Letter: Southborough must do better for businesses

[Ed note: My Southborough accepts signed letters to the editor submitted by Southborough residents. Letters may be emailed to mysouthborough@gmail.com.

The following “Open letter to the Town of Southborough” is from Julie Connelly.]

To the Editor:

Eleven years ago, seeking to contribute to the wonderful town where I was growing my family, I joined the newly formed Economic Development Committee, with the goal of supporting businesses and amenities to both enrich our Town and help stabilize the residential tax burden. Chris Robbins, the founder of the EDC, said something that I didn’t fully understand at the time: “Southborough has a reputation for being unfriendly to businesses”. Unfortunately, more than a decade later, his words ring truer than ever.

Stronger Uprising, an independently owned gym, opened and operated with great effort and care on Route 9 in 2019. The two owners weathered the Covid storm and through consistency and hard work built a successful business with 200 members, including over 100 residents of Southborough. “Stronger” became not just a gym, but a source of community where residents met, worked our bodies, built connections, and forged relationships. The owners were committed to becoming part of the Southborough community, participating in local events like Story Bridge and sponsoring the Gobble Wobble. Stronger thrived, and so did its members. As gym’s lease term came to an end, the owners were committed to staying in Southborough hoping to find a larger space to meet their growing needs. Cue the Town and its systemically horrific zoning laws, processes, and sprinkle in a dose of disengaged property owners, and here we are, with our beloved gym opening its doors at its new location – in Westborough.

The owners started their search for a new location more than a year ago. They visited sites, signed a lease in what was advertised as a commercial space on Route 9, and sat back and waited for the landlord to complete its promised work in accordance with their deal. One month before their scheduled move date, the owners realized the Landlord’s work had not started. The prominent local property owner, who now lives in Florida, became nonresponsive. Finally, with just weeks to spare, the Stronger owners learned that they could not move into the ground floor of an office building on Rte. 9 because the property was zoned for “Residential” use only. On Route 9. At the base of an office building. You literally can’t make this up.

On the verge of losing their livelihood, the Stronger owners reached out to the Town. The weeks that followed were chaotic, confusing, and largely unhelpful. A desperate effort to find a different location in Southborough ensued, and ultimately failed. As I watched the play-by-play unfold in real time, Chris Robbins’ words rang in my head: “Southborough is not business friendly”.

In my view, the failure is multi-pronged. Some parts were controllable and others were not. Some can be fixed relatively easily and some will take much longer term efforts. But the starkness between the several week period which the Stronger owners bent over backwards to try to stay in Southborough, and the ease of which, within about a week’s time, they secured a move-in-ready space in neighboring Westborough could not be more blatant. That is to say, it doesn’t have to be this way, but we just choose not to make it better. And while this example is top of mind for me now, it is not an anomaly – I could provide so many examples – a home grown artist, a chef looking to start a catering business – who could not make vacant space work for them in Southborough.

The real underlying issue is that the Town zoning bylaws that govern Southborough and Rte. 9 in particular are absolute garbage. They are an antiquated patchwork that are not at all conducive to this century, or frankly probably to last century. Zoning laws are made of two parts – first the “map” that tells us what types of uses are allowed where, and second, the language that dictates what approvals are needed and what the process for obtaining the approvals entails to construct and use a particular property. Our bylaws fail miserably on both parts, and make it unnecessarily difficult to use property on Rte. 9 in Southborough. For example, one of the many hurdles Stronger owners ran into was that a separate permit (over and above construction, use, and building permits) is needed to allow for two different (but each allowed) uses on the same parcel. For a developer or tenant, this additional hurdle adds financial burdens, extends timelines, and makes it riskier to bring a project forward. The Town needs to ask itself serious questions about the process and determine what benefits it derives from adding steps such as this. The laws are so convoluted that the owner of the property that Stronger originally planned to move to did not know that a gym was not a permitted use in the space (although he probably should have).

The zoning bylaw needs to be changed on Rte. 9, but I’m not optimistic. I’m not optimistic because as a member of the Economic Development Committee, we, in collaboration with the Select Board and Planning Board, spent more than 3 years trying to make very minor changes to about a 1/4 mile stretch on Main Street to allow for basic things such as mixed use and limited “by right” zoning uses to reduce hurdles for certain types of businesses that multiple surveys have shown are the types of businesses residents want. The Town’s Planning Board, which is the elected body with responsibility for zoning bylaws, fought our efforts each step of the way. We worked together, made compromises to help get everyone comfortable, and they ultimately voted against it, against us and our multi-year effort. I am so grateful that our community came together to vote 70% in favor of accepting the revised zoning for the Downtown anyway, but it is frustrating that the Board responsible for “Planning” has been a barrier to just that.

Periodically the Town is required to create a “Master Plan”. Huge amounts of resources go into this effort. Revising Zoning on Rte. 9 has been part of the Town’s Master Plan for decades, with zero progress. We again revised the Master Plan in 2022, and again added revising Rte. 9 zoning as a goal. This is foundational to improving our business ecosystem, fulfilling our mandates for affordable housing, and filling vacant space to help offset the tax burden on residents. We need people on the Planning Board and other town leaders and employees who will support this effort proactively.

And while our boards, committees, and town hall employees are hamstrung by the current zoning laws, the image of Southborough being unfriendly to businesses is compounded by poor communication, finger pointing, and condescending tones toward business owners. For years I have attended Planning Board meetings where I’ve felt actual embarrassment at how proponents of projects were treated and spoken to. When the Stronger owners tried to navigate the complex system in an attempt to remain in Southborough, they were sent on a circular chase from one department or official, and back again. They were met with conflicting information and finger pointing, and were told by representatives of some departments that other departments were wrong. At one point they were told they didn’t have the right permits to operate in the space they’d been operating in for 5 years, even though they had gone through all of the proper channels and received all of the required permits. At the end of the day, I think the town officials who responded were well meaning ultimately and could not have made it happen for Stronger because they were limited by the current laws. However, the experience from the business owners’ perspective was at best confusing and disorganized, at worst condescending, but either way, a huge failure. And while I’m particularly frustrated by this particular experience, it is not new or unique – even within the past year I can think of multiple examples of local residents, artists and chefs, our neighbors and friends, who have struggled mightily to secure space in Southborough due to our unworkable zoning laws and unnecessarily complicated process.

So what can we, as residents, do? We first need to recognize that zoning on Rte. 9 is one of the primary problems of our community. It is hard, it is boring, but it is fundamental. We will continue to lose businesses and amenities, our taxes will continue to go up, and our desirability as a place to live will go down if we don’t decide to change. It is possible, and our peer towns have figured it out, so we can, too. We need people on the Planning Board who are willing to engage in big picture, long-term planning. This is a hard job, and as ineffectively as I think it has been done, I also respect that these are volunteers, and zoning is difficult, detailed, and very time intensive. In this upcoming election, there are no challengers to the Planning Board incumbent (acknowledging that I’m one of many people who didn’t choose to step up and run, because it’s a difficult and time intensive position). We also must collectively become more involved in our local government. Town elections are coming up on May 14th. Historically, only about 10% of residents even come out to vote in town-only elections, which is reflective of our overall disengagement in local affairs. Until we collectively check in and promote change, we’ll continue to operate reactively and will not follow through on long term planning efforts.

When I was on the EDC and working on Downtown zoning, we released a survey asking residents what they wanted to see in Southborough. Unsurprisingly, there was overwhelming support for restaurants, coffee shops, gyms, small scale retail, mixed use, walkability, housing diversity, and green space. We’re in agreement on this, but our zoning bylaws do not align with our vision – in fact, they actively inhibit it. Until the bylaws are changed, nothing else will in any meaningful way. Until we collectively decide to put pressure on our Town, to step up, be informed, engage, and vote, then the bylaws won’t change. Until then, thank you Stronger Uprising for all you have done for Southborough, I am so sorry we were not able to reciprocate the positivity you have given to our community over the past 5 years. We know you will be successful in Westborough and we hope to be able to woo you back someday.

Julie Connelly
26 Granuaile Road