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Agenda ItemsApplications & Petitions

APP 2023-11

A citizens’ petition to amend the Zoning Ordinance

Zoning petitionfiled by residentsMGL c.40A §5
How it started
Mar 20, 2023 · Filed by Charles Jessup Franklin and fellow residents: state law (MGL c.40A §5) lets ten registered voters put a proposed zoning change before the Council, which must process it on statutory clocks.
What happened
Mar 20, 2023 · ↪ Referred, 8–0. Sent to the Ordinance Committee and Planning Board, as §5 requires. (Referred to committee · one voted present) The Planning Board held its hearing May 16; the Ordinance Committee heard it May 24.

Voted yes (8)

  • Burhan Azeem
  • Alanna Mallon
  • Marc McGovern
  • Patty Nolan
  • E. Denise Simmons
  • Paul F. Toner
  • Quinton Zondervan
  • Sumbul Siddiqui

Voted present (1)

  • Dennis Carlone
Roll call of Mar 20, 2023 · from the council’s minutes · photos: City of Cambridge
What’s next
No action taken: the city’s own zoning tracker lists this among past amendments not adopted. Under MGL c.40A §5, a petition the Council does not adopt within 90 days of its hearing lapses; adoption would have needed a two-thirds vote (6 of 9).
Referred to committee, 8–0Mar 20, 2023
Heard in committeeOrdinance CommitteeMay 24, 2023

The item's path through the council, every recorded step. How the request pipeline works

The document the petition text · 22 pages
Amendment documents are shown only as the original PDF: the proposal’s meaning lives in its markup (struck-through deletions and underlined insertions), which a text rendering can’t carry. (A searchable OCR text layer exists behind the full reader view; treat it as search-and-skim only.)
🗓 The meeting where this was taken up: Mar 20, 2023