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In July 2025, Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn derailed the citywide rezoning effort when she sent a letter to the chair of the Community Development Board, ordering her to extend public hearings for zoning amendments they were considering until the Fall, after the November elections, followed by a misinformation-laden robocall to the city about these items. Then, a month before the election, she gave council a further ultimatum via press release to change an intersection at Salem and Park from four stories to three, or else she would not renew the contract of the consultants helping us in this process.
The majority of pro-rezoning council candidates soundly won at which point the mayor renewed the contract.
On Wednesday, in yet another example of this pattern, the mayor announced, via another press release, that she would veto just one part of the new Boston Avenue rezoning package: city council decided, in a 4-3 vote, that purpose-built student housing could be built by right rather than special permit in one section of land on the north end of Boston Ave. Mayors can only veto legislative packages as a whole, not particular line items, so this likely means that she just vetoed the whole Boston Ave. rezoning package.
I motioned for the amendment because council and the CDB spent a long, long time debating the definition of purpose-built student housing — which, again, only applies in the small area around the Whole Foods and the 200 Boston Ave. building — and Medford’s city government has a history of being difficult to work with, so one less administrative hurdle to help us address the housing crisis seemed reasonable to me. In our joint meetings with the CDB, we never really discussed whether it should be by right or by special permit, and the CDB debated this itself at their September 2nd meeting. Reasonable people can disagree on this; having a special permit approval process for, say, banks in Medford Square (which council approved last March) makes sense because refusing a bank to be built in one particular location makes sense if we have too many banks. But this is a small parcel with a very stringent definition for a use we do not currently have. It already goes to the CDB for site plan review, and I didn’t see the reason for arbitrarily refusing something be built there if it followed the zoning that we so carefully wrote.
This move from the mayor bugged me enough to write about it directly because it’s not really about the zoning. It's a political jab. I hate the use of the city of Medford’s communications system to take political jabs, because it drags everyone down and makes the work of local government unserious, and I dealt with the consequences of this during the last election. Things aren’t great between the mayor and city council right now, and they never really are post-budget season. But this move not only disrespects the legislative process by saying that a board unilaterally appointed by one individual has more of a right to make decisions about our laws than a legislative body elected by thousands of residents and accountable to them every two years — it jeopardizes the rezoning initiative, which is the best opportunity Medford has to address its shrinking budget and infrastructure and to bring long-term revitalization to our community.
If the mayor's concern is protecting neighbors, her veto does the opposite. It throws out the protections that residents fought for, all to block one procedural change for one potential use in one subdistrict.
Thank you,
City Councilor Matt Leming – Medford
Chair of the City Council Planning and Permitting Committee
