On Jan. 5, the Greenfield Planning Board voted 4-1 to oppose sweeping changes to the French King entryway zone. Here’s why they were right:
The purpose of this overlay zone was to create “an attractive entryway into Greenfield, to minimize strip development, and traffic congestion, and to promote high quality building and site design.” A lot of town councilors worked on the original plan, and they had a vision of trying to prevent Route 2A from looking like so many other state roads lined with fast-food joints and self-serve gas pumps. They wanted to give the Planning Board the tools they needed to create “high quality” design.
The underlying zoning in this area is General Commercial, and has been for 11 years. The only new uses allowed by the current amendment would be gas stations and drive-thru restaurants. If we remove the entire French King Highway from the corridor protections, all design tools are gone. If you want to see what the French King strip development would look like, the westside rotary is Exhibit No. 1.
The overlay zone came with “design guidelines” to keep buildings in scale, and avoid long windowless walls. Greenfield was actually doing land use planning on that corridor — but this new proposal turns the clock back 25 years as if we had no Master Plan or Open Space Plan.
Many of the residential homeowners who live along the French King were not consulted about this proposal. What they call home, someone else calls an McRestaurant location.
No Master Plan or any planning document in the past two decades has recommended deleting the French King overlay zone. This zoning amendment is incompatible with the Town’s 2012 Open Space Plan, which calls for “protecting open space” and “promotimg the creation of ‘green space’ along public ways.” The entire Canada Hill Area, which includes the Ceruzzi parcel, is designated on a 2012 town map as one of four “scenic areas” in Greenfield, and a “priority habitat.”
One of the goals of the Greenfield 2003 Downtown Master Plan was to “improve the mix of downtown attractions with new restaurants, entertainment venues, improved retail…” and to “create a stronger focus at the heart of downtown.” Adding retail and gas stations at the edge of our highways only draws energy and spending away from our core downtown district. When it comes to the downtown, we keep undermining our own plans.
In 2005, the French King was “downzoned” from industrial to commercial. We say we want high paying manufacturing jobs — then we fill up what land we have with retail clutter, creating what one writer called “the Geography of Nowhere,” with every town having the same lineup of national brand stores and restaurants. Minimum wage jobs are already a significant portion of our local economy. Financially for the town, it would make more sense to rezone the French King back to industrial.
We have been told that our retail base is weak. But the assessed value of Greenfield’s commercial property, divided by its population is greater than Northampton or Amherst. We hear people moaning about sales “leakage,” but in 2017, the biggest leakage will be from online shopping. Our “manufacturing leakage” has had a far worse impact on our bottom line than retail migration.
The elephant on the French King Highway is the proposed 135,000-square-foot big box store — more than twice the size of Stop & Shop. If approved, the French King will become one of the most heavily trafficked arteries in Greenfield. There will be secondary growth on that road, and without the overlay, there will be no design vision and few controls.
If a Wal-Mart is built, there will be three stop lights between Silver Street and Route 2. This traffic will push drivers back onto Federal Street — which will be a quicker way to Route 2 than via the French King. Streets like Wildwood and Silver will bear the brunt of this change, as will High Street and Federal Street.
We have been told that adding gas stations and drive-thru restaurants on the French King will somehow “ease up” traffic congestion on Federal St. But according to the traffic engineers working on the Ceruzzi project, High Street (2A) carried 10,300 vehicles per weekday in 2010. They projected that 31 percent of the additional car trips coming to and from their French King box would travel along High Street. That’s 3,050 additional vehicle trips on a typical Saturday.
All the cut-through streets from Wildwood on the north, to Beacon and Maple Streets on the south, will see added congestion. Every traffic jam you have ever sat through was brought to by a traffic engineer who promised an outstanding level of service. Any responsible proposal to delete the French King development protections should first study what a build out of commercial lots would mean to traffic flow and intersection delays.
This proposal has been “seat of the pants,” a disconnected idea that relates back to nothing this town has planned for in the past. The Town Council said it has been working on this since September. When I went to the first public hearing on this plan just before Christmas, there were a total of four residents in the room — all of them people I had invited that day.
We have a rich history in Greenfield of preparing carefully laid plans — and then ignoring them. This French King proposal feels like an opportunistic leap to cram in more development, inharmonious with town planning goals, hatched in relative obscurity, and now generating more heat than light.
Let’s welcome travelers into our small town without hammering them immediately with drive-thru fast food signage and garishly lit gasoline islands. First impressions do matter. If they manage to get downtown, we can definitely offer them a good meal and some arts and entertainment. Maybe they will even want to come back.
Al Norman, known nationally as a “sprawlbuster” consultant against Wal-Mart and other big box developments, has lived in Greenfield for the past 37 years.