Mayor Martin J. Walsh will unveil plans today to create a “zoning czar” within the Boston Redevelopment Authority as part of a larger effort to rezone the entire city to make development better fit the needs of neighborhoods and streamline regulations.
“The goal is greater transparency and greater accountability so we don’t have over-development in the city. It really depends on what the communities are looking for,” said Walsh, noting a recent Boston Herald article about calls from at-large City Councilor Michael Flaherty and Council President Bill Linehan to revamp zoning in South Boston to alleviate a parking shortage due to a surge of new housing with limited or no vehicle spaces. “We are looking at new zoning for the city.”
Walsh, who will outline his plans in a speech today to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce at a breakfast meeting at the Westin Copley Place Hotel, said he will also announce the creation of a new chief digital officer to overhaul the city’s website to make it more integrated with social media and video feeds.
The mayor said he also intends to develop a roughly 4,000-square-foot “incubator space” for budding entrepreneurs inside the former Ferdinand Building, which the city is converting into a municipal complex, to help seed about a dozen startups and “allow us to do something along the lines of MassChallange.”
Walsh said the thrust of his speech, in line with his “Boston is Open For Business” theme, will be about his vision of how the city can better work with the business sector.
“It’s really about setting the tone for the relationship we want to have with the business community, the old-school businesses and the high-tech community,” Walsh told the Herald yesterday. “Rather than waiting for businesses to come to City Hall, we will go to the businesses.”
The mayor said his new “senior adviser for regulatory reform,” or “zoning czar” as he dubbed the position, will be “charged with making sure our regulations facilitate rather than hold up business growth.”
Although on the campaign trail Walsh called for the dismantling of the BRA, his speech will highlight that under his watch the authority has approved $2 billion in new developments, more than during the same period last year.
Walsh told the Herald last week that part of his focus on rezoning the city will be to streamline permitting to meet his goal of having more projects permitted within 20 days, and to meet the demands of specific neighborhood districts
“There have been a lot of neighborhoods that have a lot of concerns about the way zoning has happened in the past,” Walsh said.