed to go beyond the legal definition of the bylaw and and make an interpretation of how to apply the technical components of section 16 yes exactly mr chairman i know i've written regulations before sometimes they're not written perfectly i think the intent here is the is the lot area within the act for protection district that that was the intent it may not say that exactly but uh the reason i'm here is i i work my whole career on protecting public drinking water supplies these performance standards are critical and i believe this one's being misinterpreted okay thank you i do not have any other questions but i don't have any other questions from the board no other questions i have a question for veritas just something i was thinking about um and if we don't mind going back to them for a second um i just want to make sure i understand something um we were going through a lot of numbers pretty quickly on student sizes and and stuff so i just want to make sure i have a clear understanding uh currently there are 150 total students 77 of which are middle school do i have that accurate so far i'm going to defer to joseph joseph did say that was stating that yeah we can elevate joseph or lisa somebody just i just want to confirm so i i just wanted to confirm it is the person that needed mr hirsch the answer is yes that's correct okay beautiful and then the of those numbers are any of those are any of those current students going to be transferring to this location from the other location as part of the that's the thought process that's the thought process yeah that's right okay and it is is it the as um well right now uh it's approved for 108 students is that accurate um so will all middle school and then some of the other 150 whatever mix it may be will be taking up that 108 no so i i don't i don't know exactly how this fits into the i don't understand the line of the questioning but i'll just reiterate kind of the intended use and then whether or not that's i'll just answer the question adam so um seventh and eighth grade is what we envision because the first phase of the project is the renovation of 172 cachituate 172 cachituate is three classrooms so you're not going to bring 108 kids over there so the 108 kids is relevant to the second phase which is the addition of that second schoolhouse it's a multi-grade building which is also permitted right now so that's additional classroom space and that isn't something that we can build as of today that's something that we have permitted but that still requires additional fundraising to get there so what we're talking about today is 77 kids in the current seventh and eighth grade for the kids that we know that are coming back next year it's probably 70 kids in seventh and eighth grade and we wouldn't begin to encroach on the larger number until we moved over additional grades and that can happen in the fall of of 2026 okay that's that's totally fine and then you were talking about uh future items and future expectations and stuff uh is there any way you can give an understanding of uh i know that we were permitted here for 450 it was a it was a a different number it's like 453 or for 463 or something like that um the sizing of the permitting for the amount of personnel for the future and everything like that is that because you want to encompass be able potential for for for all of future or what is the potential usage for the amount of students in the time frame i know you were saying over time but like if you can just give an understanding of what that campus in your guys mind is going to look like for the future say you know two decades or whatever it is from now are you planning on using that 450 or is it really going to be more something much more um modest yeah i appreciate the question i think right now everything that we have done to this point is just based on those two buildings because that is all that we have actually formally designed and submitted for permitting so the number that's up in the 400s is because of work that we're doing for septic so that once we lay the groundwork for what may come two decades from now we don't have to dig up roads and dig up foundations to put in things that that we know that we may want to use so i don't have a firm answer for you right now in in a way that i think would be satisfactory i can just tell you we're we're only doing the work uh that we would that we would have to dig up uh established features otherwise to put in later so all we're here to talk about now is is these two buildings okay and that's totally fine i you were talking a little bit about future and stuff and i just wanted to get an understanding for expectations for the future if you could provide any insight or anything like that so or of what veritas was thinking for you know um campus wise so yeah nothing nothing from that i could that i could provide for today okay and mr chair just just to be clear the uh this is jonathan sulferstein uh the approval that's before you the planning board site plan approval and the building permit that's currently on appeal is for 108 students it's not for 400 plus it's correct yeah yeah i think i think that's that we oversized the septic system it's totally fine the potential future i i just want to be really clear yeah no no we we understand that and that's actually that's this is one of the reasons why i i really i i i do want us to sort of stay focused on i would say these three issues the question of whether the planning board aired with respect to the aquifer protection district whether or not there are a lot coverage violations as alleged by the appellant and whether or not there are setback issues i i would agree with you that there's there's been a lot of other material that has been shared with the board and we have looked at it all i want everyone on both sides of this issue to understand we have read all the material um and i i'm not trying to discount that material because we're not interested in it but i think it's important that we be very focused on the specific questions that i think both attorneys have sort of spent a fair amount of time sort of honing and and sort of uh i guess refining the documents that they've sent to us so mr chair i don't want to um you know jump in when i'm i shouldn't be can i make one very quick point in response to mr horsley's presentation just to sort of clarify yes because that was a very there's a there are some very specific elements of mr horsley's presentation so uh i think that's okay thank you um so uh i'm just bringing up your zoning bylaw um is that showing up uh not uh yes so he was citing the board to the the special permit standards our project does not require a special permit under the zoning bylaw there are certain uses in the apod that require a special permit so he was citing to you special permit standards that are completely irrelevant first of all you may not require a special permit for dover uses plus we're not one of the uses that requires a special permit under the bylaw so it's just more obfuscation none of those special permit standards apply so i'm really not clear on on what possible relevance that has um and i do want to note that uh mr durning brought up the picture of the site there's a very detailed landscaping plan there's going to be a lot of re um replanting of trees throughout that site so but most of and i think i was clear i'll clarify again most of the vegetative cover the buffer that i was referring to is on mr muscari's property so that those are the main points i wanted to mention and i'll stop sharing and defer to the board okay thank you um all right so we heard from uh mr horsley and um i apologize but um uh so mr white this is turning yes i think you said that there were three three individuals like my colleague gail higher is going to make some comments as well thank you very much thank you for reminding me i was trying i have it in my notes but it's all good it's all good it's all good great thanks gail thank you um thanks to the board for hearing us tonight um so one just very basic point i think one of the unfortunate coincidences about this project is that the densest part of it happens to be a in the zone two and be very close to some residential um properties and the fact that mr muscari may have a lot of trees in his backyard and maybe there's like a you know several trees between his house and the sports court like that should be irrelevant i mean the zoning bylaws are the zoning bylaws this is a residential district so i think the um residential nature of this neighborhood needs to be respected no matter how many trees mr muscari may happen to have in his backyard maybe someday he'll put something else back there and then the neighbor would be closer so that's just a kind of a um a point i wanted to make um and with regard to the aquifer protection district and um mr silverstein is correct the special permit is not needed we did not um say that it was and i agree 100 with mr horsley's technical comments and the fact is the planning board made no findings with respect to the aquifer protection district they completely ignored the uh the rules of the upper protection districts that um protect density and also earth removal and i agree there's no earth removal permit needed for dover uses but the apod um bylaw has some earth removal provisions in it which we assert should have been should have been followed so and i think um one thing that that no one has really talked about here i just want to make sure that it's understood um sir hersley put up the four well previously four lots now they're one but uh there's four lots whereas the two closest to the bottom of the screen are in the zone two and if you look at wayland's overlay district map the whole four lots are in the apod but the bylaw says the boundary is the zone two and the reason there's a boundary for the zone two that's the whole purpose of the aquifer protection district bylaw so what we are saying is that the zone two line should have been respected and the densest part of this project should not be in the zone two and that is what happened so we are asking the zoning board to take a closer look at that and say oh yes you know this is the zone two boundary this dense development should not be occurring in the zone two so the the technical aspects of how that plays out i think are in our submitted materials but i just wanted to raise that as kind of a threshold thing and where we see was the major error committed by the planning board and with respect to the aquifer protection district okay thank you thanks thanks mr white i think that uh captures the information that we wanted to convey um again we're here because we believe that there were errors in the process particularly with respect to the aquifer protection district as gail just mentioned there are no formal findings in the site plan approval um and it's not clear exactly what the planning board did did it just assume that there were um the all the additional land area could be included or not they didn't memorialize that but we believe that it's error and we think that this zoning board has an opportunity to make a finding that would respect the importance of density of development as attorney higher just said within the aquifer protection district so that's that's one of the primary errors that we're asserting today and we'll respond to any questions okay thank you um before we hear from any other uh participants uh any questions from the board no additional no additional from anyone else okay um all right so it looks like there are two more participants that have their hands raised right that's at least that's what i see on the bottom although it says there's 61 total participants so i can't i can't tell again mr chair may i make a recommendation sure now that we are um going to be listening to open comments that we uh reinstate the 92nd um period for statements uh i am fine with that i will uh i will set a timer if you'd like anina has her hand up or raising her hand okay yes uh thank you if i just may uh give a suggestion if you click on participants you will see all the um participants and see who has their hand raised and if you want to call up then i can unmute them for you so like perfect there's like a so it looks it looks like we now only have one and that is uh joseph uh mendendorf there's a uh also a miss smith as well where do you see that i'm in the i have the participant panel under attendees oh under attendees okay all right um well um actually let let's let's let's do this let's start with megan smith since uh i haven't been looking at that uh second panel there so let's do that so if you could give us you could elevate her and give us your name and address miss smith you can unmute yeah i think i don't know if you can okay can you hear me now yes
thank you everyone for your time this is amazing i really appreciate everyone's time my husband's gonna turn off his computer so i have to say just because adam maskari is the one who's being targeted it doesn't mean that he's the only one in this town that's upset about um what's going on back there and we really were not able to even meaningfully engage um until recently so am i able to see i feel like i can't see anything um so i'm just gonna say i am speaking as a direct abutter and tax paying wayland resident i'm deeply disappointed that the veritas christian academy's attorney continues to attack adam maskari even referring to his concerns as petty it's unacceptable mr maskari has been raising legitimate issues about the concerns and clear cutting of the wooded buffer that went right up to his and my property line we in the meantime had to pay out of pocket uh for where our actual property line was um and we would have never done that except that this invasive project was happening in our backyard while veritas christian academy tells us they are a non-profit i will say as a tax paying and full-time nurse and substitute for the town i will i'm a little resentful when people from natick or weston are telling me that it's not my place to voice any concerns for our town aquifer
for this fully for-profit school while they move forward with an extravagant project claiming financial hardship despite receiving out-of-state donor funding it's also troubling to hear neighbors characterized as merely complaining for pointing out work done without required setbacks these are compliance issues not personal grievances veritas i just uh hang on for one sec if i uh engaged with the neighbors all right excuse me just for one second yeah that was uh no genuine outreach and they have no understanding of what the real impacts are miss miss smith yes mr white please please we can't i guess we can't yeah there you go uh all right so i i guess yes so that was uh i'm happy to let miss smith continue to talk but that was two minutes so if you really want to limit to 90 seconds we would have to uh reevaluate that oh wait can you hear me yes yes we can hear you please if you could wrap up please miss smith wait could you hear me the whole time yes yes it was only at the very end okay i appreciate you i believe mr mendendorp was next yes i've been trying to keep track and i hope i said that right yes sir yes it was yes can everybody hear me yes we can uh miss smith appreciate your comments and um apologies on behalf of a of a charged hearing um on behalf of everything that has been exchanged today it is our intention to engage with the community i i live here too many of us live here too so we we want to make everything um as respectful as we can do and we are working to to get together with neighbors to just sit down outside of legal hearings and and and talk this out so just accept that um as as you can uh the other thing that i was going to mention mr chairman is that if you are interested in uh hearing uh veritas perspective from our engineers uh to mr horsley's comments we do have chris blessin who is our head architect we have peter maglu who is the aries engineer that was responsible for uh our our engineering perspective uh mr horsley was involved with the vast majority of the meetings that we did host through the planning board so we did review much of this material before it was also reviewed through the mass dep and we have all that on record as well so if you are interested in hearing a veritas perspective we can offer that by either of our two experts okay thank you very much thank you all right um so adam if you're keeping track who i think lisa was next yes yes so we can elevate lisa oh there she is there i am okay thank you um thank you so much for letting me speak i just wanted to do one single thing and that is read to you um the answer uh from claire golden of the mass department of environmental protection written to mr scott horsley on march 28th when he sent almost exactly the same thing that he just told you and i will read it and it's from claire golden and uh from mass department of environmental protection scott i apologize for the delay in my response i spoke to program folks in boston who requested that i send out an email to the sex and chief section chiefs which i did the results were the same as my initial survey of them when looking at nitrogen loading for zone 2 in iwpa the area of the entire facility including those parts of the facility outside of the zone 2 and iwpa is counted for example sas has to be located zone 2 the facility is 40 000 square feet the zone 2 area of the facility is only 15 000 square feet design flow is 440 gallons per day the facility meets 440 gallons per day building acre which is the guideline so this was not the planning board's decision this was the mass department of environmental protection it was sent to the board of health which voted to approve it based on this memo i'm finished thank you so much for listening to me thank you um so next yeah all right well that's good they're going they're going in order right so so i guess let's see hello and good evening give us your name and address please uh get them in those i always know when people don't say the name out loud that it's me so uh but i i never have that problem so that's uh it's actually it's a pleasant problem to have it's been my icebreaker for 30 plus years so my name is get them in those people i go by get us for short uh easiest way is like go get us a drink is the easiest way to remember um i live at 15 rolling lane so i'm obviously not direct to butter but i live very close uh i live you know just like two minutes away uh we moved here in november uh my son now attends veritas we lived in arlington which is a fantastic place to live uh but we heard about veritas different people and came to veritas uh uh fell in love with it and actually moved to wayland solely for that reason so now became a tax-paying wayland resident uh because of veritas um and immediately integrated into the community and i've now am a parent coach on the wayland youth basketball association we intend to be that i actually want to bring up a lean's point which is uh in my so my name is lithuanian i came from what was historically a soviet country broke free rules-based order is important i know there's a lot of chaos but the big the reason also reason i'm here is like if you have a plan and a process in place and that can fall apart which kind of feels a little bit like what's happening in parts of the country now too where the raw the the rules are malleable and flexible uh and you never know exactly why maybe it's we know or maybe it's because something was unclear but but we have to depend on those rules so i'm actually stuck on the fact that all these timelines passed and you know we're here late again uh uh you know everyone has to put their time and talk about this so i want to bring attention to that and just hope that we can also fix in the fact that if there are certain rules and certain plans that we have to follow certain processes that even when it's inconvenient and it doesn't work out perfectly that we stick to them um so anyway so on behalf of a new wayland resident i love this place my wife and i are so happy to live here my kids love it we're happy with everything that's here and we hope that the the precedent that's being set for the future uh is one that please please wrap up if you could please i'm down just that was my last word word okay sorry i had you i had a timer going too but my phone uh went on a screensaver so i lost it apologies that's okay no worries thank you all right so next would be uh kristen hall sorry hill sorry about that hello can you hear me now yes okay great hi i'm kristen hill i'm at the five ball walk ball rock lane um ball rock road and in wayland here um so i've been a resident for about uh nine years um and uh just as a full disclaimer my my children have been very tough for the last two years and um i reiterate uh what my uh my fellow parent there i get us just talked just said that as a resident um i you know i'm seeing kind of things from both sides i'll appreciate that it's for the you know the interest of those that are that live right close to it that i have this fear that things are going to um change for them you know at this at the same time i can reiterate that veritas has been you know quite amenable to my community i live really close to them right now my my kids actually walk right to school and i could say that uh veritas has been a very uh very good um um neighbor for all these years even though we just started with the school just two years ago um so with that as a but however my priorities do reside most as a resident that i'm very from what i've heard today it's been quite confusing because you know hearing both sides kind of say that that their way is the right way to me these matters seem to be very black and white they either follow the rules or they don't and essentially as a resident i certainly don't want to have any of my taxpayer dollars to be going towards wasting time for either those that are applying for things that are trying to help build and strengthen our community or for the residents that are relying on us the laws to keep us safe so essentially i'm still curious to see what the true facts are and i hope that there will be a transcript of the information that we sent to help identify what the actual facts are so we can see what's right or wrong so that's what it is i just implore the board and implore everyone to please follow the rules to the letter of the law and not not skip steps just because of emotions all right with that um my time is done thank you most real thank you um okay uh i guess next is uh emily combos hi can you hear me yes we can hi so my name is emily campos belusi i live in 11 gauge road wayland massachusetts um and i've had the unique privilege of attending both veritas christian academy and wayland public schools i'm here tonight to represent the voice of the students from veritas past present and future i'm someone who has experienced veritas firsthand and can speak on how it has shaped my education but more so who i am as a person my my family chose veritas because they wanted two things for me and my brother an excellent and advanced as you academic education and a place where my faith could grow alongside my intellect beyond academics and faith my family got to see what makes veritas special and that is its community because the school is so small relationships are deep teachers weren't just instructors they were mentors who walked with us through some of the most important years of our lives many of those relationships have continued through high school and even now into college that kind of personal investment is rare and it changes students it changed me all of my experiences at veritas helped me transition successfully to wayland high school and now to tufts university veritas didn't separate me from the broader world it prepared me to step into it with confidence i'm deeply grateful for both of my educational experiences wayland public schools and veritas serve different roles in my life and together they shape the person that i am today what veritas is seeking now is not to take away from the town but to establish a stable permanent home for a community of students and families who care deeply about education character and belonging the property already means so much to students and alumni many have even helped fundraise because they believe in what this student this school provides thank you thank you all right uh i guess next is uh kate taunton rigby yes sorry hi my screen is cut off yes that's okay can folks hear me okay yes yes okay great um so kate taunton rigby i live at 147 old connecticut path um i will again reiterate that this is not about veritas or the school or the people that may or may not attend at such school this is more about clarity around the setbacks that were specifically you know concerning i saw frankly two sides to the story one that seemed to be very dismissive of the concerns um another that may have been contained in a letter submitted friday i do hope that the board will take a thorough investigation into the contents of that letter just to make sure that we understand um the other piece that i want to clarify is a memo that was read by someone in relation to the water and zoning therein um my request of the board is that we bring back our expert um mr horsley to clarify and explain or perhaps in a follow-up letter help us understand the true impact this is going to have and i think you know adam's question around the capacity that's being presented now versus in the future it does have a broader impact we're you know putting in uh septics that allow the organization to scale and i recognize that that's good planning but i do have legitimate concerns uh for my family my children my neighborhood's drinking water here in the town especially in a town that has had concerns of a significant nature over several years past so um i'm not sure mr horsley could come back onto clarifier if that's a follow-up point but i want to be very direct you know i do support specificity in terms of things that we're discussing here to get clarity um this is not about the town's you know distrust of the uh school or any emotional side to it whatsoever um it's more just let's get clarity on where we have concerns so that we could be at ease um if in fact this is to um is to to come to rest thank you all right well i what i what i would propose we do is um you know we we have heard from we have heard from mr horsley um but we we do also we're going to continue the discussion about the aquifer protection district and and groundwater we're going to hear from uh another uh engineering consultant uh so but i don't want to start that until we finish the process of listening to the last few people that have had their hand raised before we get on that path so it looks like at this point we have uh doug sacra um and another hand just popped yeah another hand just popped up as well so hi can you hear me yes we can hi doug sacra 55 gleason lane whale and mass and i'm an architect with my own company maple hill architects um i just wanted to make one quick statement um we met all the building setbacks and we didn't request any variances or anything for that um so i just want to make that statement because it seems like lots of people are making it sound like we didn't meet setbacks and um you know i'm i'm done thank you okay thank you uh okay uh next is may kong hi can you hear me yes yes hi uh my name is may and i'm a well-named resident and apparent at veritas christian academy i just want to share my veritas is address please uh my address is 97 east plan street yeah i just i just want to share why veritas is so important to our family my family is a new immigrant family to the united states even before we came here uh we heard heard about veritas zero friends from my church they spoke uh very highly of the school so when we moved to the u.s we chose veritas very intentionally because of veritas we decided to uh move to wainland we actually bought a house only about a three minutes drive from the school through uh veritas we put down roots here and really become part of the wainland community i also know at least two other families in our class who moved to wainland for the same reason for our family veritas is not a temporary choice it's a big reason why wainland feels like home to us the school has had a very positive impact on our chat on our kids and on our family not just a cut academy but also in shaping our values and our sense of belongs here please wrap up yeah thank you oh right that i guess that was it um all right so it looks like uh kate kate taunton rigby has another question i just want to make sure that this is something different i think it's actually jason he's they just have one account guys okay okay sorry guys are you able to hear me yes yes okay yeah i apologize um yeah for some reason my phone won't log into the the zoom call um uh jason taunton rigby 147 old connecticut path i i just wanted to say quickly um i i work as a commercial real estate appraiser and i i've been hired on numerous occasions to be an expert witness um for court cases and one of the the things i want to point out is that our job is to be an impartial third party opinion and when i think about this traffic study that that was used within the approval process we're talking about 108 i might might have the numbers slightly off we're talking about 108 students and somehow the traffic study had 34 cars um if we're if we're talking about a school that's only seventh and eighth grade or even sixth seventh and eighth grade how are we getting three kids into each car and and i just want to question the legitimacy of the traffic study itself um i i think that's something that should be thought about here and and if if the traffic study goes out the window then maybe we need to think about getting a new one or just going through this process again thank you very much i appreciate your time okay thank you all right so it looks like we have gone through all of the uh members of the public that were interested in speaking uh so what i would like to do is um with respect to uh what we heard so far this evening um i i would like to hear from uh veritas's consultant with respect to their review of um the process that they went through in the site plan review uh and understands their uh i guess relationship with uh discussions they had with mr horsley during that review process and i believe that was something that um joseph mentioned uh the consultant was here to sort of speak to that so what i what i i do want to do is is if we could keep it focused on the pretty nuanced argument that mr horsley was making uh sorry uh notwithstanding the question about the uh the applicability of the the nuance between um the special permit and the aquifer protection district i sort of really want to focus more on um the specific uh amount of hydrological study that was done during the planning board uh review process i think that's me uh mr white is that uh i think it is yes okay great uh so i'm chris blessin the uh principal architect of tapay architects who led a team of um uh very established and capable engineers um i'd like to ask whoever's running to also promote um michelle callahan as a civil engineer um pete mcglue from aries is already promoted he is uh a hydrologist um with a lot of credentials as well and uh that process was also um brought forward uh or he and his team was brought forward into that um also with us is mark zambernardi is a geotechnical consultant and the reason i want all of these folks um on your screen and ready to talk to you is because for me to frame the question right on the process of uh review relative to uh groundwater i think that's what you asked about right um yes it is okay so the process of review is this came up uh uh actually uh about midstream in the planning process which again was um you know uh nine months at least um and it the question was about it it got really focused on groundwater mounding um and if anybody wants a master class on anything to do with groundwater mounding if you don't know what that term is you should go review those documents because it was quite extensive um and uh there was a lot of back and forth and one point of that back and forth between our um consulting group uh in communication with horsley and the attorneys at the time who were involved um horsley and his attorneys declined the opportunity to meet with our team to get on board with what was going on uh for groundwater mounding and the engineering that was going on um and so from that point we relied upon uh a peer-reviewed engineer study which is a third-party peer review uh solicited by the town paid for by the applicant at the planning board uh that peer review process went through multiple iterations where comments were made and slowly they were whittled away over time uh to establish what was going on and at the end of the day the third party reviewer agreed with the engineering analysis provided by our team some of which are here on this call that uh the engineering done for the water in this district on this site was applicable was right um and the letter that was issued from the mass dp on how to consider the site to mr horsley also went to the board of health so um there's two other boards to keep in mind too that the planning board waited for decisions from they did not make their decision before conservation commission reviewed and before the board of health reviewed both of which went through uh board of health actually hired another third-party reviewer to review groundwater calcs and and make their determination to issue a title five uh wastewater permit on this site as shown in the documents and so that's important information for this board to understand that there were two different boards that had two different peer reviews happening uh to review the engineering and analysis of this site and you have a state representative from a state massachusetts state that controls this process issuing a directive straight to mr horsley himself um talking about how to calculate the site um the conservation commission which uh controls uh storm water and tree um work um we'll leave the tree work as it as it is but i can tell you that we were fully compliant with the tree replacement um requirements of that bylaw um so there are a lot of trees taken down but you have to replace a whole lot more than you take down um and it's all based on caliper and replacement sizes and so that was all taken into consideration including with the screening analysis that was brought up in the other complaints um and the uh the conservation commission also reviewed the stormwater uh strategies on site um in light of all of the impervious impervious calculations related to to the uh zone 2 and aquifer protection district um and so uh that kind of outlines the extensiveness of the process and in no way did the planning board uh short circuit that at all um a lot of the documents actually that are coming from the opposing council um reference moments in time where uh further documents were produced after that for example the peer review documents and things like that and so they they didn't necessarily hit on the final determination or the final analysis in some cases not all but in some um and so um it's important to also realize time stamps in this process that in in the journey of a nine-month planning process of which um you know most projects don't actually go through a nine-month planning process in my experience it's maybe two hearings maybe three for really tough ones but nine months of hearings where we debated and and like scrutinize the project tweaked things along the way including impervious calculations and we we made all of the adjustments we needed to make and one thing to um kind of get back to the water issue is that there was a there was a a question by horsley's team and and the um folks at the time about well where's seasonal high groundwater or we didn't do enough test pits or borings or anything like that and so we hired mark zambernardi who's a geotechnical firm northeast youth technical they went out did some more analysis that went back to aries we uh did all of the requisite things and some of it produced okay we need to raise it a little bit or we need to do this stuff to really protect the neighbors and really protect everybody that's going uh everything that's going on on site and so um michelle can actually talk to you about the improvement of stormwater runoff from the site that's happening because of this development the improvement of captured rainwater that gets actually um diverted back into the aquifer production district area in the location that it's talked about and so um not or we're not relying any more on ambiguous or um just where the water lands and flows kind of uh area here we're by design and by sound engineering directing it to where it needs to go and controlling it on this site which is better for everybody and we'll um by the engineering analysis that pete and his team can talk about for mounding or by the stormwater runoff that michelle can talk about which is all backed in subsurface investigations that are applicable and meet all of the um stormwater handbook requirements again the case is actually quite clear for you all that um this is that's in the complaint is about a planning board's miss uh you know whatever the complaint says about the planning board but the planning board also relied on two other boards in town to help them get to a decision and those plant those boards themselves actually used the the means necessary and so we were under a lot of scrutiny um i think i want to in the this order i would like for michelle to talk about the stormwater um in particular and then um i'd like pete to just briefly we can go on for days about mounding i'm telling you for days and the subsurface effects of water and where you put it but i want pete to quickly and succinctly tell you some of the key findings relative to that the key takeaway the wastewater engineer is out of the country and unavailable which is why um the the record still in any case would rely on um the planning board's decision because you have a title five permit for that um and so the nitrogen loading and all of that stuff was taken up at the planning board not i'm sorry at the board of health not the planning board um it was discussed at the planning board but at the end of the day they they sort of said hey if board of health is going to issue a permit for this and that's their specialty that's their jurisdiction then who are we to override their um their authority on wastewater um and so uh michelle can you please talk for uh you know a couple minutes on uh stormwater and then pete if you'll follow that right up with um pounding
thanks i'm michelle callahan i'm a senior project manager at niche engineering um i work on a lot of projects with complicated sites lots of stormwater design and environmental permitting um this site was no different um like chris mentioned we went through a very long process of permitting peer reviews lots of back and forth um and i feel very confident in this design um i think a couple of things that i want to touch on because i could talk about this all night but there's been a lot of talk about impervious cover and that impact on that on the zone 2 um per the stormwater handbook and the requirements that are given to us by mass dep um any increase in impervious area has to also offset that um with groundwater recharge so our stormwater design has actually exceeded the requirement of recharge that's required under the handbook for this site we are there's extra considerations in the handbook related to zone 2 um so the different stormwater strategies that we can use those we're taking into account on the site um like chris also mentioned we work very closely um with mark's team to get additional geotechnical um uh investigations completed at the site a lot of times with um civil engineering and stormwater design you know we have certain um we have to test pits and borings and try to get groundwater levels um we did a really thorough thorough site investigation of this site and working with mark to get those investigations done so that we could really uh hone in our stormwater model and get uh our assumptions really nailed down we worked really closely with pete mcglue to work on the mounding that was brought up so i don't want to get too much into the weeds with that but mounding really talks about how much you're affecting the groundwater levels uh below the grade um so we worked really closely with pete to make sure that we weren't we weren't creating any mounding issues that anyone would be concerned about you know we're meeting all the regulations um i do want to just touch lastly on the point of we are reducing uh both the rate and volume of stormwater leaving the site so in the existing site right now the water hits the surface it leaves it leaves the site unmitigated there's nothing really holding it back other than the natural ground cover um that's there and the proposed design we're really intercepting this water infiltrating it on site um and really reducing both the rate and volume um in this proposed condition so it does result in an overall improvement uh for the stormwater conditions that i'll end there happy to answer any questions okay um i don't have any particular questions on that any other questions from the board none for me all right thank you sorry i was muted uh do you want to hear from pete on mounding yes is that okay uh pete can you please talk for a second on the mounding aspects of the project uh sure i guess what i what i do want to say is that this this one is a particular nuance point because we've heard from the applicants on like a very highly technical um disagreement on the way mounding is uh is calculated and that's my that's my high level takeaway reading reading all the materials yeah pete can you go ahead and talk certainly pete mcleugh principal at aries engineer airing and i've been a hydrogeologist for about 40 years um we've done plenty of uh mounding groundwater modeling that type of work uh michelle did a very good job of uh leading us in and um what lisa said earlier is correct that we went through other boards and chris mentioned them we worked closely with because some of the uh numbers that we were using in the calculations were being questioned um we worked with the geotech firm went out collected more information from the specific areas put that information or work and we worked with uh dillis and roy which is civil design group that was hired by the planning board and we went through iterations with them we met with them and um by march 24th they sent a letter to uh the planning board saying that we met all their concerns that that were raised by them and uh the other app the people that were against the applicants questions mr horsley so um all in all the mounding we showed that it was a temporary and would uh reduce shortly after the storm and that it was um helping by getting the surface water and runoff into the groundwater which is what the epa and others have come up with these regulations for to begin with and we also met the stormwater plans and that's really it in a nutshell okay um so uh mr white i think that paints a picture of a pretty thorough process from the planning board and other boards alike um on uh the nature of of uh you know the groundwater specifically in that part of the process um if if the board uh goes into some discussion and needs some additional information from the geotechnical engineer on um you know some of that stuff then that's that's certainly uh we mark is here happy to do that i think um for you all sake it i think you get the picture um it was thorough it was vetted um and it was extensive so okay um there may be sort of uh some specific questions that come up but i don't have any i don't have any general ones now other than i guess at a at a high level i guess what we've heard from um the applicant is that um there's a whole series of issues that they want us to uh investigate that sounds to me like have in a way been investigated as part of this process so i guess like my question maybe that wasn't really a question but i guess my question to you is um in in the planning board process that you and your consultant team went through were a lot of these questions that we're hearing about this evening were these questions raised during that process they were and and that's right that's what i'm saying is that part of the process of um the planning board uh you know all all of the track record of all nine meetings um we went through um we went through discussions on how to calculate the site um on you know is it one site is it not that's where the whole anr process came out and it's one site because of the um even though the bylaw says lots owned by the same owner can be considered one we still said well let's let's connect them and then the actual one of the board members said once the anr is done i'm satisfied that the um aopd calculations and zone 2 calculations are compliant um so so the the nature that something wasn't discussed at aopd or sorry at planning relative to um aopd or um you know the coverage is even impervious impervious um that that whole process was discussed at planning um we had uh conversations on um there's documentation of one of the board members uh disliking impervious materials because it creates a maintenance um a maintenance uh mandate for the the the school to keep those things clean and vacuum them because of if they don't then they lose their in they lose their perviousness right um over time and so we talked about the strategies that michelle taught was wanting that michelle spoke to you about we talked about those we talked about alterations of those um and so so the planning board did their job and they also we talked at nauseam at the planning board conversations about mounding about that's where all of the scott horsley uh memos came to that's where we talked to them they suggested we maybe meet with the horsley team after you know in private and work some of this out we tried didn't work um and so the the planning board did their job on forcing us to go through things and we made some changes we i think michelle at one point um raised the height of one of the um the um ponds that collects water to infiltrate infiltration ponds um to accommodate that and that was discussed at the planning board okay so like all of these things were discussed at length at the planning boards um audience and nothing new from the uh from the um appellant here in this case nothing it's it's kind of remarkable that every time we get a forwarded letter or something like that it's like this is not new we've dealt with this at the planning board constantly that's what our team is saying to each other that every time something comes it's nothing there's no new there's no new knowledge here um all of it has been tackled at the planning board and i'll just give you um you know the planning board's decision that the um the slope right written straight in there in in the decision that we talked about that at length again about the the various um the various trade-offs from walls to uh slopes to um we even talked about the nature of doing work in a tight setback situation um and so the planning board had a lot of comments to say about the nature of doing work right which arguably is not the purview of the planning board but like just to give you a sense of the thoroughness of their their review is that we talked high and low about all of it and um and a key mark of that was uh the water stuff i think we spent a few meetings on that actually um and so okay um i think i'll leave it there for you yeah thank you all right um it looks like we got two other people that have raised their hands so i i'm assuming it goes in order so uh it looks like peter uh during is up next thanks tom i'll just go quickly uh just uh um here on behalf of adam muscari the the petitioner and so just a few comments and then i'll turn it to scott um again just to focus everyone's energy i think you know chris has made a nice presentation again we are asserting that the planning board decision was in error um so that they allowed the the structured slope in the setback we are asserting that as an error maybe it was talked about but this zoning board of appeals has the power and the ability to evaluate that and determine whether or not such a structured slope should be located right up to the property line where there should be a 30-foot setback um similarly though there was a discussion of the the email exchange with dep i think that's in a very narrow context of talking about nitrogen loading under title five our issue and and assertion of error with respect to the apod is broader than that in particular i think the strongest element of it is the um density of development within the zone two the dep memo has no jurisdictional weight on that issue um even if it did have any weight on a zoning board's interpretation of its own bylaw so i think that while there were many meetings and lots of disputes and potentially wrangling at the planning board our assertion is that the site plan approval is an error it did not make a finding in the site plan approval with respect to whether or not the um how to assess and describe the apod mr silverstein and mr blesson are relying on stormwater management decisions made by the conservation commission but my understanding is that approval was not issued until june 24th of 2025 well after the planning board had concluded its process so it's not clear to me how uh the concom approval of the stormwater management on the site was a justification for the construction in the apod so again um our core issues are error in the site plan approval and i'll ask mr horsley to uh amplify our response thank you yeah he's he's up next so yeah mr chairman i'll be brief and again i i agree with a lot of what michelle said i think the stormwater plan does sorry just please state your name again for the record it's got scott horsley working with uh the uh attorneys here and i just wanted to say i do agree with what michelle said about the stormwater plan does control peak runoff rates leaving the site in compliance with the uh stormwater manual that is not uh what we're talking about here with the apod as i tried to describe earlier it's really about the density within the zone two um i i think the bylaw is pretty clear in its intent to try to limit density within the drinking water zone two area they the bylaw talks about both wastewater density limiting the amount of wastewater per area within the zone two within the act for district also limits the amount of impervious surface both of those uh derive pollutant loads even though you're putting the stormwater in the ground which is a requirement as michelle said correctly uh this pollutant loading and the intent of the bylaw is to limit it uh 30 is a pretty high number frankly 15 is a number i see in a lot of other places so these are high loads and the and the way that the planning board interpreted this was to dilute those loads by the entire lot which as i've said before is not in the zone two so from a technical standpoint if if and i'd love to talk to these other consultants i guess i'd ask them do they believe in density controls in a drinking water area like wastewater and and storm water and if so does it make sense to include lot area outside the zone two um i'd love to have that conversation i suspect if we talked it through honestly they would agree um the bylaw does say something different as attorney silverstein points out he's looking at the words in there and i i respect that but i'm here to tell you that the intent of the bylaw is to limit density in the in the zone two area in the act of protection district area and this does not do it gail said earlier this uh the unfortunate thing here is the development has focuses the higher density in that blue area that i showed in the slide within the zone two uh what what would have been nice to protect the drinking water if we all believe that's a good goal would it be put that stuff outside the zone two that i think that's the intent of the bylaw that didn't happen uh it exceeds the performance standards in my view and i'll just end by saying again i was going to the dp letter i know claire quite well we had a long conversation about this she's commenting on the dp permitting process they regulate wastewater treatment plants this is a different this is a different application this is a local standard which has every right to be more strict than state standards uh that's that's what title five regulations are that's what aquifer protection zoning bylaws are to provide more local control beyond more restrictive than the state requirements and i think this bylaw does provide that for good reason i applaud the town for writing the bylaw i just hope they enforce it thank you thank you all right so it looks like we do not have any other uh parties that are have their hands raised um so what i would propose to do um again given the given the late hour and the fact that we have all these uh consultants uh here tonight um are there any questions from the board of either um the appellants team or consultants or the veritas team and their consultants that that we would like to we would like to ask because what i would propose to do is um close the public comment period of this and sort of move to the deliberation portion i don't know that we'll be able to wrap that up this evening um but before we do that i just want to make sure that there are no additional comments that we want to hear hi mr chair um i wanted to get the opinion now that we've heard mr horsley uh michelle mark or peter uh based on those comments that mr horsley was uh providing is there what are your thoughts to the view of mr horsley versus uh on that specific piece i'll just make a quick comment so he talked about pollutant loading uh within the zone two so the mass stormwater handbook is very clear on zone two requirements related to water quality treatment uh there's specific requirements around pre-treatment that level of treatment that needs to happen before any of that water can get infiltrated and i will say that this product does meet all of those pre-treatment and water quality treatment requirements specifically for zone two um and and the handbook does not distinguish whether or not part of your parcels and part of your not we basically designed our whole stormwater system for the entire site to meet those requirements so they're meeting the pre-treatment requirements and water quality treatment requirements so that's uh related to the pollutant loading comment that was made thank you thank you and mr chair could i just make one quick point sure um just to respond uh to mr during um he made the claim that the um the conservation commission did not approve uh the stormwater management permit which went into great detail about aquifer protection and the best management practices that were informed uh employed these are the may 7 approved minutes may 7 prior to the vote of the planning board this is the discussion detailed discussion about the peer review and um it culminated with a vote to issue a permit under chapter 193 that's the stormwater management and it passed yes the actual written permit was issued in june but as i said in my letter to the board it was voted to be approved prior to the planning board vote and they were waiting for that and for the board of health health and they had all of that information available to them and were relying on those area experts those boards that deal with these types of groundwater issues with every application they look at in addition to their peer reviewers all of whom disagreed with mr horsley and mr during with respect to the project's compliance so i just wanted to correct the record on that issue thank you i have a question for mr during um you you sort of you did just make a statement to the board that uh out made you stated that the conservation commission permit was technically not um approved prior the written permit was not sort of issued i guess prior to the planning board decision but you did omit that fact that the conservation commission did indeed vote on this prior to the planning board decision do you do you agree with what was just presented i i appreciate uh jonathan's presentation i was looking at the uh concom uh opinion that he had attached to his letter and i saw the date of issuance in june 24th so i was a i was basing my comment on that i i see the minutes and the vote that that he clarified occurring in may and i i concede that point i didn't realize that it was earlier i was looking at this june date all right thank you questions from the board all right um any other public comment hearing none what i'd like to do is uh i propose to make a vote uh to close the uh public comment period and move to the deliberation period so i don't know if i need to make a motion for that is that something that i guess i can ask carolyn uh that question thank you mr chair yes you should vote if you're ready to close the public hearing there should be a vote to do so okay um i'd make a motion to close the public hearing portion of this process second all right so we get to do this by roll call since we're on zoom so um mr hirsch hi miss janice hi miss paul hi mr perry hi mr white i uh so we have closed the public um hearing portion um so my concern is that it being 9 42 uh i think it's going to be difficult to complete a uh deliberation process on this however i do want to refocus the board onto my initial uh comments that i made um i i i would propose that uh we focus the issues that we've heard tonight into the three distinct buckets that um i don't want to say buckets is not the right word the three distinct items or themes that sort of i outlined at the beginning right i think there's three elements here um is uh did the planning board make an error in their decision with respect to the application of article 16 the second one is do we believe that the approved site plan and subsequent building permit um conforms to the requirements of the planning board decision and the zoning bylaw with respect to lot coverage and there's a distinction there because the provisions of the bylaw are in a way superseded by the planning board's decision and then number three does the project that we have documents for us that is approved right now violate the setback requirements of the planning board decision in my opinion those are the three main themes that go along with what this applicant is asking us to consider and then out of that there are two two components one is the approval or denial of the building permit and then one is the i guess it's the approval or upholding of the planning board decision so i would like us to focus the deliberations really on only those three things and look for findings on those three things we can debate them and discuss them in a little more detail and i recognize and i and i i did this intentionally i may i i oversimplified these for the purposes of clarity with the board and i didn't mean to sort of any disrespect to either um the vero or um sorry to the appellant's uh attorney's memo or to the uh memo put together by um veritas i'm just looking for a way to sort of streamline and simplify the questions that are being asked of this board because it's not reasonable to think that we're going to go through and reinvestigate nine months worth of planning board process uh to come to the decision that we need to make any questions from the board on those items no i think sticking to those uh uh those outlined pieces make sense okay any other comments um so the other thing i'd like to do is i would like to uh make a motion to continue this to our next hearing and um before i make a motion and pick a um what how how confident is the board uh that we can have a uh i don't want to say speedy but a uh a review of these three points uh in a reasonable amount of time do we need to listen to any more no there's no more testimony i think there's no more testimony okay i i mean i i i can if i'm just speaking for myself i feel like i i think speedy i think i think we can have a um to the point discussion on expectations and uh as such i'm going to recommend that maybe we put this in the beginning and be able to have accountability of it in the beginning because you know that the majority of the personnel that are on attendance here today are gonna want to know the result i think we already uh promised a couple in the beginning we did we if you recall uh we had a challenge last time uh where we had actually some quite controversial items that we had to continue and we did uh assure them that we would uh we would listen to them first so uh i do appreciate that but i think it's it may be uh it may be challenging to do that i'm just basically looking for confirmation that we can uh get through this at the next hearing i i think it's important that this be dealt with uh as quickly as possible i don't want to continue uh this process unnecessarily i'm respectful of the fact that both uh the applicants and uh veritas have to uh retain counsel to sort of represent them at these um and uh i'd like to move that along as fast as possible so i'm comfortable that we can deal with this at the next meeting i just want to be sure the rest of the board is in agreement so i have a question the public hearing is closed we're now in deliberation and the suggestion is to continue this to the next monthly meeting in february as opposed to having another special meeting just on this case um you know i didn't think about that we could have another we could have another special meeting on this case just to uh just to deliberate it is just it's proven challenging to set up uh supplemental meetings based on the number of people that would be interested in attending so the reason i'm asking that again is because i believe it was justine mentioned that we had told the other two applicants who are at our last meeting that they would go first we wanted to ensure that they wouldn't be held up by this case or a similar case it would be taking well it wouldn't be a similar case this case um should this you know take a long time and i understand your hope is that it would be an expeditious discussion i think we can end up being an expeditious discussion on on this because it's just us talking at this point so just deliberation um yeah we're not going to be hearing anything from anybody else i mean i guess so the question i mean i don't want to you know belabor this unnecessarily the question is we could either set up an interim meeting prior to uh it looks like our meeting is scheduled for february 10th we could set up an interim meeting potentially february 3rd if we wanted to or we could uh stick with the 10th we on the 10th we would be starting at seven o'clock we've already set the time for the other hearings is that correct we did so we would have to set this for say 7 30 or something like that yeah that's probably not that's not realistic based on based on the types of cases we have before us in the tent i'm i'm coming around to to miss genesis perspective that perhaps it would be advantageous to have a an interim meeting if that's possible with the board
you're gonna all hate me i'm trying traveling the first week of february i'm traveling like almost all of february so you're going to hawaii again i'm not going to hawaii again i had to say it i had no no we're no we're good you did i was gonna so how about would it would it make sense at all to have the meeting on the on february start earlier on that same evening on the 10th six can we do six can you guys i i can do six if we can i would be happy uh i'd be happy to do that um uh i can double check with my wife to make sure we have coverage for swim for the kids um but that is um 6 30 if we can do it quick 6 30 and then if we like make the other ones a little a little late then that wouldn't be out right i i i guess i do just i would be open to that i would be open to that i just need to check with carolyn that that is acceptable um to change the start of the meeting time and introduce a case before i don't think the other meeting has been advertised yet i don't think it would affect the other meetings if we start earlier okay and if we if it goes to a 45 minute discussion right that's not that's not moving the other hearings significantly okay um attorney murray does that sound aida you you kind of beat me to it but yes i mean you can you can certainly start the meeting um with respect to the other two petitions that you postponed on february 10th what you can't do is start their hearings before seven o'clock because you told them um that you voted to continue their hearing to seven that's why you want to start at six we can take a recess though
you can always take a recess too if you're if it doesn't take you the full till seven o'clock okay all right so did we settle on six or 6 30 i think 6 30 to be safe okay um uh bear with me for a second um all right i would make a motion that we continue case uh zba case 2602 to february 10th at uh 6 30 p.m second uh all right by roll call uh mr hirsch hi miss jennis hi miss paul hi mr perry all right mr white i so we are all set so i i know i we didn't ask um either uh either council um about that date but i know since we've moved into the deliberation period i would assume um that at this point it does not make much difference but i'm hoping that everyone is able to uh attend should they should they want to hi mr chair thank you um i have one other question now you know we're in deliberation should there be other information coming from the public to the board what happens to that so so do we ask thank you so do we ask the office to hold anything and not disseminate it that's a question only attorney murray could answer yeah uh you could certainly instruct the office that any new materials that come in on this are simply to be held um if the office happens to forward those materials to you folks you just need to be mindful that at this point you can't take into consideration anything contained in those materials so you might want i i see anina is still out there so um you know anina could certainly advise people who want to deliver something to the office by letting them know the public hearing has been closed and so the board isn't accepting any new information um but i do realize that folks sometimes will just send an email as well but whether it's forwarded to the board or just held um by the building department um the board can't take it into consideration okay i can work with that everyone else it's important i'm okay with that yeah i don't want any more information we have a lot we have a lot of information we have more information that we've had than we have typically on a 40b case so i'm not interested in additional information at this point okay and mr white just to get it on the record i know you asked council to agree i'd just like to say you know i appreciate that the board conducted this meeting by zoom tonight that you set a special schedule for this i know we had a lot of comments in the in the first round about the concern about the work proceeding um and desire to get to a decision quickly and i just want to say you know i i have other matters pending uh including another hearing tonight that was just completely canceled because of the snow and i do appreciate that this board has gone forward that you're trying to do so in an expeditious manner and just for the record we uh consent to that next hearing on february 3rd so the february 10th pardon me so thank you for all the work that this board has done thank you um anyone have a motion move to adjourn second second
it's a couple different seconds there all right so uh i can't i can't i'm sorry seconded that but couldn't hear carolyn sorry actually vote on the motion to continue i i don't recall that you actually took a roll call vote no you're right we didn't we didn't on the motion we didn't take a roll call vote to continue oh yeah the hearing we voted to get to close it's been a long night yeah okay so a mission to continue the hearing to february 10 at 6 p.m at 6 30 p.m seconded okay um mr hirsch aye miss janice aye miss paul aye mr perry aye mr white aye um attorney murray thank you for noticing that uh it is getting late and uh i'm trying to keep track of it but no thank you for noticing that that would have been a problem um about now now yeah so i don't know who seconded that so i will do a roll call for that um mr hirsch aye miss janice aye miss paul aye mr perry aye mr white aye so we are adjourned thank you everyone for for coming tonight and thank you to um both the applicants and to veritas for uh bringing all of the individuals tonight and uh letting them letting them speak and uh we're we're we're happy to have had all of this information so thank you everyone thank you have a good evening stay safe good night you
there is someone there is someone listed as a wayland zoom meeting manager
okay is that right i'm not sure who that is i don't know who that is but okay do we have a quorum uh looks like it appears looks like we do all right so all right we'll kick this off uh this is the january 2020 january 26 uh 2026 meeting of the wayland zoning board of appeals this is a remote access only meeting due to the storm and the town building being closed um so just read the preamble here and then we can get going this meeting may be recorded and if recorded it will be made available to the public on wacom as soon after the meeting as is practical the public is excluded from any executive sessions uh pursuant to chapter two of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted via remote access in accordance with the applicable law
if this meeting is remote only access no in-person attendance by members of the public will be permitted uh one may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that i think all of you have were required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so uh using the remote access link public comment should be limited to two minutes per person um so this is the call to order so we don't have any other items on the agenda so um we'll get right into this this is the continuation of case zba 2602 the building permit appeal for the veritas christian academy um adam scari is appealing issuance of a building permit for the veritas christian academy project the appeal raises concerns regarding compliance with the aquifer protection overlay district discrepancies between the building permit and planning board approved site plans and potential environmental and storm water management issues the applicant seeks a review of their permits validity and compliance with zoning bylaws so uh with that out of the way um i just wanted to sort of produce a couple sort of go through actually a couple of quick procedural uh procedural items one um i want everyone who is uh in attendance or perhaps watching this meeting to be aware that the zoning board has received numerous letters on this project uh i have personally read all of the letters that have been sent to us and i know that uh the board has uh endeavor to review all of these things um hang on it looks like carolyn has raised her hand but i don't know what to do with that can carolyn unmute herself i think i've just done it now can you hear me now yes perfect sorry mr chair i i just think that since there's a lot of people and we are on zoom that uh you should call for roll calls for the board members to identify themselves oh sure thank you um all right so we'll do this by roll call if everyone can uh uh announce himself i'll start with myself uh tom white chair of the zoning board of appeals hunter i'm sorry go ahead add it uh i eat a janice hunter perry adam hirsch just seemed paul okay all right great thank you um so just to resume uh the board gets all of these letters um they're all sent to us individually and also they're uploaded to the uh to the sharepoint for all of us to review um i also want to recognize that at our last hearing uh we we heard from a pretty extensive presentation from the appellate we did not have a chance to hear fully from veritas so uh i do want to set out that that's primarily what i'd like to do this evening i also um i've spent a lot of time looking at the materials on this case and i wanted to sort of give a quick overview and kind of set the expectations for what i think i'd like the board to to consider for this um we understand that uh this process is spelled out in the bylaw about the the zoning board being the venue to overturn a application of a building permit or granted a building permit and a site plan review uh we understand this is not a perfect process a large amount of time has gone by between the initial planning board hearings and uh the subsequent matter that we're hearing tonight uh so this is the process we have in town unfortunately it is we recognize that it is a little less than ideal uh i also want to note that the board understands the difference of opinion on the issue regarding the timeliness of the appeal we've heard uh sort of i think specific arguments on both cases here i just want the everyone to understand that the board is aware of all of these conversations um also the board here is really being specifically asked by the applicant to overturn an issued building permit and reject a planning board approved site plan um this is a very unusual request for this board it's not something we've done before and it isn't something necessarily to be taken lightly uh with that in mind what i'd what i propose that we do is really very narrowly focus the work of the board on the specific things that are being asked and in this case i think reviewing all the material that we have and looking very carefully at uh general law uh 40 a section 3 regarding the dover amendment the zoning board really needs to do something very specific here and that is understand specifically the review of the planning board's material and the granting of a building permit through the lens of what is required in under the dover amendment also reading what the applicant has proposed to us the applicant has sort of given us a very specific set of things they're interested in looking at and i would propose that the board really focus their efforts on the three things that we have been tasked to look at now this is my opinion um but this is summarizing all of the materials we have to date that uh the applicant is asking us to review so uh in general i think it's important for the board to understand this and to sort of very specifically focus on this so what i want to do is to just quickly go through uh my reading of the material that we have and sort of let that out to the board before we hear from the council for veritas um by my reading of the uh appeal here i think the applicant is asking us to look at three specific and very focused things does this project comply with the provisions of the aquifer protection district zoning bylaw does this project comply with the lot coverage requirements in the bylaw and or the planning board subsequent decision and does this project violate the separate setback requirements in article 7 or the setback requirements that are determined in the planning board decision i think those are the three main elements that the uh appellant is asking us to look at so before we go a little further into that um i just want to ask that does that does that summation uh make sense both to uh the appellant and to the board that is how i read it uh mr white i have my hand raised peter durning on behalf of adam maskari yes so i i appreciate your summary there mr white and indeed in the letter that we submitted um at the end of last week i think we tried uh as best we could to frame those issues much the way that you had just characterized them um in particular that the site plan approval did not sufficiently consider and did not comply with the aquifer protection district the issue of lot coverage and the setbacks which we highlighted in our initial letter but we amplified in our additional submittal on friday and um i think you framed it well those are our concerns that the planning board action the planning board site plan approval did not comply with uh the regulations in respect to those rulings and therefore this appeal is to the zba to have that reviewed and potentially remand it back to the planning board for further consideration of those issues um i know also mr chair i know you've asked to hear from veritas i just add that mr muscari is present i don't see him up as a panelist necessarily but he's here and prepared to speak and in addition we have scott horsley who was intimately involved with this matter before the planning board and he has prepared to speak also and he is on um here as a panelist as well so i fully expect that you wanted to hear from veritas we just got their letter i think at 4 30 this afternoon uh just before this meeting started but um when they're done we'd certainly like to circle back and have mr horsley and mr muscari have an opportunity to speak yeah thank you yes my intent is to have uh is to allow everyone who's here sort of the opportunity to speak i just wanted to sort of set out some overall uh an overall framework for this because i know that there have been some concerns expressed like as to whether or not this board is going to re-litigate the entire planning board process that occurred months ago um and that's that's not the intent of this process here i think the intent in my mind is very narrowly focused on those three questions that you've asked as the applicant for this board to consider um and i i sort of i would like to keep the like to keep the process in a way sort of narrowly focused on on those three things it's not my intent is not to sort of reintroduce a process where we need to bring in a series of consultants to answer uh additional questions or sort of kind of further of the investigation that was uh i think exhaustively done during the the planning board process thank you mr white i'll i'll unmute myself again in a minute i just want to say again i think we tried to do that through our submission on friday and and i think you summed it up fairly well towards the close of the last meeting that this is not an opportunity for um really re-litigating if you will all those technical aspects but we've alleged certain non-compliance with the planning board's action and decision with respect to the bylaw and we're asking this board to re-evaluate it and potentially uh remand so thank you i understand thank you um all right i guess with that um what i think it makes sense for us to do is to uh have a presentation um by um veritas that in a way is uh i suspect is going to largely mirror the the letter which was sent today which is actually a summary response to the uh letter that uh veril has prepared for us and i think i tried to summarize as a non-lawyer the best that i can uh for for everyone right now so i guess if we can do this if we can elevate um i think it's attorney silverstein um i believe i'm already here i think you are great thank you very much okay as i said um i know you didn't have an opportunity to present sort of a detailed analysis at the last hearing so i wanted to make sure we have we give you this opportunity to sort of to go forward with that this evening i appreciate that mr chair um i guess i want to know one thing and then with your permission i know there's some other members from the veritas team who are hoping to give um sort of short statements before i run through um the legal analysis um the one thing i want to say before um turning it over to them is as mr jernan indicated i submitted my letter this afternoon as you said it's a response to a letter i received friday afternoon so i i didn't want the board to think i took lightly submitting something um at the last minute but obviously um i had a limited amount of time to respond to it um the other thing i wanted to note is that uh i think i was very clear at the last hearing session that this project is 100 privately funded there had been uh consideration about taking some state grant money uh or loan money uh earlier in project concept again i don't think this board has jurisdiction over mepa but um i did see that this afternoon mr derning uh copied the board on a request for mepa advisory opinion um which was premised um incorrectly on uh the notion which i thought i had very clearly uh addressed at the last hearing session which is that there will be no public funding of the project so i just wanted to put those out there for the board's information and and hopefully mr derning will uh withdraw his uh request for an advisory opinion from mepa since i have uh reiterated that fact um with that uh with your permission i would um like to turn it over to some members of the team um i think we're going to start with uh joseph mendendorp um if uh joseph um isn't already he is yeah and that's that's that's totally fine uh the only thing i would ask is that um i'm not sure necessarily how many people are aligned up to speak we just want to be as concise as possible and i know as i said last time if there are several people i mean i i want to allow everyone the opportunity to speak but if if we have five people that will say you know almost the exact same thing i would prefer to have the comments be as differentiated as possible just to be as efficient with time as practical understood absolutely am i good to go yes all right so just give us your name and address my name is joseph medendorp i live at 3 nolan farm road here in weyland appreciate everybody's time tonight and we will do what we can to keep it concise here and get to the legal and the technical details of the project for my part uh i will also just say uh mr white the comments are differentiated so we do have some speakers that are lined up and each one has something different so they this will not be uh redundant information okay so thank you get to it uh if you happen to see friday's uh weyland post uh you may have noticed that there was a snowman directing traffic uh i've got two daughters in elementary school here in weyland i've got one in middle school so that was um our family contribution to law and order here in weyland it's a small thing um but i i mentioned it only just to remind everybody that we're we're neighbors first and we're we're parents just like several of the people that i know are here on the board and as well as here in the town uh when we first when we first came to the planning board we were given the opportunity to just simply make an introduction so there are real questions there are real concerns that are being raised from the community and we're going to get to that but before we get into that information we wanted to just share what exactly this project is and of equal importance what this project is not so i'm talking to the zoning board i'm also talking to the people that are our neighbors that i know are on the call my family lives here we've lived here for almost eight years we chose wayland um we chose it because of the school so when i see that people are concerned with traffic when they're concerned with safety when they're concerned with scale when they're concerned with the experience of our kids in the town i share those same concerns that you do this isn't some abstract concept this is a personal issue for me just like it is for everybody else that's on this call so i'm just going to kind of unwind a couple quick things let me start with traffic because i know that's something that's top of mind the peer-reviewed study that we submitted back in april of 2024 was done for a maximum of 108 students cachituate road at the site carries 11 000 vehicles per day so half of those are going northbound half of those are going southbound so what our traffic study showed is that we're going to add 48 cars during morning drop-off 34 cars during afternoon pickup so the peer-reviewed study confirmed that the site design sight lines line queues all of that is adequate and that there is no impact there's negligible impact to the traffic at that intersection that we also live with so we know that people are concerned with shaw becoming a cut through woodridge becoming a cut through and people are concerned that they're going to see more traffic on those spots and none of this means that we don't care about the traffic i drive through that intersection every single day multiple times so i care about it too what it does mean is that like every other aspect of this project we've studied it and we're committed to managing the traffic at that spot responsibly second thing i want to clarify is the number of students that we're actually talking about so there's been a discussion about this being a high density 450 student and faculty campus i've seen this online i've seen it in print and i just want to clarify a few important details our entire school is 150 students so for those of you that are in wayland that are familiar with six loker the celebration international church we have 150 kids there and it's taken us 15 years to grow to that size so our full middle school is 77 kids today and what we're talking about right now is the first phase it's not even a full middle school so we're talking about renovation of an existing building this is 172 constituent it's the same footprint that it's been since 1958 when the building was built we're talking about adding three classrooms to that now the other building that we've got permitted is another mid to large size house it's a school house building and when that is complete then we can bring over the rest of the middle school again at a maximum of 108 kids so if you're wondering where the other 300 kids are coming from so are we because that's not an accurate representation the third thing i wanted to address is the the number of buildings so there are some conceptual sketches that we shared that were interpreted to be nine buildings that will be built in the near future and i just wanted to be crystal clear the only things that are permitted today are the renovation of 172 and the addition of a school house every other building that we've seen on that master plan is years if not decades away and is going to require multiple trips back to the planning board for approval we're small we're fully self-funded we don't receive state funding i know that has come up again we don't receive outside assistance so every building that we add is a major fundraising effort for our school that just takes substantial time to get to so we did share a master plan and that's what it is it's a long-term concept it's not a construction schedule so i think we just wanted people to understand the reality today is that we're far smaller than what we're seeing represented and we're a much more modest school than i think um you you would see the last thing that i wanted to mention then i'll hand it over to lisa gurdy's i just wanted to talk about how we would how we would really like to engage with our neighbors from the very beginning we did reach out to our neighbors from there we we sent 50 invitations out we tried to get people to come to the site to hear the vision share concerns ask questions and then give us the opportunity just to learn what um what the concerns of the community are we hosted site walks we invited the planning board we had neighbors that also joined for the site walks and at present we're working with members of the select board to create more opportunities for just open face-to-face dialogue i think that a lot of the backlash that we're seeing is really based on a misunderstanding of the project and and a misrepresentation of what it is that we're trying to do on this site so facebook posts headlines they're just not telling the full story here and we want the opportunity to actually speak directly with people and meaningfully exchange information we're not trying to push something through we're trying to be good neighbors we're trying to be responsible neighbors and you're going to see that as a theme come through over the course of the conversation with that i'll close thank you i appreciate the opportunity to speak um if you haven't seen our traffic directing snowman open invitation to come by and check it out anytime uh with that can we elevate lisa gerties please thank you thank you um hi i'm lisa gerties um and i'm actually speaking for cindy who actually is um one of the co-founders of veritas so to introduce myself i live at 8 beverly road natick massachusetts i am a co-founder and former principal of veritas christian academy and i currently work as a senior consultant for veritas and other schools so i just wanted to address this to our neighbors and to just give you a little bit more background about who veritas is because so much misinformation as mr medendorp just shared has been circulated um first of all to to our neighbors um we've just been here for 15 years we we love this community um we've talked so extensively that that we understand what it would be like if it were our homes um and and if a big project was going near us we understand that this is stressful especially when the kind of information has been circulated that you've heard so we do want to correct it um a lot of things have also been said about veritas that i think it's important to correct as well um i would say that the only true thing that i have seen so far printed in social media is that uh we're a non-profit who's tax exempt the rest has largely been fiction so when um cindy and i and three other families founded the school 15 years ago this was just a vision that we create a school that was excellent to create kids nurture them to have excellent moral fiber a strong educational foundation that would put them out there in the world to make a real difference and we can see firsthand how needed that is in our country um we have core values and you know if you know anything about organizations core values often are written put on the shelf our core values are values we develop and we live by and they are they spell the word truth truth resilience unconditional love teachable heart high expectations our children to our board to our staff we evaluate on this we talk about this we live by this and i say this this is our dna because it's also how we behave to our community so we believe in integrity from our finances to our educational standards to how we interact with our community so i'll give you an example it's been printed that we don't meet mass standards well that is true but not true because no private school has to meet math standards actually but most of us as private schools meet and even exceed them what does that look like well for us at veritas our kiddos since 2010 have scored an average of 90 percent on a math standardized test since 2018 we worked hard to get those scores up they also do that in english language arts one of the funnest things about starting a new school is you get to do the best possible curriculum and we developed a rich and wonderful curriculum almost what i call garden of delights for our kids now they don't always think of it as delayed but generally when they leave they do so kids learn history in tandem with literature they get to read about the period of history we teach latin and spanish in third grade and believe it or not lots of them like it our seventh and eighth graders read wonderful books like the little prince kill a mockingbird animal farm our fifth and seventh graders do science fairs and they learn about why controls are important for the scientists in the room uh our kids can take math at their level which means that they can go into high school from everything to algebra one to pre-calc and they test into it um one of my best memories when i was principal was during covid when dr art yanowski who is the former wayland uh superintendent came to visit us as he was assessing our curriculum and we absolutely i'm gonna geeked out about some of the sixth grade novels we had so much fun and because they were novels he knew and recognized and we had um such a great visit and he said he left very impressed by what we were doing we've been represented as a rich school because of our tuition and by the way how else do you pay your teachers to live here and our tuition is maybe half of what most of their private schools like us are um in truth our student body is very very diverse and we provide financial aid for about a third of our students and we do take special needs students again that was said that we don't take special needs students and we work hard to work with the towns they come from to make sure that we implement their ieps our students 20 of them go to some most exclusive private schools in massachusetts and it's not because they're from rich families it's because they earn it and the number one feedback i get two big feedbacks from other heads of school your kids know how to work and they love to learn they have a joy in learning how do we do it we love our kids we come alongside we do some old-fashioned stuff we teach them how to study we make it interesting and we get them to the point where they believe in themselves and that's what we do so our kids have gotten into our hundred of 151 of our eighth grade graduates uh several have gone to roxbury latin saint sabs montrose milton nobles phillips exeter phillips and over and this is a small part of our list um mr white i i just need to hey excuse me you are not you're not speaking right now but okay so uh please do not interrupt so yeah all right how do we how do we control excuse me here how do we control this um in this process uh since they we're not in a room i can't i can't do anything so if people are just going to cut in and speak uh i'm not quite sure so maybe this is a question for the town attorney i i think you just have to do exactly what you did mr chairman in terms of folks need to raise their hands to be recognized and yes we should give whoever the speaker is the floor um but perhaps we also need to remind folks of uh the focus that you sort of outlined mr chair yeah yeah i was i was actually about to do that so um so uh i do i do really appreciate uh this this presentation but i i do think it's important that we focus the comments on the matter we have before us which is the question about uh overturning the site plan approval and overturning the building permit so as much as i appreciate the the character you're describing of the school and the students and i i absolutely can appreciate your passion for that and i don't in any way want to denigrate that but i think it is important that we keep it focused on um on the matter we have um do i have i have two comments related to that and i can skip the rest is that yes if you can that would be great thank you sure i'm happy to do that um we just spent a year in a grueling approval process um and i attended all the planning board meetings so and i can tell you having been there personally not a single stone was left unturned uh i went through every single memo from dillis and roy and took every issue to its completion and i can tell you today in confidence um that you're not going to unearth anything surprising this project is very complex i am a chemist by training um and so i read every memo and i get the data and i appreciated the professionalism thoroughness i saw at the planning board the number of times i saw either annette or jennifer steel say hey let me look up the bylaw and check it and i'll come back to you later and we were sent back to do more research more test pits more modeling this project meets the bylaws and not only that we care about meeting the bylaws and you've all heard a lot about the dover amendment and we are entitled to a lot of protections as an educational institution the abutters council has asserted that we have used the dover's amendments to cover a lot of things that we have not can i tell you that in the end we only asked for one single waiver not to have to cover 10 percent of the parking with landscaping that's it and we want you to know that we were willing to make these accommodations because we just care about the people of whiteland we genuinely care we know what this means to the community and we wanted to make the modifications needed so thank you for this time to make the comments and um i apologize if i went a little bit long thank you all right so what i what i cannot tell right here is um i have no way of ordering the number this sort of responding to and order the number of people that have raised their hand i just get a notification that someone has raised their hand i don't have a list of people um so i guess what i'd like to do is sure yes uh the point of order this is uh uh sorry uh this is the zoo meeting coordinator i'm with the i.t department um great i just wanted to let you know that when people do raise their hands um it they do get self-ordered in in the in like the participant link okay so whoever raised their hand first so to speak uh it gets ordered in that from top to bottom so there are two people that raise their hand the person that raised their hand first is the person that's going to be above the other person so if it if that's what you're looking for uh yes the only thing is i don't have like any kind of a control panel i just have a tab at the bottom that says there's 58 participants and and it says three of them have raised their hand i can't say which who has raised their hand or in what order they want to speak so i'm just saying okay i'm bringing this up because it's like this meeting is without without some organizational structure this meeting is going to uh it's going to be unmanageable would it help mr chair i completely understand if i identified for you who on my team is raising their hand uh i guess it would be what i what i'd like to do is i know you said there are there were a couple of people that wanted to uh to speak before you gave your presentation i'd like to just kind of proceed in that order so if i could at least have an understanding of how many additional individuals there are and um i would also like to stress that i'd really like to keep the comments on topic if possible i understand um i've i've heard that loud and clear i'm sure that uh the people on my team have as well right now aline caldwell uh from our team is the next person and on my list she was going to be the last of five so i'm assuming that that that might mean that um the other two have um decided to defer um in in recognition of your admonition and that aline may be the last one right that'd be great i'm i'm not trying to be difficult about this it's just like it's virtually impossible to control this over zoom it'd be way easier uh in person but yeah let's let's hear i think you said um eileen yes aline aline all right yes good evening thank you so much so my name is aline caldwell um i am a resident of weston actually um but i am here just to speak very very briefly no more than two minutes um of your time here just want to boil it down i am a parent of two students at veritas i volunteer on the veritas parent association and i'm a class parent and so with that i'm just very in tune with the family needs and the real impact of this project any any delays related there too i thank the board for your time i know that you guys are volunteers you don't have to be here especially on a you know even virtually after a snowstorm so i really appreciate you i also just want to say especially as we get into public comments um there's a lot of emotion in this and if any of you on the board or parents i'm sure that you can appreciate that when a parent feels like something relating to their children is at risk or threatened it might exert a certain emotion and so none of that is intended to in any way um imply that you're not doing your job or that you know we're upset with you it's just emotion and we're going to try your best to try and harness that um so i just wanted to say that on the front end there are some real practical consequences of delaying this um project we have entered into a six million dollar construction contract and we remain financially responsible under that contract irrespective of any delays that are caused from here on out as you know there's been site work already done to prepare it including tree removal and any delays in that can cause not only problems with our site but the aboveers um and so stopping construction site prep once it's underway is extremely dangerous and so i just i just also wanted to share kind of the practical implications of that i know i speak for my children that they're so excited about the school so the thought that this might not move forward or could be delayed is just is really is really uh unfortunate um at the last meeting there was a comment that kept coming up which was that litigation is going to happen no matter what um and that might be true but i respectfully just wanted to point out that even if that's the case i really hope that that does not in any way sway the board in ruling one way or another and i would argue that veritas should not bear the burden of having to initiate a suit to defend a permit it obtained properly after full compliance with this process and that if the appellant here feels like he has standing and he's been wronged i would just encourage that that that he then take that recourse and not be on veritas after following those rules strictly the last thing i just wanted to touch on quickly is the precedent that's being established and i know um mr white that you had talked about this and that the board is aware of this but the last hearing there was something that wasn't discussed that i think is really important to address and that is the precedent that's being established by the board deciding to rely on this land court case and my fear is not only just for veritas and for this appellant but in perpetuity that this by looking at intent and utilizing that as the new standard for meeting the standards of filing a timely appeal that any abutter any abutter can send an ambiguous email to a board not even the zba with no financial consideration wait the 30 days hope that someone else lawyers up puts skin in the game files an appeal and if they don't then they'll go and file and in this case it was six days later but i asked the board what is that standard is it six days six weeks six years and then what assurance does veritas have or anyone for that matter when they do have a building permit that they can go and incur costs and start developing their sites it's really really problematic it's problematic for the building permit holder it's problematic for the town and especially for the zba because no matter how good the intentions are of the zba that standard it will be impossible to be able to implement it fairly across the board it just it's an impossibility and you're just opening yourself up to lawsuits and so i just wanted to highlight that last final thought mr muscari was part of this process i know that because i looked at the planning board decision and references him and while again i sympathize with any concerns i know we're going to get into those and address them one by one i just want to really highlight that there was a process and nothing being raised today was not raised and addressed beforehand and so in closing i leave you with this in my humble opinion once deadlines become optional approvals are no longer final and that uncertainty harms everyone in this case the residents citizens of whalen and our children at veritas thank you okay thank you so i still see three additional participants uh have raised their hand but i don't uh you know just two it looks like um but i guess what i'd like to do is still like to proceed i think everyone will try to afford everyone an opportunity to speak but i want to proceed as we originally planned which was to hear from uh attorney silverstein um thank you mr chair uh so again for the record jonathan solferstein i'm counsel for um veritas uh i'm going to uh follow the order of my uh letter of earlier today which runs through um the three main types of allegations that mr muscari's counsel has asserted i will note that there are other issues that have been sort of peppered in um throughout some of the different submissions on behalf of the appellant i'm prepared to respond to them but i'm going to focus on the three main issues uh mr chair that you raised um so the first has to do with the um aquifer protection overlay district so uh i'm gonna in and the primary issue there is the question of impervious ground coverage so um mr mustari's council asserts that this that our project should be regulated as a residential lot and not only that but that only a very small piece of the property should be considered when determining compliance with that standard so i'm going to address those pieces in order um first of all we're not a residential lot when you look at the bylaw admittedly it's a little bit ambiguous it in right in imposing regulations on properties under the um overlay district it refers to residential lots being subject to one standard and non-residential uses being subject to a different standard but i submit that clearly what's intended there especially since when you look at it more than five residential lots is subject or are subject to the same standards as non-residential uses right so i think it's very clear that the structure of the bylaw is that if you're a single family residential structure on a lot you're not being forced to um employ costly best management practices rain gardens um you know uh storm scepters you're not a commercial project so you're just subject to a very straightforward and for a residential for a house a single family house on a lot your only requirement is really pretty easy to meet and that's 30 percent ground coverage however when you get to five or more residential lots or any non-residential use you're subject to much more onerous and technical requirements and those are best management practices you have to demonstrate compliance with the mass stormwater handbook all these things that our single family residents would not be subject to that's the clear structure of the bylaw and we've complied with all that i submitted to the board as an exhibit our groundwater uh permit from the conservation commission the conservation commission recognized that we've met all those requirements the planning board recognized that we met all those requirements requirements and clearly the intent of the bylaw is that non-residential uses need to meet this higher standard and we have met it so that's the threshold now let's say that we are a residential lot i don't know how you could call it that no one's living there but let's say we're a residential lot subject to the 30 percent impervious coverage limitation the planning board recognized in its decision that our impervious coverage is 21.9 we have a single lot the property is a single lot was it at one point multiple lots yeah and the planning board endorsed an approval not required plan long before issuing its decision that erased all those lot lines and made it a single lot it is a single lot when you look at the definition of lot it is an area of land in in single ownership this is one lot now what is the 30 coverage requirement it is 30 of the upland lot area which in section 1602 is defined as the total area of the parcel of land in question not the total area of the parcel so much of the parcel as is in the zone 2 or in the apod the total parcel that's what the planning board looked at that's what the engineers agreed was appropriate and that's the only possible reasonable reading of the bylaw so we easily satisfy the 30 percent lot coverage limitation which in any case does not apply to us now um in their letter uh from friday afternoon mr muscarry's counsel said well you really have to read it this way because it's important to further the interests of the bylaw including nitrogen loading well first of all when the language of the bylaw is clear which this is you can't try to you know change the language and read language in that's not there just because you think it should say something else but and i know i know i know we'll be hearing from mr horsley later and i've never seen mr horsley comment on a project that he was not opposing uh often on exactly the same bases in every case but he tried to make this argument to dep and they shot him down they said no you consider for nitrogen loading you consider the entire property and i attached that email chain to my letter as well so that's the um impervious law coverage issue under the apod i don't know mr chair if you want me to pause there see if there are questions or just plow on to the next issue um i am satisfied uh with with that uh that piece of the presentation um i don't know if there's any other questions from the board not as of yet all right yeah then let's uh let's keep going thank you mr chair so there was also sort of a throwaway um reference in um the letter from friday afternoon from mr muscarry's counsel that suggested well we admit that there's over you know there's 21.9 percent impervious lot coverage so that shows that we violate article 7 which has a 20 percent lot coverage uh uh maximum in the single residence districts but those are it's apples and oranges in the apod the 30 percent limit for single for residential lots is impervious lot coverage that's buildings parking roads any impervious surface the 20 percent lot coverage limit referenced it by mr mustari's counsel and it's i'm at a loss because it wasn't difficult for me to look at this and see that it's referring to building coverage so i'm really at a loss as to how those two issues could have been conflated by competent counsel um but the difference between impervious coverage and building coverage is obvious for building coverage for that 20 percent limit you don't count roads you don't count parking you don't count anything except for buildings so as explicitly stated in our plans and in the planning board approval we're at 4.1 percent building coverage so no we're not in excess of 20. last i checked four is less than 20. so those are the uh the lot coverage and apod issues and now i'll move on to the setback issues the first one is really um surprising to me uh if i could mr chair can i share my screen uh yes i don't know how to enable that unless you can just i think it's enabled it looks like it's enabled so um so i'm just bringing up for now um you should see uh the letter that i submitted earlier today to the board yes um and i know that the state zoning act section three on the dover amendment explicitly prohibits or exempts any handicap ramp from application of the bylaw okay so this is what mr muscari is complaining about you see this little circle less than 10 square feet on the corner of a handicapped access ramp so that handicapped students can get into their school and let's look at where it is almost 800 feet from the closest place on mr muscari's house and what's in between there
dense woodland now in order to bring an appeal to this board mr muscari is supposed to demonstrate standing how he's going to be harmed how is mr muscari going to be harmed by us having handicap access for our students that extends maybe three feet at one corner not into his setback but into the setback of this property now bearing in mind it's not even into the setback near this property's house it's this little tail for all intents and purposes it's really a setback to yeager way but if you actually measure to yeager way we're well over 30 feet so i felt it was important to show those details to show how petty this is mr muscari doesn't care about this setback this isn't hurting him what does he want to do he wants to stop the project he wants to get a stop work order so that it becomes for this small nonprofit educational entity cost prohibitive and he can accomplish through delay what he could never accomplish on the merits and i hope the board will uh not accept that this is a handicapped ramp access ramp in fact if you see it's referred to wood deck and ramp it's five feet wide for handicapped access it's got a maximum grade why to comply with handicapped access requirements it is exempt on its own even independent of the fact that this is part of a dover project it's exempt from setbacks so there's no violation there so the next argument with respect to setbacks is that the engineered slope which is a fancy term for an earthen grassy slope next to the road that happens to have some stabilizing material under it to prevent erosion we substituted that for retaining wall in that location of the road because there were objections raised to having a retaining wall within the setback so it has to be one or the other something has to hold up the road unless as the true goal clearly is you want to just prevent the road and therefore prevent the project but that's not how the dover amendment works so first of all this grassy slope is not a structure there is no evidence in the bylaw in the language it uses or in the way it's ever been applied in wayland to my knowledge that would support the notion that setbacks apply to subgrade or at grade features why do i say that well the definition of a structure that's subject to setbacks gives examples buildings frameworks walls tents stands platforms bins fences signs flagpoles recreational tramways and antennae these are all things that extend above grade they are all structures that you can see above the ground to my knowledge and i've been practicing municipal land use law for 30 years i'm not familiar with anyone ever trying to apply a setback to a grassy slope which is what this is does the fact that there might be landscaping fred fabric or these geotech reinforcements to prevent erosion does that turn a grassy slope into a setback i mean to a structure of course not and why do i say that also because look at your definition of setback it is the shortest distance from a lot line or right of way to the wall of a building or structure if something doesn't stick up out of the ground you don't need a setback has anyone here ever had to show setback compliance for a brick patio or for a sandbox i mean these are common sense obvious facts it's never been applied this way and it shouldn't be applied this way here but let's pretend we're just going to throw common sense out the window and call this grassy slope a structure
let's pretend it would in the normal course be subject to the setback even though i bet you can go to every single subdivision that's been built in wayland and find engineered slopes reinforced slopes holding up subdivision roads all over the place would that mean that it's okay to strictly apply that requirement to this project to prohibit construction of our road no because under the dover amendment you can't do that it's unreasonable under the law to apply a dimensional requirement even if it would otherwise apply if it would unduly interfere with the dover project and it wouldn't further some compelling zoning objective but what's the compelling zoning objective here that the neighbor closest to this who isn't complaining mr muscari can't see this grassy slope through all the woods and the hundreds of feet from his house but that a neighbor might have to look at a grassy slope and think there might be something under that grassy slope that turns it into a structure there's simply no reasonable basis to apply this 30 foot setback which would prohibit the project there's no way to install the road without holding the road up and we agreed to remove the retaining wall and substitute it with a grassy slope and now mr muscari doesn't want the grassy slope not because the grassy slope hurts him or that he could even see it but instead because he thinks that's a way to stop the project um finally thank you just before hang on just before we go on to that i see one of the board members has a question for you i think i'm one of the points you just raised so i'll let adam ask that question first yes mr silvenstein i used to have a clarification question if you could just pull up what you were just uh showing about the the pictures and stuff i just want to make sure i have a a clear understanding of something really quickly certainly uh not that one it was the next one uh yes right there uh the the trees and the tree line just scroll down just a little bit um i know that there have been a lot of trees that have been taken out from the property are any of these trees that are part of this picture uh removed as part of the project um i just wanted to get a clarification on that and what the time stamp kind of was in comparison to before versus now and i just wanted to get an understanding sure so i want to be really clear when i show this and in my letter you may have most noted um that i'm talking about the wooded buffer on mr muscari's property i don't know the answer others on my team may as to whether we have removed trees sort of on the eastern portion of the property but even if we clear cut up to our property line this is all on mr muscari's property and so so this is this is all part of his property right here i mean yeah i mean i will be able to speak to that anywhere but i just wanted to get a clear understanding of it yeah i i didn't i'm not the most technologically savvy and and i was obviously under a bit of a time constraint i didn't know how to plot the actual lot line on here but my best guess is that the lot line is somewhere around here and so there's still a significant and dense okay so it's about it's about half it's a it's a i have no idea uh okay it might be a half it might be two-thirds i don't think it's um less than a half okay i just wanted to get a better understanding of of what that was and you know because those have those have leaves and we're not in a leafy time period now yeah so i just wanted to get the other thing i want to know um actually i realized yes we certainly have cut some of these trees this is actually the property i believe um so this is the structure so he this house is complaining about a two-foot encroachment here for a handicapped access ram yes okay so it's tough it's tough to tell it's it's tough to tell the the expectations then from the photo it is all it is a fairly big distance overall but um yeah it's three football fields um okay all right but thank you mr silverstein again i just wanted a clarification just get a kind of an understanding on it all right so yeah so uh mr silverstein if you could continue to sort of uh thank you articulate the uh i guess you were on the setback issues um right now i was um so the uh i think the one other thing i wanted to mention is again this was not none of these were issues that were ignored by the planning board planning board didn't ignore anything this was an extremely detailed and burdensome review project in its decision and this is uh on page six paragraph or section four two one the planning board quote approves the location of the proposed buildings internal roads stabilized slope and sports court as well as specifically noting the lot and building coverage of 21.9 and four point one percent respectively these issues were explicitly addressed by the planning board after the better part of a year and the benefit of many consultants so for this board to be asked to substitute its judgment for that of the planning board that conducted this analysis on all of these issues i think makes no sense um this is not a situation where the planning board didn't address or didn't consider certain issues all of these issues were considered we have the transcripts of all the planning board meetings should the board want them i doubt you will um but i did think they're important to note that um so the uh sports court it's the same argument it does not extend above grade there was discussion about a fence there's no fence proposed it's landscaping um the uh property two door two uh properties away from us has a sports court that looks like it literally extends onto one abutting property and very close to mr muscari's property i don't think it's ever been considered a structure it has no walls so it's not subject to setbacks but even if it were subject to setbacks we are talking about a minuscule encroachment and the placement of that sports court was discussed as ad nauseum during the planning board hearings it's obviously a necessary aspect of an education of a school we need sports courts and there is another place to put it so again when you go to the dover amendment case law about when it's reasonable to strictly enforce a dimensional requirement it has to further a legitimate zoning objective and not unduly impair the dover protected use and neither one of those standards would be met here um finally there's reference in the uh correspondence from mr muscari's council about you know it's very vague uh about us not meeting screening requirements for the parking areas now first of all we're not required to meet screening requirements case law is crystal clear that dover protected uses cannot be subjected to landscaping or screening requirements but that didn't stop us we did it we're proposing a great deal of new trees shrubs and other landscaping including to screen abutting properties from the parking areas so even though we're not required to do it we are doing it um finally i don't think it was mentioned in the letter from friday but the previous letter from mr muscari's council suggested that there was some sort of violation of of the earth movement bylaw um the appeals court is actually held in another case in weyland that the earth movement bylaw may not be applied to dover protected uses i cite cited to that case um but the fact is that we're not violating the bylaw anyway because by this the clear terms of the bylaw earth movement necessary as part of a use protected under 48 section 3 that's the dover amendment is not subject to its terms so the bylaw explicitly says we're not subject to the bylaw and even if that language wasn't in there it also says that you don't need uh to comply with the bylaw for earth movement in connection with constructing buildings roads septic systems and that's all we're doing we're not going in there and you know selling loan to raise money for the building project the only earth movement that's taking place is in connection with the approved site plan so i know i've thrown a lot of information at the board i'm happy to answer any questions i really do appreciate the board's time uh and and consideration of um some of the the statements of members of the um the schools board so that you could get a sense i i think it's easy to lose track of the fact that this is a small non-profit school that's just trying to make things better for its students um and uh and the impact even of having to have its full suite of consultants here tonight um is significant so i appreciate the board's consideration well uh thank you um thank you for that um so uh i guess before i see several people that have um raised their hands but i guess does the board have any questions uh for mr silverstein before we hear from anybody else i have no additional all right it sounds like there's no additional so i can't tell again who is who has raised their hand first but i'm assuming they'll automatically be elevated to ask a question in the order uh that their hands were raised
this is peter jerning i don't know if you want to hear from mr muscari side or were you looking for other general questions uh i can't again i can't tell i only see three participants have raised their hand that you are you are one of them um and mr muscari is one of them um mr white may make a suggestion sure uh that we listen to add uh mr muscari or counsel for mr muscari uh as they had an opportunity to speak and let them speak and then from there uh we can listen to attendees or anybody else at that point and then um you know after mr muscari or counsel end up speaking i think we should uh limit uh discussions to 90 seconds like we usually do okay i guess with that um let's uh let's have let's hear from mr muscari because i recognize it yep sorry this is peter turning i'll just jump in on our side we'd like to you to hear from adam mr muscari um scott horsley and gail hire from our firm will will also talk and i'll just start before asking mr muscari to pick up just to say that you know i think what's important and i think i tried to frame and actually mr white i think you did a good job of uh framing this at the top why we are here is because we alleged error we alleged that the site plan review process had error we believe that this the planning board did not appropriately apply the aquifer protection district zoning bylaw to this project among other infirmities and you know i think that there was a lot of statements at the top that seemed to attack i don't know things that are occurring um on facebook or elsewise but some of that seemed to impugn the the action that we've brought before the board today and i take some umbrage at that um but i think we'll get past it before i turn it over to mr muscari i would like to share my screen if i could just to illustrate um what i believe mr hirsch was referencing before and that is an image that we shared during the last hearing that showed the extensive amount of clearing on the property um and the assertion that mr muscari is just benefiting from a great densely wooded area um maybe there was a clarification that there's a densely wooded area on his property but um from what we're witnessing on the site and what this aerial footage shows uh to the extent that was represented on the image that attorney silverstein included with his materials um you know that i think that's not an accurate depiction of of the situation um and just to highlight again the concerns that we raised i understand the focus that mr silverstein has had on the handicap ramp i'll acknowledge i didn't realize or appreciate the purpose of that so point taken but we did raise uh other setback issues particularly with the parking these are much more approximate to mr muscari's uh property and the even in the recitation that mr silverstein ended with where the planning board made certain um approvals for a for the structured slope i believe is the term that he used and that the planning board used that's that area here um and again we assert that that's an error we assert in our papers that that should rightly be considered a structure i understand he has his arguments against that but you know and then his arguments about you know certain structures in subdivisions or backyard patio you know those are likely not going right up to the property line within a setback and these this structured area these geo cells uh we believe should be found to be a structure they are this is an engineered slope it's not merely just a a grassy area there's a i understand that mr silverstein says the earth movement is permissible um i understand his comment there but again there's a massive amount of restructuring of earth uh on this site and this structured uh slope is required to offset the the slopes that have been created and caused on this property therefore we believe you know those are serious considerations so i'll stop sharing now just or slight uh elucidation of those issues and adam if you're ready we'll go to you and then scott and then gail thank you okay thank you thank you peter um can everybody hear me okay yes is my my camera a little bit more stable this time sorry yes you're not walking around this time yeah i i will make sure i don't give you guys motion sickness again um look you guys just heard a lot all i want to do is just thank you all for allowing us to continue the appeal tonight um it's it's not lost on me how difficult the decision was to move forward and ensure that our voices could be considered today um it's been a long process for everybody involved and i'd like to sincerely thank the board for the time you're taking to hear this appeal um i also want to thank veritas for your comments it's good to hear from them directly finally after such a long process and i want to again reiterate that we are in no way opposing this school or religious institution and we've been clear about that from the start um we're just here to make sure that they're held to the same standards that any of us would be um i'm not complaining about a handicapped ramp um i'm just asking that the project um protects our town's drinking waters and respects our property lines just as we would like to respect theirs um i i also know the board's in a really difficult position right now and i just want you guys to know we genuinely appreciate the work you do for the town it's really not easy to do what you guys do and it's often very thankless and so just thank you for hearing and ensuring that the abutters have the opportunity to share our voice um many fam my family our neighbors everybody who's on this call the many residents through wayland who voice concern about projects such as these we're just taxpayers and we care deeply about our home and the neighborhood and just because this is closest to me and it happened to be the one who's who's kind of the one appealing it the issues here matter that they're to the entire town as a whole so we may sound very passionate at times and i apologize for that um but that's because we just feel a responsibility to speak not only for our street but for the fellow residents who don't have the ability or opportunity to show up and advocate in this way so in in no means is this meant to be a reflection on the work you all do each day to keep the town running we're not here to be adversarial we want to be respectful we're hoping to be heard we trust in your judgment and fairness and we understand the constraints that you're under so truly just appreciate the opportunity to share our perspective again tonight and i just wanted to say thank you thanks adam scott you want to jump on yes uh can you hear me okay mr chairman yes great well very briefly in the way introduction i am a hydrologist i have more than 30 years experience a lot of my work has been for the us epa nationally i've worked in all 50 states i've worked for many municipalities in in massachusetts i served as an expert witness in federal and state courts interestingly worked for mr silverstein as an expert witness as well and contrary to his representation of me i've worked on many development projects you may have heard of the pine hills probably the largest development projects in the commonwealth i worked on that i did the design and permitting on that i'm also working on three affordable housing projects right now so i just wanted to clarify i think some of his comments about perhaps whether i'm objective or not i believe i very much am and i'm very proud of my my credentials um if i may mr chairman i would just like to share my screen just to show two quick slides and i'll be very very brief sure i think it may be enabled here can you see uh let's see not yet but it looks like something is happening okay hold on can you see that slide now no okay how about how about now you cannot see it let me go let me go back and try again my apologies that's okay
easier in person right because we would have our built-in tech support with us that could solve solve this issue yeah let me go back here and try again all right yep something's happening yes we see that okay now it's going to get the right slideshow up here that's not the right one i'm sorry mr chairman i had this all set to go it's okay we don't have any other cases tonight we literally have this one on purpose so i think we'll be all right all right how about that can you see the parcel yeah my apologies okay so um very briefly i guess the the one issue i'd like to speak to is this act for protection district now i will say that most of my career has been focused on groundwater protection i mentioned epa i actually uh helped epa develop the national program to protect drinking water supplies while their protection areas i helped massachusetts dep develop the zone 2 delineation procedure so i'm quite familiar with the subject matter this graphic you're looking at here is the the dark outline is the parcels the blue area is the zone 2 area which is essentially what the town adopted as the act for protection district as you can see the majority of this parcel is outside the zone 2 and outside the act for protection district a smaller part of it is within the district and that happens to be where the storm water issues the impervious surfaces as well as the wastewater is concentrated within the zone 2 area now it's going to show one other slide this is a slide that i actually developed for uscpa for national training on how to protect uh wellhead drinking water areas and this is a 3d dimensional picture and frankly i'm not sure this was fully understood by the planning board there's a number of discussions uh and it wasn't very clear to me that they really understood this so i thought it would be worth taking a minute to make sure that everybody does understand what is at stake here my understanding of the act for protection district the purpose of that law that violates to protect groundwater drinking water the town's drinking water supply so what we're looking at here is in the front is a cross section on the top is the land view so this is a drinking water well the yellowish greenish area represents the area that flows to that well when it's pumping that's the that's what we call the zone 2 area when that gets projected up to the land surface we see this dotted line or dash line that's the what gets put on the map that's the zone 2 or act for protection district now the way this works is the water that gets to that well comes from within that zone 2 area none of the water outside the zone 2 area gets to the well so when we develop regulations to manage the types of uses and in this case the density of uses amount of wastewater amount of impervious surfaces we are focused only on the zone 2 area because that's where the water comes from that's why we delineate zone 2 areas in massachusetts we want to know what are the critical protection areas and when i read the purpose of your bylaw act protection bylaw it is exactly that to protect land uses within that act for protection district now what i've done here is just shown a parcel and i'm going to suggest that this is represent representative of this subject parcel we're talking about tonight part of it is within the zone 2 and part of is outside from a actual impact to the well standpoint the part that's outside the zone 2 has no impact and it doesn't contribute any recharge so both the wastewater provisions within the a pod as well as the stormwater impervious surfaces work on the basis of the amount of impervious surface which is then diluted by the amount of recharge because that's how you manage concentrations so the portion of the parcel that's outside the zone 2 is completely irrelevant now i understand that the attorney is trying to make an argument using the definition of a lot and and yes i he can probably read read that correctly but what i'm here to tell you is in the deliberations with the planning board i'm not sure that this was fully understood because when i read some of the performance standards for a special permit uh the finding has to be made that the project is not going to contribute to degradation of groundwater supply and by by taking into account the land area outside the zone 2 uh it provides a really inappropriate and and i would say um insignificant part of this so i think for the purpose of both the wastewater nitrogen loading as well as the impervious surfaces i believe that the way this has been looked at by the planning board is inaccurate and and and does not does not um connect to the intent and purpose of the apod and i'll stop there mr chairman be happy to answer any questions
thank you thank you uh yes i do have a quick question for you you you mentioned that and i i i tried to write this down but i i don't know that i got this correctly you talked about something about the application of a special permit and sort of making sure that uh there's no degradation of the water supply in there could you could you read that seems to be the crux of your argument that you're saying the planning board failed to consider that well there's there's a section i'll see if i can find it quickly within the apod district here can you see the bylaw i've tried quickly here there's a section that i've highlighted down here that says the decision and i'm obviously paraphrasing here i'll let you read it in detail but the decision must include these provisions here will not during construction or thereafter have an adverse impact on any aquifer area or recharge area in the district now that would exclude the land area outside the zone 2 area the other one is will not adversely affect an existing or potential domestic water supply so these are the these are the performance standards and which they relate right back to the intent and purpose of the bylaw and again the 30 impervious surface the nitrogen loading uh relates to those those um impacts within the zone 2 not outside the zone 2 those are irrelevant so again i guess what i what i want to be very very clear is is you are you are saying that in your opinion the planning board did not ask you this question in a in a clear enough way with uh in in to help them render their decision so in other words you're saying that regardless of the area regardless of how the the lot area is calculated whether we're calculating lot area just inside the aquifer protection district or we're taking talking the the total lot because i think that's a that's a legal question what you're what you seem to be saying is that regardless of the legal definition of the lot you feel the planning board did not adequately understand what they were approving i i think that that is true the i believe that the standards the intent of the standards are in here the 30 percent impervious surface and the nitrogen loading pertains to only the part of the lot within the zone two for from a from a substantive uh technical basis and and again when i look at these standards here these performance standards those are the things that go to this the lot area outside the zone two uh which i believe they considered when they did their calculation of the 30 percent uh is irrelevant to these uh performance well i i i understood that you you feel i i i understand that you feel that that's irrelevant however that's not exactly what the bylaw says so i guess this is this is the core of the question that i'm asking are you saying that in your opinion the planning board needed to go beyond the legal definition of the bylaw and and make an interpretation of how to apply the technical components of section 16 yes exactly mr chairman i know i've written regulations before sometimes they're not written perfectly i think the intent here is the is the lot area within the act for protection district that that was the intent it may not say that exactly but uh the reason i'm here is i i work my whole career on protecting public drinking water supplies these performance standards are critical and i believe this one's being misinterpreted okay thank you i do not have any other questions but i don't have any other questions from the board no other questions i have a question for veritas just something i was thinking about um and if we don't mind going back to them for a second um i just want to make sure i understand something um we were going through a lot of numbers pretty quickly on student sizes and and stuff so i just want to make sure i have a clear understanding uh currently there are 150 total students 77 of which are middle school do i have that accurate so far i'm going to defer to joseph joseph did say that was stating that yeah we can elevate joseph or lisa somebody just i just want to confirm so i i just wanted to confirm it is the person that needed mr hirsch the answer is yes that's correct okay beautiful and then the of those numbers are any of those are any of those current students going to be transferring to this location from the other location as part of the that's the thought process that's the thought process yeah that's right okay and it is is it the as um well right now uh it's approved for 108 students is that accurate um so will all middle school and then some of the other 150 whatever mix it may be will be taking up that 108 no so i i don't i don't know exactly how this fits into the i don't understand the line of the questioning but i'll just reiterate kind of the intended use and then whether or not that's i'll just answer the question adam so um seventh and eighth grade is what we envision because the first phase of the project is the renovation of 172 cachituate 172 cachituate is three classrooms so you're not going to bring 108 kids over there so the 108 kids is relevant to the second phase which is the addition of that second schoolhouse it's a multi-grade building which is also permitted right now so that's additional classroom space and that isn't something that we can build as of today that's something that we have permitted but that still requires additional fundraising to get there so what we're talking about today is 77 kids in the current seventh and eighth grade for the kids that we know that are coming back next year it's probably 70 kids in seventh and eighth grade and we wouldn't begin to encroach on the larger number until we moved over additional grades and that can happen in the fall of of 2026 okay that's that's totally fine and then you were talking about uh future items and future expectations and stuff uh is there any way you can give an understanding of uh i know that we were permitted here for 450 it was a it was a a different number it's like 453 or for 463 or something like that um the sizing of the permitting for the amount of personnel for the future and everything like that is that because you want to encompass be able potential for for for all of future or what is the potential usage for the amount of students in the time frame i know you were saying over time but like if you can just give an understanding of what that campus in your guys mind is going to look like for the future say you know two decades or whatever it is from now are you planning on using that 450 or is it really going to be more something much more um modest yeah i appreciate the question i think right now everything that we have done to this point is just based on those two buildings because that is all that we have actually formally designed and submitted for permitting so the number that's up in the 400s is because of work that we're doing for septic so that once we lay the groundwork for what may come two decades from now we don't have to dig up roads and dig up foundations to put in things that that we know that we may want to use so i don't have a firm answer for you right now in in a way that i think would be satisfactory i can just tell you we're we're only doing the work uh that we would that we would have to dig up uh established features otherwise to put in later so all we're here to talk about now is is these two buildings okay and that's totally fine i you were talking a little bit about future and stuff and i just wanted to get an understanding for expectations for the future if you could provide any insight or anything like that so or of what veritas was thinking for you know um campus wise so yeah nothing nothing from that i could that i could provide for today okay and mr chair just just to be clear the uh this is jonathan sulferstein uh the approval that's before you the planning board site plan approval and the building permit that's currently on appeal is for 108 students it's not for 400 plus it's correct yeah yeah i think i think that's that we oversized the septic system it's totally fine the potential future i i just want to be really clear yeah no no we we understand that and that's actually that's this is one of the reasons why i i really i i i do want us to sort of stay focused on i would say these three issues the question of whether the planning board aired with respect to the aquifer protection district whether or not there are a lot coverage violations as alleged by the appellant and whether or not there are setback issues i i would agree with you that there's there's been a lot of other material that has been shared with the board and we have looked at it all i want everyone on both sides of this issue to understand we have read all the material um and i i'm not trying to discount that material because we're not interested in it but i think it's important that we be very focused on the specific questions that i think both attorneys have sort of spent a fair amount of time sort of honing and and sort of uh i guess refining the documents that they've sent to us so mr chair i don't want to um you know jump in when i'm i shouldn't be can i make one very quick point in response to mr horsley's presentation just to sort of clarify yes because that was a very there's a there are some very specific elements of mr horsley's presentation so uh i think that's okay thank you um so uh i'm just bringing up your zoning bylaw um is that showing up uh not uh yes so he was citing the board to the the special permit standards our project does not require a special permit under the zoning bylaw there are certain uses in the apod that require a special permit so he was citing to you special permit standards that are completely irrelevant first of all you may not require a special permit for dover uses plus we're not one of the uses that requires a special permit under the bylaw so it's just more obfuscation none of those special permit standards apply so i'm really not clear on on what possible relevance that has um and i do want to note that uh mr durning brought up the picture of the site there's a very detailed landscaping plan there's going to be a lot of re um replanting of trees throughout that site so but most of and i think i was clear i'll clarify again most of the vegetative cover the buffer that i was referring to is on mr muscari's property so that those are the main points i wanted to mention and i'll stop sharing and defer to the board okay thank you um all right so we heard from uh mr horsley and um i apologize but um uh so mr white this is turning yes i think you said that there were three three individuals like my colleague gail higher is going to make some comments as well thank you very much thank you for reminding me i was trying i have it in my notes but it's all good it's all good it's all good great thanks gail thank you um thanks to the board for hearing us tonight um so one just very basic point i think one of the unfortunate coincidences about this project is that the densest part of it happens to be a in the zone two and be very close to some residential um properties and the fact that mr muscari may have a lot of trees in his backyard and maybe there's like a you know several trees between his house and the sports court like that should be irrelevant i mean the zoning bylaws are the zoning bylaws this is a residential district so i think the um residential nature of this neighborhood needs to be respected no matter how many trees mr muscari may happen to have in his backyard maybe someday he'll put something else back there and then the neighbor would be closer so that's just a kind of a um a point i wanted to make um and with regard to the aquifer protection district and um mr silverstein is correct the special permit is not needed we did not um say that it was and i agree 100 with mr horsley's technical comments and the fact is the planning board made no findings with respect to the aquifer protection district they completely ignored the uh the rules of the upper protection districts that um protect density and also earth removal and i agree there's no earth removal permit needed for dover uses but the apod um bylaw has some earth removal provisions in it which we assert should have been should have been followed so and i think um one thing that that no one has really talked about here i just want to make sure that it's understood um sir hersley put up the four well previously four lots now they're one but uh there's four lots whereas the two closest to the bottom of the screen are in the zone two and if you look at wayland's overlay district map the whole four lots are in the apod but the bylaw says the boundary is the zone two and the reason there's a boundary for the zone two that's the whole purpose of the aquifer protection district bylaw so what we are saying is that the zone two line should have been respected and the densest part of this project should not be in the zone two and that is what happened so we are asking the zoning board to take a closer look at that and say oh yes you know this is the zone two boundary this dense development should not be occurring in the zone two so the the technical aspects of how that plays out i think are in our submitted materials but i just wanted to raise that as kind of a threshold thing and where we see was the major error committed by the planning board and with respect to the aquifer protection district okay thank you thanks thanks mr white i think that uh captures the information that we wanted to convey um again we're here because we believe that there were errors in the process particularly with respect to the aquifer protection district as gail just mentioned there are no formal findings in the site plan approval um and it's not clear exactly what the planning board did did it just assume that there were um the all the additional land area could be included or not they didn't memorialize that but we believe that it's error and we think that this zoning board has an opportunity to make a finding that would respect the importance of density of development as attorney higher just said within the aquifer protection district so that's that's one of the primary errors that we're asserting today and we'll respond to any questions okay thank you um before we hear from any other uh participants uh any questions from the board no additional no additional from anyone else okay um all right so it looks like there are two more participants that have their hands raised right that's at least that's what i see on the bottom although it says there's 61 total participants so i can't i can't tell again mr chair may i make a recommendation sure now that we are um going to be listening to open comments that we uh reinstate the 92nd um period for statements uh i am fine with that i will uh i will set a timer if you'd like anina has her hand up or raising her hand okay yes uh thank you if i just may uh give a suggestion if you click on participants you will see all the um participants and see who has their hand raised and if you want to call up then i can unmute them for you so like perfect there's like a so it looks it looks like we now only have one and that is uh joseph uh mendendorf there's a uh also a miss smith as well where do you see that i'm in the i have the participant panel under attendees oh under attendees okay all right um well um actually let let's let's let's do this let's start with megan smith since uh i haven't been looking at that uh second panel there so let's do that so if you could give us you could elevate her and give us your name and address miss smith you can unmute yeah i think i don't know if you can okay can you hear me now yes
thank you everyone for your time this is amazing i really appreciate everyone's time my husband's gonna turn off his computer so i have to say just because adam maskari is the one who's being targeted it doesn't mean that he's the only one in this town that's upset about um what's going on back there and we really were not able to even meaningfully engage um until recently so am i able to see i feel like i can't see anything um so i'm just gonna say i am speaking as a direct abutter and tax paying wayland resident i'm deeply disappointed that the veritas christian academy's attorney continues to attack adam maskari even referring to his concerns as petty it's unacceptable mr maskari has been raising legitimate issues about the concerns and clear cutting of the wooded buffer that went right up to his and my property line we in the meantime had to pay out of pocket uh for where our actual property line was um and we would have never done that except that this invasive project was happening in our backyard while veritas christian academy tells us they are a non-profit i will say as a tax paying and full-time nurse and substitute for the town i will i'm a little resentful when people from natick or weston are telling me that it's not my place to voice any concerns for our town aquifer
for this fully for-profit school while they move forward with an extravagant project claiming financial hardship despite receiving out-of-state donor funding it's also troubling to hear neighbors characterized as merely complaining for pointing out work done without required setbacks these are compliance issues not personal grievances veritas i just uh hang on for one sec if i uh engaged with the neighbors all right excuse me just for one second yeah that was uh no genuine outreach and they have no understanding of what the real impacts are miss miss smith yes mr white please please we can't i guess we can't yeah there you go uh all right so i i guess yes so that was uh i'm happy to let miss smith continue to talk but that was two minutes so if you really want to limit to 90 seconds we would have to uh reevaluate that oh wait can you hear me yes yes we can hear you please if you could wrap up please miss smith wait could you hear me the whole time yes yes it was only at the very end okay i appreciate you i believe mr mendendorp was next yes i've been trying to keep track and i hope i said that right yes sir yes it was yes can everybody hear me yes we can uh miss smith appreciate your comments and um apologies on behalf of a of a charged hearing um on behalf of everything that has been exchanged today it is our intention to engage with the community i i live here too many of us live here too so we we want to make everything um as respectful as we can do and we are working to to get together with neighbors to just sit down outside of legal hearings and and and talk this out so just accept that um as as you can uh the other thing that i was going to mention mr chairman is that if you are interested in uh hearing uh veritas perspective from our engineers uh to mr horsley's comments we do have chris blessin who is our head architect we have peter maglu who is the aries engineer that was responsible for uh our our engineering perspective uh mr horsley was involved with the vast majority of the meetings that we did host through the planning board so we did review much of this material before it was also reviewed through the mass dep and we have all that on record as well so if you are interested in hearing a veritas perspective we can offer that by either of our two experts okay thank you very much thank you all right um so adam if you're keeping track who i think lisa was next yes yes so we can elevate lisa oh there she is there i am okay thank you um thank you so much for letting me speak i just wanted to do one single thing and that is read to you um the answer uh from claire golden of the mass department of environmental protection written to mr scott horsley on march 28th when he sent almost exactly the same thing that he just told you and i will read it and it's from claire golden and uh from mass department of environmental protection scott i apologize for the delay in my response i spoke to program folks in boston who requested that i send out an email to the sex and chief section chiefs which i did the results were the same as my initial survey of them when looking at nitrogen loading for zone 2 in iwpa the area of the entire facility including those parts of the facility outside of the zone 2 and iwpa is counted for example sas has to be located zone 2 the facility is 40 000 square feet the zone 2 area of the facility is only 15 000 square feet design flow is 440 gallons per day the facility meets 440 gallons per day building acre which is the guideline so this was not the planning board's decision this was the mass department of environmental protection it was sent to the board of health which voted to approve it based on this memo i'm finished thank you so much for listening to me thank you um so next yeah all right well that's good they're going they're going in order right so so i guess let's see hello and good evening give us your name and address please uh get them in those i always know when people don't say the name out loud that it's me so uh but i i never have that problem so that's uh it's actually it's a pleasant problem to have it's been my icebreaker for 30 plus years so my name is get them in those people i go by get us for short uh easiest way is like go get us a drink is the easiest way to remember um i live at 15 rolling lane so i'm obviously not direct to butter but i live very close uh i live you know just like two minutes away uh we moved here in november uh my son now attends veritas we lived in arlington which is a fantastic place to live uh but we heard about veritas different people and came to veritas uh uh fell in love with it and actually moved to wayland solely for that reason so now became a tax-paying wayland resident uh because of veritas um and immediately integrated into the community and i've now am a parent coach on the wayland youth basketball association we intend to be that i actually want to bring up a lean's point which is uh in my so my name is lithuanian i came from what was historically a soviet country broke free rules-based order is important i know there's a lot of chaos but the big the reason also reason i'm here is like if you have a plan and a process in place and that can fall apart which kind of feels a little bit like what's happening in parts of the country now too where the raw the the rules are malleable and flexible uh and you never know exactly why maybe it's we know or maybe it's because something was unclear but but we have to depend on those rules so i'm actually stuck on the fact that all these timelines passed and you know we're here late again uh uh you know everyone has to put their time and talk about this so i want to bring attention to that and just hope that we can also fix in the fact that if there are certain rules and certain plans that we have to follow certain processes that even when it's inconvenient and it doesn't work out perfectly that we stick to them um so anyway so on behalf of a new wayland resident i love this place my wife and i are so happy to live here my kids love it we're happy with everything that's here and we hope that the the precedent that's being set for the future uh is one that please please wrap up if you could please i'm down just that was my last word word okay sorry i had you i had a timer going too but my phone uh went on a screensaver so i lost it apologies that's okay no worries thank you all right so next would be uh kristen hall sorry hill sorry about that hello can you hear me now yes okay great hi i'm kristen hill i'm at the five ball walk ball rock lane um ball rock road and in wayland here um so i've been a resident for about uh nine years um and uh just as a full disclaimer my my children have been very tough for the last two years and um i reiterate uh what my uh my fellow parent there i get us just talked just said that as a resident um i you know i'm seeing kind of things from both sides i'll appreciate that it's for the you know the interest of those that are that live right close to it that i have this fear that things are going to um change for them you know at this at the same time i can reiterate that veritas has been you know quite amenable to my community i live really close to them right now my my kids actually walk right to school and i could say that uh veritas has been a very uh very good um um neighbor for all these years even though we just started with the school just two years ago um so with that as a but however my priorities do reside most as a resident that i'm very from what i've heard today it's been quite confusing because you know hearing both sides kind of say that that their way is the right way to me these matters seem to be very black and white they either follow the rules or they don't and essentially as a resident i certainly don't want to have any of my taxpayer dollars to be going towards wasting time for either those that are applying for things that are trying to help build and strengthen our community or for the residents that are relying on us the laws to keep us safe so essentially i'm still curious to see what the true facts are and i hope that there will be a transcript of the information that we sent to help identify what the actual facts are so we can see what's right or wrong so that's what it is i just implore the board and implore everyone to please follow the rules to the letter of the law and not not skip steps just because of emotions all right with that um my time is done thank you most real thank you um okay uh i guess next is uh emily combos hi can you hear me yes we can hi so my name is emily campos belusi i live in 11 gauge road wayland massachusetts um and i've had the unique privilege of attending both veritas christian academy and wayland public schools i'm here tonight to represent the voice of the students from veritas past present and future i'm someone who has experienced veritas firsthand and can speak on how it has shaped my education but more so who i am as a person my my family chose veritas because they wanted two things for me and my brother an excellent and advanced as you academic education and a place where my faith could grow alongside my intellect beyond academics and faith my family got to see what makes veritas special and that is its community because the school is so small relationships are deep teachers weren't just instructors they were mentors who walked with us through some of the most important years of our lives many of those relationships have continued through high school and even now into college that kind of personal investment is rare and it changes students it changed me all of my experiences at veritas helped me transition successfully to wayland high school and now to tufts university veritas didn't separate me from the broader world it prepared me to step into it with confidence i'm deeply grateful for both of my educational experiences wayland public schools and veritas serve different roles in my life and together they shape the person that i am today what veritas is seeking now is not to take away from the town but to establish a stable permanent home for a community of students and families who care deeply about education character and belonging the property already means so much to students and alumni many have even helped fundraise because they believe in what this student this school provides thank you thank you all right uh i guess next is uh kate taunton rigby yes sorry hi my screen is cut off yes that's okay can folks hear me okay yes yes okay great um so kate taunton rigby i live at 147 old connecticut path um i will again reiterate that this is not about veritas or the school or the people that may or may not attend at such school this is more about clarity around the setbacks that were specifically you know concerning i saw frankly two sides to the story one that seemed to be very dismissive of the concerns um another that may have been contained in a letter submitted friday i do hope that the board will take a thorough investigation into the contents of that letter just to make sure that we understand um the other piece that i want to clarify is a memo that was read by someone in relation to the water and zoning therein um my request of the board is that we bring back our expert um mr horsley to clarify and explain or perhaps in a follow-up letter help us understand the true impact this is going to have and i think you know adam's question around the capacity that's being presented now versus in the future it does have a broader impact we're you know putting in uh septics that allow the organization to scale and i recognize that that's good planning but i do have legitimate concerns uh for my family my children my neighborhood's drinking water here in the town especially in a town that has had concerns of a significant nature over several years past so um i'm not sure mr horsley could come back onto clarifier if that's a follow-up point but i want to be very direct you know i do support specificity in terms of things that we're discussing here to get clarity um this is not about the town's you know distrust of the uh school or any emotional side to it whatsoever um it's more just let's get clarity on where we have concerns so that we could be at ease um if in fact this is to um is to to come to rest thank you all right well i what i what i would propose we do is um you know we we have heard from we have heard from mr horsley um but we we do also we're going to continue the discussion about the aquifer protection district and and groundwater we're going to hear from uh another uh engineering consultant uh so but i don't want to start that until we finish the process of listening to the last few people that have had their hand raised before we get on that path so it looks like at this point we have uh doug sacra um and another hand just popped yeah another hand just popped up as well so hi can you hear me yes we can hi doug sacra 55 gleason lane whale and mass and i'm an architect with my own company maple hill architects um i just wanted to make one quick statement um we met all the building setbacks and we didn't request any variances or anything for that um so i just want to make that statement because it seems like lots of people are making it sound like we didn't meet setbacks and um you know i'm i'm done thank you okay thank you uh okay uh next is may kong hi can you hear me yes yes hi uh my name is may and i'm a well-named resident and apparent at veritas christian academy i just want to share my veritas is address please uh my address is 97 east plan street yeah i just i just want to share why veritas is so important to our family my family is a new immigrant family to the united states even before we came here uh we heard heard about veritas zero friends from my church they spoke uh very highly of the school so when we moved to the u.s we chose veritas very intentionally because of veritas we decided to uh move to wainland we actually bought a house only about a three minutes drive from the school through uh veritas we put down roots here and really become part of the wainland community i also know at least two other families in our class who moved to wainland for the same reason for our family veritas is not a temporary choice it's a big reason why wainland feels like home to us the school has had a very positive impact on our chat on our kids and on our family not just a cut academy but also in shaping our values and our sense of belongs here please wrap up yeah thank you oh right that i guess that was it um all right so it looks like uh kate kate taunton rigby has another question i just want to make sure that this is something different i think it's actually jason he's they just have one account guys okay okay sorry guys are you able to hear me yes yes okay yeah i apologize um yeah for some reason my phone won't log into the the zoom call um uh jason taunton rigby 147 old connecticut path i i just wanted to say quickly um i i work as a commercial real estate appraiser and i i've been hired on numerous occasions to be an expert witness um for court cases and one of the the things i want to point out is that our job is to be an impartial third party opinion and when i think about this traffic study that that was used within the approval process we're talking about 108 i might might have the numbers slightly off we're talking about 108 students and somehow the traffic study had 34 cars um if we're if we're talking about a school that's only seventh and eighth grade or even sixth seventh and eighth grade how are we getting three kids into each car and and i just want to question the legitimacy of the traffic study itself um i i think that's something that should be thought about here and and if if the traffic study goes out the window then maybe we need to think about getting a new one or just going through this process again thank you very much i appreciate your time okay thank you all right so it looks like we have gone through all of the uh members of the public that were interested in speaking uh so what i would like to do is um with respect to uh what we heard so far this evening um i i would like to hear from uh veritas's consultant with respect to their review of um the process that they went through in the site plan review uh and understands their uh i guess relationship with uh discussions they had with mr horsley during that review process and i believe that was something that um joseph mentioned uh the consultant was here to sort of speak to that so what i what i i do want to do is is if we could keep it focused on the pretty nuanced argument that mr horsley was making uh sorry uh notwithstanding the question about the uh the applicability of the the nuance between um the special permit and the aquifer protection district i sort of really want to focus more on um the specific uh amount of hydrological study that was done during the planning board uh review process i think that's me uh mr white is that uh i think it is yes okay great uh so i'm chris blessin the uh principal architect of tapay architects who led a team of um uh very established and capable engineers um i'd like to ask whoever's running to also promote um michelle callahan as a civil engineer um pete mcglue from aries is already promoted he is uh a hydrologist um with a lot of credentials as well and uh that process was also um brought forward uh or he and his team was brought forward into that um also with us is mark zambernardi is a geotechnical consultant and the reason i want all of these folks um on your screen and ready to talk to you is because for me to frame the question right on the process of uh review relative to uh groundwater i think that's what you asked about right um yes it is okay so the process of review is this came up uh uh actually uh about midstream in the planning process which again was um you know uh nine months at least um and it the question was about it it got really focused on groundwater mounding um and if anybody wants a master class on anything to do with groundwater mounding if you don't know what that term is you should go review those documents because it was quite extensive um and uh there was a lot of back and forth and one point of that back and forth between our um consulting group uh in communication with horsley and the attorneys at the time who were involved um horsley and his attorneys declined the opportunity to meet with our team to get on board with what was going on uh for groundwater mounding and the engineering that was going on um and so from that point we relied upon uh a peer-reviewed engineer study which is a third-party peer review uh solicited by the town paid for by the applicant at the planning board uh that peer review process went through multiple iterations where comments were made and slowly they were whittled away over time uh to establish what was going on and at the end of the day the third party reviewer agreed with the engineering analysis provided by our team some of which are here on this call that uh the engineering done for the water in this district on this site was applicable was right um and the letter that was issued from the mass dp on how to consider the site to mr horsley also went to the board of health so um there's two other boards to keep in mind too that the planning board waited for decisions from they did not make their decision before conservation commission reviewed and before the board of health reviewed both of which went through uh board of health actually hired another third-party reviewer to review groundwater calcs and and make their determination to issue a title five uh wastewater permit on this site as shown in the documents and so that's important information for this board to understand that there were two different boards that had two different peer reviews happening uh to review the engineering and analysis of this site and you have a state representative from a state massachusetts state that controls this process issuing a directive straight to mr horsley himself um talking about how to calculate the site um the conservation commission which uh controls uh storm water and tree um work um we'll leave the tree work as it as it is but i can tell you that we were fully compliant with the tree replacement um requirements of that bylaw um so there are a lot of trees taken down but you have to replace a whole lot more than you take down um and it's all based on caliper and replacement sizes and so that was all taken into consideration including with the screening analysis that was brought up in the other complaints um and the uh the conservation commission also reviewed the stormwater uh strategies on site um in light of all of the impervious impervious calculations related to to the uh zone 2 and aquifer protection district um and so uh that kind of outlines the extensiveness of the process and in no way did the planning board uh short circuit that at all um a lot of the documents actually that are coming from the opposing council um reference moments in time where uh further documents were produced after that for example the peer review documents and things like that and so they they didn't necessarily hit on the final determination or the final analysis in some cases not all but in some um and so um it's important to also realize time stamps in this process that in in the journey of a nine-month planning process of which um you know most projects don't actually go through a nine-month planning process in my experience it's maybe two hearings maybe three for really tough ones but nine months of hearings where we debated and and like scrutinize the project tweaked things along the way including impervious calculations and we we made all of the adjustments we needed to make and one thing to um kind of get back to the water issue is that there was a there was a a question by horsley's team and and the um folks at the time about well where's seasonal high groundwater or we didn't do enough test pits or borings or anything like that and so we hired mark zambernardi who's a geotechnical firm northeast youth technical they went out did some more analysis that went back to aries we uh did all of the requisite things and some of it produced okay we need to raise it a little bit or we need to do this stuff to really protect the neighbors and really protect everybody that's going uh everything that's going on on site and so um michelle can actually talk to you about the improvement of stormwater runoff from the site that's happening because of this development the improvement of captured rainwater that gets actually um diverted back into the aquifer production district area in the location that it's talked about and so um not or we're not relying any more on ambiguous or um just where the water lands and flows kind of uh area here we're by design and by sound engineering directing it to where it needs to go and controlling it on this site which is better for everybody and we'll um by the engineering analysis that pete and his team can talk about for mounding or by the stormwater runoff that michelle can talk about which is all backed in subsurface investigations that are applicable and meet all of the um stormwater handbook requirements again the case is actually quite clear for you all that um this is that's in the complaint is about a planning board's miss uh you know whatever the complaint says about the planning board but the planning board also relied on two other boards in town to help them get to a decision and those plant those boards themselves actually used the the means necessary and so we were under a lot of scrutiny um i think i want to in the this order i would like for michelle to talk about the stormwater um in particular and then um i'd like pete to just briefly we can go on for days about mounding i'm telling you for days and the subsurface effects of water and where you put it but i want pete to quickly and succinctly tell you some of the key findings relative to that the key takeaway the wastewater engineer is out of the country and unavailable which is why um the the record still in any case would rely on um the planning board's decision because you have a title five permit for that um and so the nitrogen loading and all of that stuff was taken up at the planning board not i'm sorry at the board of health not the planning board um it was discussed at the planning board but at the end of the day they they sort of said hey if board of health is going to issue a permit for this and that's their specialty that's their jurisdiction then who are we to override their um their authority on wastewater um and so uh michelle can you please talk for uh you know a couple minutes on uh stormwater and then pete if you'll follow that right up with um pounding
thanks i'm michelle callahan i'm a senior project manager at niche engineering um i work on a lot of projects with complicated sites lots of stormwater design and environmental permitting um this site was no different um like chris mentioned we went through a very long process of permitting peer reviews lots of back and forth um and i feel very confident in this design um i think a couple of things that i want to touch on because i could talk about this all night but there's been a lot of talk about impervious cover and that impact on that on the zone 2 um per the stormwater handbook and the requirements that are given to us by mass dep um any increase in impervious area has to also offset that um with groundwater recharge so our stormwater design has actually exceeded the requirement of recharge that's required under the handbook for this site we are there's extra considerations in the handbook related to zone 2 um so the different stormwater strategies that we can use those we're taking into account on the site um like chris also mentioned we work very closely um with mark's team to get additional geotechnical um uh investigations completed at the site a lot of times with um civil engineering and stormwater design you know we have certain um we have to test pits and borings and try to get groundwater levels um we did a really thorough thorough site investigation of this site and working with mark to get those investigations done so that we could really uh hone in our stormwater model and get uh our assumptions really nailed down we worked really closely with pete mcglue to work on the mounding that was brought up so i don't want to get too much into the weeds with that but mounding really talks about how much you're affecting the groundwater levels uh below the grade um so we worked really closely with pete to make sure that we weren't we weren't creating any mounding issues that anyone would be concerned about you know we're meeting all the regulations um i do want to just touch lastly on the point of we are reducing uh both the rate and volume of stormwater leaving the site so in the existing site right now the water hits the surface it leaves it leaves the site unmitigated there's nothing really holding it back other than the natural ground cover um that's there and the proposed design we're really intercepting this water infiltrating it on site um and really reducing both the rate and volume um in this proposed condition so it does result in an overall improvement uh for the stormwater conditions that i'll end there happy to answer any questions okay um i don't have any particular questions on that any other questions from the board none for me all right thank you sorry i was muted uh do you want to hear from pete on mounding yes is that okay uh pete can you please talk for a second on the mounding aspects of the project uh sure i guess what i what i do want to say is that this this one is a particular nuance point because we've heard from the applicants on like a very highly technical um disagreement on the way mounding is uh is calculated and that's my that's my high level takeaway reading reading all the materials yeah pete can you go ahead and talk certainly pete mcleugh principal at aries engineer airing and i've been a hydrogeologist for about 40 years um we've done plenty of uh mounding groundwater modeling that type of work uh michelle did a very good job of uh leading us in and um what lisa said earlier is correct that we went through other boards and chris mentioned them we worked closely with because some of the uh numbers that we were using in the calculations were being questioned um we worked with the geotech firm went out collected more information from the specific areas put that information or work and we worked with uh dillis and roy which is civil design group that was hired by the planning board and we went through iterations with them we met with them and um by march 24th they sent a letter to uh the planning board saying that we met all their concerns that that were raised by them and uh the other app the people that were against the applicants questions mr horsley so um all in all the mounding we showed that it was a temporary and would uh reduce shortly after the storm and that it was um helping by getting the surface water and runoff into the groundwater which is what the epa and others have come up with these regulations for to begin with and we also met the stormwater plans and that's really it in a nutshell okay um so uh mr white i think that paints a picture of a pretty thorough process from the planning board and other boards alike um on uh the nature of of uh you know the groundwater specifically in that part of the process um if if the board uh goes into some discussion and needs some additional information from the geotechnical engineer on um you know some of that stuff then that's that's certainly uh we mark is here happy to do that i think um for you all sake it i think you get the picture um it was thorough it was vetted um and it was extensive so okay um there may be sort of uh some specific questions that come up but i don't have any i don't have any general ones now other than i guess at a at a high level i guess what we've heard from um the applicant is that um there's a whole series of issues that they want us to uh investigate that sounds to me like have in a way been investigated as part of this process so i guess like my question maybe that wasn't really a question but i guess my question to you is um in in the planning board process that you and your consultant team went through were a lot of these questions that we're hearing about this evening were these questions raised during that process they were and and that's right that's what i'm saying is that part of the process of um the planning board uh you know all all of the track record of all nine meetings um we went through um we went through discussions on how to calculate the site um on you know is it one site is it not that's where the whole anr process came out and it's one site because of the um even though the bylaw says lots owned by the same owner can be considered one we still said well let's let's connect them and then the actual one of the board members said once the anr is done i'm satisfied that the um aopd calculations and zone 2 calculations are compliant um so so the the nature that something wasn't discussed at aopd or sorry at planning relative to um aopd or um you know the coverage is even impervious impervious um that that whole process was discussed at planning um we had uh conversations on um there's documentation of one of the board members uh disliking impervious materials because it creates a maintenance um a maintenance uh mandate for the the the school to keep those things clean and vacuum them because of if they don't then they lose their in they lose their perviousness right um over time and so we talked about the strategies that michelle taught was wanting that michelle spoke to you about we talked about those we talked about alterations of those um and so so the planning board did their job and they also we talked at nauseam at the planning board conversations about mounding about that's where all of the scott horsley uh memos came to that's where we talked to them they suggested we maybe meet with the horsley team after you know in private and work some of this out we tried didn't work um and so the the planning board did their job on forcing us to go through things and we made some changes we i think michelle at one point um raised the height of one of the um the um ponds that collects water to infiltrate infiltration ponds um to accommodate that and that was discussed at the planning board okay so like all of these things were discussed at length at the planning boards um audience and nothing new from the uh from the um appellant here in this case nothing it's it's kind of remarkable that every time we get a forwarded letter or something like that it's like this is not new we've dealt with this at the planning board constantly that's what our team is saying to each other that every time something comes it's nothing there's no new there's no new knowledge here um all of it has been tackled at the planning board and i'll just give you um you know the planning board's decision that the um the slope right written straight in there in in the decision that we talked about that at length again about the the various um the various trade-offs from walls to uh slopes to um we even talked about the nature of doing work in a tight setback situation um and so the planning board had a lot of comments to say about the nature of doing work right which arguably is not the purview of the planning board but like just to give you a sense of the thoroughness of their their review is that we talked high and low about all of it and um and a key mark of that was uh the water stuff i think we spent a few meetings on that actually um and so okay um i think i'll leave it there for you yeah thank you all right um it looks like we got two other people that have raised their hands so i i'm assuming it goes in order so uh it looks like peter uh during is up next thanks tom i'll just go quickly uh just uh um here on behalf of adam muscari the the petitioner and so just a few comments and then i'll turn it to scott um again just to focus everyone's energy i think you know chris has made a nice presentation again we are asserting that the planning board decision was in error um so that they allowed the the structured slope in the setback we are asserting that as an error maybe it was talked about but this zoning board of appeals has the power and the ability to evaluate that and determine whether or not such a structured slope should be located right up to the property line where there should be a 30-foot setback um similarly though there was a discussion of the the email exchange with dep i think that's in a very narrow context of talking about nitrogen loading under title five our issue and and assertion of error with respect to the apod is broader than that in particular i think the strongest element of it is the um density of development within the zone two the dep memo has no jurisdictional weight on that issue um even if it did have any weight on a zoning board's interpretation of its own bylaw so i think that while there were many meetings and lots of disputes and potentially wrangling at the planning board our assertion is that the site plan approval is an error it did not make a finding in the site plan approval with respect to whether or not the um how to assess and describe the apod mr silverstein and mr blesson are relying on stormwater management decisions made by the conservation commission but my understanding is that approval was not issued until june 24th of 2025 well after the planning board had concluded its process so it's not clear to me how uh the concom approval of the stormwater management on the site was a justification for the construction in the apod so again um our core issues are error in the site plan approval and i'll ask mr horsley to uh amplify our response thank you yeah he's he's up next so yeah mr chairman i'll be brief and again i i agree with a lot of what michelle said i think the stormwater plan does sorry just please state your name again for the record it's got scott horsley working with uh the uh attorneys here and i just wanted to say i do agree with what michelle said about the stormwater plan does control peak runoff rates leaving the site in compliance with the uh stormwater manual that is not uh what we're talking about here with the apod as i tried to describe earlier it's really about the density within the zone two um i i think the bylaw is pretty clear in its intent to try to limit density within the drinking water zone two area they the bylaw talks about both wastewater density limiting the amount of wastewater per area within the zone two within the act for district also limits the amount of impervious surface both of those uh derive pollutant loads even though you're putting the stormwater in the ground which is a requirement as michelle said correctly uh this pollutant loading and the intent of the bylaw is to limit it uh 30 is a pretty high number frankly 15 is a number i see in a lot of other places so these are high loads and the and the way that the planning board interpreted this was to dilute those loads by the entire lot which as i've said before is not in the zone two so from a technical standpoint if if and i'd love to talk to these other consultants i guess i'd ask them do they believe in density controls in a drinking water area like wastewater and and storm water and if so does it make sense to include lot area outside the zone two um i'd love to have that conversation i suspect if we talked it through honestly they would agree um the bylaw does say something different as attorney silverstein points out he's looking at the words in there and i i respect that but i'm here to tell you that the intent of the bylaw is to limit density in the in the zone two area in the act of protection district area and this does not do it gail said earlier this uh the unfortunate thing here is the development has focuses the higher density in that blue area that i showed in the slide within the zone two uh what what would have been nice to protect the drinking water if we all believe that's a good goal would it be put that stuff outside the zone two that i think that's the intent of the bylaw that didn't happen uh it exceeds the performance standards in my view and i'll just end by saying again i was going to the dp letter i know claire quite well we had a long conversation about this she's commenting on the dp permitting process they regulate wastewater treatment plants this is a different this is a different application this is a local standard which has every right to be more strict than state standards uh that's that's what title five regulations are that's what aquifer protection zoning bylaws are to provide more local control beyond more restrictive than the state requirements and i think this bylaw does provide that for good reason i applaud the town for writing the bylaw i just hope they enforce it thank you thank you all right so it looks like we do not have any other uh parties that are have their hands raised um so what i would propose to do um again given the given the late hour and the fact that we have all these uh consultants uh here tonight um are there any questions from the board of either um the appellants team or consultants or the veritas team and their consultants that that we would like to we would like to ask because what i would propose to do is um close the public comment period of this and sort of move to the deliberation portion i don't know that we'll be able to wrap that up this evening um but before we do that i just want to make sure that there are no additional comments that we want to hear hi mr chair um i wanted to get the opinion now that we've heard mr horsley uh michelle mark or peter uh based on those comments that mr horsley was uh providing is there what are your thoughts to the view of mr horsley versus uh on that specific piece i'll just make a quick comment so he talked about pollutant loading uh within the zone two so the mass stormwater handbook is very clear on zone two requirements related to water quality treatment uh there's specific requirements around pre-treatment that level of treatment that needs to happen before any of that water can get infiltrated and i will say that this product does meet all of those pre-treatment and water quality treatment requirements specifically for zone two um and and the handbook does not distinguish whether or not part of your parcels and part of your not we basically designed our whole stormwater system for the entire site to meet those requirements so they're meeting the pre-treatment requirements and water quality treatment requirements so that's uh related to the pollutant loading comment that was made thank you thank you and mr chair could i just make one quick point sure um just to respond uh to mr during um he made the claim that the um the conservation commission did not approve uh the stormwater management permit which went into great detail about aquifer protection and the best management practices that were informed uh employed these are the may 7 approved minutes may 7 prior to the vote of the planning board this is the discussion detailed discussion about the peer review and um it culminated with a vote to issue a permit under chapter 193 that's the stormwater management and it passed yes the actual written permit was issued in june but as i said in my letter to the board it was voted to be approved prior to the planning board vote and they were waiting for that and for the board of health health and they had all of that information available to them and were relying on those area experts those boards that deal with these types of groundwater issues with every application they look at in addition to their peer reviewers all of whom disagreed with mr horsley and mr during with respect to the project's compliance so i just wanted to correct the record on that issue thank you i have a question for mr during um you you sort of you did just make a statement to the board that uh out made you stated that the conservation commission permit was technically not um approved prior the written permit was not sort of issued i guess prior to the planning board decision but you did omit that fact that the conservation commission did indeed vote on this prior to the planning board decision do you do you agree with what was just presented i i appreciate uh jonathan's presentation i was looking at the uh concom uh opinion that he had attached to his letter and i saw the date of issuance in june 24th so i was a i was basing my comment on that i i see the minutes and the vote that that he clarified occurring in may and i i concede that point i didn't realize that it was earlier i was looking at this june date all right thank you questions from the board all right um any other public comment hearing none what i'd like to do is uh i propose to make a vote uh to close the uh public comment period and move to the deliberation period so i don't know if i need to make a motion for that is that something that i guess i can ask carolyn uh that question thank you mr chair yes you should vote if you're ready to close the public hearing there should be a vote to do so okay um i'd make a motion to close the public hearing portion of this process second all right so we get to do this by roll call since we're on zoom so um mr hirsch hi miss janice hi miss paul hi mr perry hi mr white i uh so we have closed the public um hearing portion um so my concern is that it being 9 42 uh i think it's going to be difficult to complete a uh deliberation process on this however i do want to refocus the board onto my initial uh comments that i made um i i i would propose that uh we focus the issues that we've heard tonight into the three distinct buckets that um i don't want to say buckets is not the right word the three distinct items or themes that sort of i outlined at the beginning right i think there's three elements here um is uh did the planning board make an error in their decision with respect to the application of article 16 the second one is do we believe that the approved site plan and subsequent building permit um conforms to the requirements of the planning board decision and the zoning bylaw with respect to lot coverage and there's a distinction there because the provisions of the bylaw are in a way superseded by the planning board's decision and then number three does the project that we have documents for us that is approved right now violate the setback requirements of the planning board decision in my opinion those are the three main themes that go along with what this applicant is asking us to consider and then out of that there are two two components one is the approval or denial of the building permit and then one is the i guess it's the approval or upholding of the planning board decision so i would like us to focus the deliberations really on only those three things and look for findings on those three things we can debate them and discuss them in a little more detail and i recognize and i and i i did this intentionally i may i i oversimplified these for the purposes of clarity with the board and i didn't mean to sort of any disrespect to either um the vero or um sorry to the appellant's uh attorney's memo or to the uh memo put together by um veritas i'm just looking for a way to sort of streamline and simplify the questions that are being asked of this board because it's not reasonable to think that we're going to go through and reinvestigate nine months worth of planning board process uh to come to the decision that we need to make any questions from the board on those items no i think sticking to those uh uh those outlined pieces make sense okay any other comments um so the other thing i'd like to do is i would like to uh make a motion to continue this to our next hearing and um before i make a motion and pick a um what how how confident is the board uh that we can have a uh i don't want to say speedy but a uh a review of these three points uh in a reasonable amount of time do we need to listen to any more no there's no more testimony i think there's no more testimony okay i i mean i i i can if i'm just speaking for myself i feel like i i think speedy i think i think we can have a um to the point discussion on expectations and uh as such i'm going to recommend that maybe we put this in the beginning and be able to have accountability of it in the beginning because you know that the majority of the personnel that are on attendance here today are gonna want to know the result i think we already uh promised a couple in the beginning we did we if you recall uh we had a challenge last time uh where we had actually some quite controversial items that we had to continue and we did uh assure them that we would uh we would listen to them first so uh i do appreciate that but i think it's it may be uh it may be challenging to do that i'm just basically looking for confirmation that we can uh get through this at the next hearing i i think it's important that this be dealt with uh as quickly as possible i don't want to continue uh this process unnecessarily i'm respectful of the fact that both uh the applicants and uh veritas have to uh retain counsel to sort of represent them at these um and uh i'd like to move that along as fast as possible so i'm comfortable that we can deal with this at the next meeting i just want to be sure the rest of the board is in agreement so i have a question the public hearing is closed we're now in deliberation and the suggestion is to continue this to the next monthly meeting in february as opposed to having another special meeting just on this case um you know i didn't think about that we could have another we could have another special meeting on this case just to uh just to deliberate it is just it's proven challenging to set up uh supplemental meetings based on the number of people that would be interested in attending so the reason i'm asking that again is because i believe it was justine mentioned that we had told the other two applicants who are at our last meeting that they would go first we wanted to ensure that they wouldn't be held up by this case or a similar case it would be taking well it wouldn't be a similar case this case um should this you know take a long time and i understand your hope is that it would be an expeditious discussion i think we can end up being an expeditious discussion on on this because it's just us talking at this point so just deliberation um yeah we're not going to be hearing anything from anybody else i mean i guess so the question i mean i don't want to you know belabor this unnecessarily the question is we could either set up an interim meeting prior to uh it looks like our meeting is scheduled for february 10th we could set up an interim meeting potentially february 3rd if we wanted to or we could uh stick with the 10th we on the 10th we would be starting at seven o'clock we've already set the time for the other hearings is that correct we did so we would have to set this for say 7 30 or something like that yeah that's probably not that's not realistic based on based on the types of cases we have before us in the tent i'm i'm coming around to to miss genesis perspective that perhaps it would be advantageous to have a an interim meeting if that's possible with the board
you're gonna all hate me i'm trying traveling the first week of february i'm traveling like almost all of february so you're going to hawaii again i'm not going to hawaii again i had to say it i had no no we're no we're good you did i was gonna so how about would it would it make sense at all to have the meeting on the on february start earlier on that same evening on the 10th six can we do six can you guys i i can do six if we can i would be happy uh i'd be happy to do that um uh i can double check with my wife to make sure we have coverage for swim for the kids um but that is um 6 30 if we can do it quick 6 30 and then if we like make the other ones a little a little late then that wouldn't be out right i i i guess i do just i would be open to that i would be open to that i just need to check with carolyn that that is acceptable um to change the start of the meeting time and introduce a case before i don't think the other meeting has been advertised yet i don't think it would affect the other meetings if we start earlier okay and if we if it goes to a 45 minute discussion right that's not that's not moving the other hearings significantly okay um attorney murray does that sound aida you you kind of beat me to it but yes i mean you can you can certainly start the meeting um with respect to the other two petitions that you postponed on february 10th what you can't do is start their hearings before seven o'clock because you told them um that you voted to continue their hearing to seven that's why you want to start at six we can take a recess though
you can always take a recess too if you're if it doesn't take you the full till seven o'clock okay all right so did we settle on six or 6 30 i think 6 30 to be safe okay um uh bear with me for a second um all right i would make a motion that we continue case uh zba case 2602 to february 10th at uh 6 30 p.m second uh all right by roll call uh mr hirsch hi miss jennis hi miss paul hi mr perry all right mr white i so we are all set so i i know i we didn't ask um either uh either council um about that date but i know since we've moved into the deliberation period i would assume um that at this point it does not make much difference but i'm hoping that everyone is able to uh attend should they should they want to hi mr chair thank you um i have one other question now you know we're in deliberation should there be other information coming from the public to the board what happens to that so so do we ask thank you so do we ask the office to hold anything and not disseminate it that's a question only attorney murray could answer yeah uh you could certainly instruct the office that any new materials that come in on this are simply to be held um if the office happens to forward those materials to you folks you just need to be mindful that at this point you can't take into consideration anything contained in those materials so you might want i i see anina is still out there so um you know anina could certainly advise people who want to deliver something to the office by letting them know the public hearing has been closed and so the board isn't accepting any new information um but i do realize that folks sometimes will just send an email as well but whether it's forwarded to the board or just held um by the building department um the board can't take it into consideration okay i can work with that everyone else it's important i'm okay with that yeah i don't want any more information we have a lot we have a lot of information we have more information that we've had than we have typically on a 40b case so i'm not interested in additional information at this point okay and mr white just to get it on the record i know you asked council to agree i'd just like to say you know i appreciate that the board conducted this meeting by zoom tonight that you set a special schedule for this i know we had a lot of comments in the in the first round about the concern about the work proceeding um and desire to get to a decision quickly and i just want to say you know i i have other matters pending uh including another hearing tonight that was just completely canceled because of the snow and i do appreciate that this board has gone forward that you're trying to do so in an expeditious manner and just for the record we uh consent to that next hearing on february 3rd so the february 10th pardon me so thank you for all the work that this board has done thank you um anyone have a motion move to adjourn second second
it's a couple different seconds there all right so uh i can't i can't i'm sorry seconded that but couldn't hear carolyn sorry actually vote on the motion to continue i i don't recall that you actually took a roll call vote no you're right we didn't we didn't on the motion we didn't take a roll call vote to continue oh yeah the hearing we voted to get to close it's been a long night yeah okay so a mission to continue the hearing to february 10 at 6 p.m at 6 30 p.m seconded okay um mr hirsch aye miss janice aye miss paul aye mr perry aye mr white aye um attorney murray thank you for noticing that uh it is getting late and uh i'm trying to keep track of it but no thank you for noticing that that would have been a problem um about now now yeah so i don't know who seconded that so i will do a roll call for that um mr hirsch aye miss janice aye miss paul aye mr perry aye mr white aye so we are adjourned thank you everyone for for coming tonight and thank you to um both the applicants and to veritas for uh bringing all of the individuals tonight and uh letting them letting them speak and uh we're we're we're happy to have had all of this information so thank you everyone thank you have a good evening stay safe good night you