With the turn of the month, the city meeting calendar is getting busy again. This coming week has a bunch of meetings happening. Here are a few that I will be trying to keep an eye on…
Monday - Community Development Block Grant Public Hearing
This one is on Monday, March 4 at 5:00 PM at city hall and on Zoom. It’s a public hearing to take public comment on the items included in Greenfield’s 2024 Mini-Entitlement Program application:
- Housing Rehabilitation Program ($200,000)
- Microenterprise Assistance Program ($112,500)
- Water Mains Replacement Design and Engineering ($150,000)
- Public Social Services funding for the Center for Human Development, Center for New Americans, Community Legal Aid, Stone Soup Café, and the Wildflower Alliance ($185,000 total)
Also providing updates on previous years' CDBG activities.
Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) are federally funded grants given out to Massachusetts cities and town to “meet a broad range of community development needs in housing, infrastructure, revitalization, economic development and public social services.”
Tuesday - City Council Committee Chairs
Tuesday, March 5 at 6:00 PM, also happening at city hall and on Zoom.
This the meeting where the president of the City Council and all the chairs of the committees decide the committee meeting agendas for the month ahead.
The list for this one is pretty long, so I’d suggest looking at the meeting notice for the details.
Wednesday - Planning Board
The Greenfield Planning Board will be meeting on at 6:00 PM on Wednesday, March 6 at city hall and on Zoom
On the agenda for this one:
- Public hearing on several proposed zoning amendments:
- amend the definitions of “Farm, Poultry” and “Dwelling, Three-Family”
- amend Section 200-55, Marijuana Establishments; to amend Section 200-34, Sign regulations
- amend Section 200-21, Water Supply Protection District (WP)
- amend Section 200-50B1), Major Development Review; of the Zoning Ordinance.
- A site plan review for the Starbucks going into the current Friendly’s location across from Big Y off the traffic circle
- Planning Board discussion and deliberation on the proposed zoning amendments listed above
Given the recent (and ongoing) fooferah about the Aldi’s already being planed to go in across from Big Y, I could imagine the discussion around this new Starbucks to be somewhat contentious.
I’m hoping to be able to attend or watch at least some of each of these meetings; if so, I’ll be posting about that them live at greenfield.social and you can follow along there. If I’m not able to watch any or all of the meetings live, I’ll catch them when they hit GCTV’s YouTube feed and watch them there.
Either way, expect a summary post for each of these meetings on this site within a few days after the meeting takes place.
There are a couple other meetings happening this week that I’m not going to be able to cover, as I’m just one guy. 😁
As an aside, I do appreciate the city is conducting all of these meetings in a hybrid format and providing Zoom links for each one. That really makes my job a lot easier and (more importantly) I think it is much better for public accessibility as well.