Planning Board - Regular Meeting

Good evening. Welcome to the Monday, May 18th, 2026 meeting of the Grafton Planning Board. Everyone who's participating, all the members and the planner are here.

so we don't need to do a roll call I think that's all we need to do before the next item though I want to say hello and welcome to our new planner introduce yourself to the

Well, the world. Thank you, Chairman. My name is Christian D'Amelio. I'm glad to be here as the new Director of Planning. I know I have some big shoes to fill. I've been spending, starting Monday, I've been spending time going through the notes that was left for me. There's a lot of projects going on, so it takes some time to get up to speed, but excited to be here, meet you all in person, and to work with you all moving forward.

Welcome. Welcome. Okay, the First item on the agenda is public input. This is where if somebody has something to say to us that is within our purview and is not otherwise on the agenda, this is your chance. Raise your hand out there on the Internet. There's no one in the room. Anybody up here have anything? Apparently not. I guess we move right on. First item of action items, a decision on request for site plan approval at 18 Shrewsbury Street. We have a draft decision. That's closed, right?

I think every... Yeah, I think the draft decision is complete and up-to-date to my knowledge.

Okay. Tell us about... The draft decision, anything that we need to know that you know?

The draft decision, the only specific other than the standard conditions was to address ZBO section 3.3.3.4 that is in there, which has to do with the setback on, not the setback, where the the 10 foot buffer zone based off of where the parking lot was set. So just to make sure that complies in the final construction.

Let's see. Any questions about it? Any concerns?

Apparently, no. I will offer a motion to approve the decision as drafted. Second.

Moved and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? So voted unanimously. The second item is a draft decision on a request for special permit 2026-03 and site plan approval at 135 Westboro Road, Takiara, Acapulcos, Mexican food. Now there's a little something, a little discussion about that, isn't there?

Oh, Natalia has her hand raised. Did you have something, Natalia? Yeah, Natalia?

Your hand? You're on mute. Earth and Natalia.

Sorry. This is the one that you want to ask Ray to step on board.

Yes, the chair should designate Raid. Yeah. Having signed to Mullen, Raid should be designated to vote.

Yeah, that's what I just did. He's named to act in the absence of a fifth member or even a fourth member.

For that special permit, the discussion in the last meeting was about some corrections to the site plan that would be conditioned as part of the approval, so that should be provided, or I think exactly what the board wants to see from that based on the condition could be determined, but it has to do with the placement of the food truck on the site plan was incorrect from the discussion. Also, what it seemed to me was that there were some changes in the the maximum number of employees per shift. The previous site plan had one listed. The discussion from the applicant was that there would be three. Also, there was an inaccuracy on the uses of the site based on the site plan. So that was where the discussion came. That's addressed in the conditions.

You feel that all those bases are covered in the decision, in the conditions. In the conditions, yes, but... Because, like, I was the one who, again, complained, as I did, whatever, a couple years ago, about the use on where Nikos is. We need, we should insist on having a plan that shows all that correctly, and should we hold off until we have a plan? or should we somehow just say tweak the decision after we vote?

Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. I would just say, I think from the email that we saw, it addressed all the conditions, and I think the gentleman that came in was just kind of using an old drawing, right? So if we've listed out all the things they have to submit under condition, I'd be okay with approving it on condition.

I didn't have time to read real thoroughly. Things have been going on with us. Are those bases covered in the most recent? Is getting a correct plan covered so that?

In the condition?

Yeah.

It is in the condition that needs to be corrected. I couldn't.

Yes. I looked at all the brightly colored parts.

Yes, condition A-20. No occupancy permit shall be issued for the site until the applicant provides a corrected parking plan that accurately reflects the location of the food truck and the total number of parking spaces it occupies, the location and total number of spaces assigned to the food truck and food preparation facility, and the correct use types for all current business uses on the site. So I think that covers all the issues that we discussed at the last meeting.

I was interested that you said that the food truck and the, whatever, the commissary are a restaurant. I've been wondering, we have at least one other sort of, well, it's not really a food truck. It's parked permanently down by a, At Lakefield Plaza. Yep, the plaza, yeah. Never quite understood how they fit into the laws.

In the previous approval, when the food truck appeared on the last site plan, the findings from the previous planner in consultation with other departments was that it would be classified as a restaurant. That's where that came from. Yeah. Well, okay.

I don't know how the other place you're talking about, Bob. I'm not sure where that fits in the permitting picture.

I've asked that ever since it appeared. I've never gotten a good answer. And it seemed to be very popular today. As I went by, they were beginning that parking situation over there. So... Is there any other discussion before we... I just have a question as to where it says applicant owner.

Is the owner of the food truck the current owner of the building and property?

No. They're a tenant. The applicant, but the owner is a signer of the application as well.

So the owner signed the application.

There's a portion of the application where the applicant signs and then the owner of the site also signs. Yeah.

Okay. Because that piece of property just was just sold at auction.

Was it actually sold? I keep seeing people talk about that. It was supposed to be sold at auction. It was sold?

I don't know.

Okay. The owner of record for the application is... who it was at the time.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Anything else? That hearing is closed, right? Yes, we closed the hearing. All right, so we need a motion.

So I will move the board... How do we usually do it? Well, once upon a time we used to vote on findings individually, but here I'll just... We've been getting motions, basically everything that's in the draft decision. Yeah, so we find favorable findings and grant the requested waivers and grant the special permit site plan approval with the conditions all as drafted.

And special permit and site plan, I think.

Yep.

Was that a second? Second. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? So voted for zero. And C, draft decision, request for a project plan review, One Ridge Road, trustees of Tufts College. PPR 2026-01.

I did not have any specific notes on this one. I know there was a comprehensive presentation at the last hearing. If there's any, Natalia, you have something on this one?

No, I was just going to say the template was based on all previous Tufts project decisions. Also, Wayne had input on his findings and was very helpful. So basically, it's the same as previous decisions, just based exactly like that. Okay.

Anybody have anything else? I had no comments or questions about the draft decision. In that case, we can have a motion. I will move that the board grant this project, approve this project plan with the decision as drafted.

Second. Moved and seconded. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? So voted unanimously.

Mr. Chairman? Yes. Wayne Bellick, Lane Design Collaborative. I want to thank you folks once again for everything you're doing. Obviously your commitment to the town and working with us on this project. It's been a pleasure, and I look forward to doing more work in town and more work at Tufts. And I wanted to take the opportunity to welcome Christian on board. I'm going to be stopping by this week for a pre-construction meeting with town staff. I'll be sure to stop in and say hello to Christian as well. So thanks, Mr. Chairman, and the rest of the board, and have a great night.

Thank you. You too. Good luck.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Okay. All right. Bills.

Move the board authorize the payment of the bills.

Second. Moved and seconded. Discussion? Hearing none, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? So voted unanimously. Minutes of previous meetings.

Yes, we actually have minutes of March 9th. I reviewed the minutes and have no suggested changes or edits. Give a motion. I will move. That way the board approve. The minutes of March 9th, 2026 as drafted with any corrections that might be noted during discussion of the motion. Second.

Moved and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor? Aye. Opposed? So voted unanimously. Staff report.

Staff report.

Hello.

I have a couple quick bullet points based off of last week. Like I mentioned, I have some great notes I'm going through to pick up on. So there's a number of projects underway under construction and going through the permitting phase. There's some long-range planning projects that are in the pipeline and underway. So I have my work cut out, but Natalia has been a great help in getting me up to speed. So over the next couple of weeks, I'll be reaching out to the contacts I have listed and getting up to speed in the middle of all those projects. The next thing Natalia had pointed out to me, there has been some continued request for payments to applicants that are fraudulent. I think that has been going on for a little bit. There's been notifications on that. It's winding down a little bit, but it's picked up again recently. Natalia, you may have some more input on that.

Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that while we have a public meeting that it's put out there again so that if anybody's listening, they're aware that apparently it's started up again. Hopefully this is an unusual thing and it'll stop, but we had a nice span where there were no applicants being contacted for extra cash and the police department is aware of it and each one that we get we have them forwarded to the police department so they can hopefully eventually put an end to it totally yeah and just to be clear to tell you this is an email that people are typically getting or how are they getting notes yes they're getting invoices that look very good if people aren't, you know, on their toes, the email looks pretty, you know, the return address looks pretty good. The main thing is, is that they are not asking for checks or credit card payments like we usually do. They're asking for wired transfers.

The first blue.

Anything else on that? Yes. So, For anybody who is listening, if you happen to get what looks like an invoice from the Town of Grafton, in the context of this meeting, it's from the Town of Grafton Planning Department, and you may or may not currently be an applicant, but I think they get a lot of these from current and previous applicants. They dig out the information from all the applications we have online, but if you ever get one of these invoices, be suspicious.

always reach out to myself and Natalia and we'll confirm if you're not sure. The last thing is we did send out a notification on the Planning Department Facebook page, Planning Conservation Department, about the CMRPC Vision Zero survey. So that's out the regional Vision Zero plan. Any comments can be submitted through the survey. and that is a plan, a national best practice, Vision Zero, to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries on the roadways. That's all I have.

Anything else with all of that? Correspondence. Okay. I sort of cross over between correspondence and reports from... our representatives on town committees and from CMRPC. I did a webinar that through CMRPC this last week, the card deck or whatever you call it, that went with it, the presentation was uploaded to correspondence for us. It's about data center siting, issues for local communities. Apparently a lot of towns are getting pretty worried about data centers. They tend to be big, they tend to use a lot of power, take land that may or may not, who knows how they do in terms of local revenue. I just wanted to let everybody be sure that they were aware of this and look at it as much as you might. It was a pretty good presentation. So take a look if you can and keep your eyes open. Keep thinking about it. There are one or two other things floating around that may come by before too long. Anybody?

One element of that was the I wish I had remembered to go and participate in that, but it's good to see the presentation materials afterwards. The town of Mansfield has been, I don't remember just off the top of my head where they're at with it, but they're working on a zoning bylaw to regulate data centers within the town. Although off the top of my head, nothing comes to mind as a likely prospective location for a data center here in Grafton, but you never know. And so that's something that we will probably want to give some thought to at some point.

Well, I was thinking that we ought to at least give a little thought to where that use would fit in our zoning. Because then we can analyze little more whether there are that would fall in the industrial zone because of the size of the building yeah well yeah there's anyway yeah maybe be as careful as we can about understanding what powers we may or may not have They have cooling. Besides power, there's cooling. And they like water. And they like free-flowing water, if at all possible. Now, if we could pull the water out from behind the Burger King site, we could... Maybe that could... Never mind. There's also... No, the huge data centers, and then there are the not so big data centers. And there's the decommissioning question. Some people apparently, you know, the chips change every year, right? They get smaller. And so they take less room and they take less power. Well, maybe they take less power. Or you can cram more of them into the same space. cram more of them into the same space but some people at least were afraid I don't know how valid the fear is that companies might find it best to just abandon a data center and leave it for someone else to be a problem for someone else so that's another thing that's another piece of this uh that we ought to be thinking about we we do normally have decommissioning for solar fields and we might see what what we can do or what we should change so that we can do i'm not sure whether we have a I'm not sure how much power we have until it comes to it. We have special permit, which is almost surely gonna come into the picture. But you can't just say no, because I don't want one.

But nobody can argue that data centers should be classified along with solar and battery under Chapter 48 Section 3. which has been an issue for a lot of communities that are trying to regulate solar and battery power.

Yeah, which are, well, we haven't had too much trouble with that, but keep it in mind. Watch out for all those things. All right, anything else on correspondence? Any other reports from representatives on town committees? I have nothing. Nothing. I'm on almost every special committee up at CMRPC. We're doing bylaws. I'm trying to capture from them AI policy and so on. So anyway, fortunately, most of that's done from home. Okay. Nothing else from all of that. There's nothing else, as far as I know, that can lawfully come before us. So we don't need to extend the meeting. I think I will move to adjourn. Second. Moved and seconded. As far as I'm concerned, it's not debatable. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Opposed? So voted.