After six months of hearings, the Manchester By-The-Sea Planning Board approved a special permit for Cell Signaling Technology at Monday night’s meeting.
“Well, that was all anti-climatic,” said CST attorney Mark Glovsky after the board voted 6-0 in favor of the special permit.
Chairman Sarah Creighton and members Sue Philbrick, Laura Tenney, Peter Morton, Gordon Brewster and, via Zoom, Chris Olney, all voted in favor of the project. Planning Board member Mary Foley was absent.
Actually, the hearing for CST started earlier than last spring. The hearing began last winter but when Planning Board Chairman Ron Mastrogiacomo died suddenly in April, CST agreed to restart the hearing after town election in May.
The project will be built in two phases. When completed it will have a 260,000 square foot laboratory, research and development facility, a 479-space parking garage and about 500 employees. It will be located at 2 Atwater Ave., just north of the Manchester Athletic Club.
The board spent about 40 minutes going over a draft of the special permit, making small adjustments and corrections.
Creighton explained that since the board’s last meeting, Marc Resnick, the town’s director of Land Management, Public Works Director Chuck Dam and Town Administrator Greg Federspiel had agreed that CST would need to pay $1.3 million for off-site improvement, specifically for a sidewalk and traffic calming elements on Atwater Avenue, construction of bicycle lanes on School Street, from Atwater Avenue to the Route 128 overpass and for structurally reinforcing the culvert on Atwater Avenue.
Those payments would be $100,000 within 30 days of the special permit being issued, and then $600,000 on or before July 1, 2025 and July 1, 2026.
Deadlines for the work on those improvements were also set.
The question of whether CST would use sodium chloride to melt ice and snow on its property and on the loop road around the project was solved when CST said they do not use sodium chloride. That was added as a condition to the special permit.
Another change to the draft will be the addition of three waivers requested by CST. The first two were requested and agreed to by the board early in the process – that the size of the parking spaces in the garage be smaller than town’s bylaw requested and the depth of soil be 4-inches rather than 6-inches for the plantings in the meadow.
The third waiver was to allow a free-standing company sign at the intersection of Atwater Avenue and the loop road. The town’s bylaws only allowed for a company sign on the side of the building. Glovsky said the sign would not be lit up.
Tenny asked about whether some of the conditions only applied during construction or if they would continue forever. The board went over several of the 19 conditions and agreed that some only applied for the construction phase of the project. But others, like the access from the CST property to the Trustees of Reservation’s “The Monoliths,” and giving the town easement to CST property to repair water and sewer lines would be granted in perpetuity.
An additional condition was added saying that prior to the beginning of construction on Phase 2 of the project, CST would meet with the Planning Board about any changes from the plan approved in the special permit.
Once all the small issues were dealt with, Creighton asked if the board wanted to wait until its next meeting when Resnick would have an edited version of the special permit to vote on the project or to vote on the special permit then and there.
The board agreed it was ready to vote.
