A FRESH PERSPECTIVE: Read what a smart outsider has to say about the Waubeeka zoning proposal

(Posted by Bill Densmore)
On Friday, while visiting at my mother's house in Worcester, I shared the "Unofficial Voters Guide" document with a smart Worcester friend in his 70s who has spent most of his career in health care, but at one point in his life was in real-estate sales for a year or so -- in Britain.  I asked him after he had read the guide, and with no additional information from me, to describe the situation as he understood it.  This is what he said: 

Somebody has a special interest, the seem to want to avoid the normal procedure, which is going through the planning board. Because the citizenry needs the information from the planning board to be able to evaluate it -- and this is completely bypassing what would normally be a town procedure for a project, especially one that is reasonably large.

My other concern is the 67 acres bordering the golf course which is wetlands.  That wetlands would probably be threatened by the development.

It almost seems like they are in a hurry. Usually it is marry in haste and repent in leisure.  Whenever they do shortcuts there is somebody on the inside who is going to make quite a bit a money and it is just a matter of looking at who benefits from this, and I don't think it is going to be the citizenry.
The charm of a town like that is they don't have these big, almost semi-convention centers.
I did commercial real estate many years ago so I know how developers work. You can do a lot of damage changing zoning and you might not expect it. You may not see down the road, you can look at the way the zoning was as say it has worked this way for 50-100 years, why risk changing it?