The Providence City Council’s Ordinances Committee approved an amended version of the city’s comprehensive plan on Monday. A comprehensive plan lasts for 10 years and determines what can be built, where. In recent weeks, the committee revised the plan to include more stringent measures to fight against climate change and pollution, but removed some of the strongest language last week after Mayor Brett Smiley threatened to veto the plan.
The result is a new comprehensive plan with softer pollution measures in the city’s industrial districts, which drew the ire of many activists in the room during the Oct. 21 meeting.
Julian Drix chairs the city’s sustainability committee, which he has sat on for about five years. He says the new measures are a step in the right direction but do not go far enough.
“It’s a complicated, mixed bag. I wouldn’t say that I necessarily oppose all of it,” Drix said, adding that he found developments in the last few weeks “confusing.”
Previously the committee amended the comprehensive plan to prohibit a laundry list of specific polluters in the zoning district that includes the Port of Providence, some of which are known to cause conditions like asthma – a common complaint of residents in nearby neighborhoods like Washington Park.
The old language would have prohibited new developments of electric power plants that burn fossil fuels, scrap metal recycling facilities, fossil fuels storage facilities, fossil fuel refineries, medical waste incinerators, cement and concrete processing facilities, gas stations, combustors, landfills, and numerous other industrial activities.
The newly approved language now prohibits only three specific uses: “power generation plants dependent on the combustion of fossil fuels or via processes that produce emissions at levels that are established to impact public health, noxious or toxic chemical manufacturing, and ethylene oxide manufacturing and storage facilities.”
“It really takes the teeth out of it and makes it much more uncertain,” said Drix. “So it really kind of just pushes the fight down the road.”
The document also leaves some additional future prohibited uses open to possible interpretation. Deputy planning director Bob Azar agreed that some of the new language will be more difficult to translate into binding zoning laws, for which the comprehensive plan forms the basis.
“I think language around industrial uses will probably take some time,” said Azar.
The plan now heads to the full City Council for approval, and then to the mayor’s desk. Many city council members not on the committee have sat in on recent meetings and voiced their opinions, and are not expected to block the plan’s approval now. According to council member John Goncalves, Mayor Brett Smiley worked with the council on the newly added language.
The zoning laws that will be written based on the plan will be debated and voted on in public meetings, which means the contentious discussions over the future of the Port of Providence and other industrial zones are likely to continue.
Azar estimates it may take until July to see what the final rules around industrial zones will be, though he says he is happy with the plan in its current form.
“I’m feeling good. I feel like after two years of hard work, we got a win tonight,” he said.
