The Stamford Zoning Board met on June 23, 2026, at 6:32 PM, chaired by David Stein, to continue a public hearing on Application 22608 – a city-initiated zoning text amendment aimed at strengthening sustainability requirements. The amendment would mandate a minimum sustainability scorecard grade (B or C depending on zone), require solar or green roofs on new roofs over 5,000 square feet, and establish tree protection standards. The board also approved prior minutes and a separate site plan application (CSPR 1233).
The meeting adjourned after approximately one hour.
Good. I'd like to welcome everyone and call tonight's zoning board meeting to order. I'm David Stein, Chair of the Zoning Board, and it is 6 32 on June 22nd, 2026. The members of the board and the staff are holding this meeting by Zoom video conference. The public is in attendance both on video conference and I teleconference. I'd like to do a roll call of the board and the staff. Phil Morris. Jerry Bozak. Keith Walker. Here. And Peter Rustin. Sure. And for the staff, Ralph Lessing. Here. And Benita Matter. During tonight's meeting, the board's microphones will be on. The applicants' mics will be on during the public hearing for their application, which there won't be one tonight. The first part of the meeting is the public hearing during which the public will have an opportunity to speak. Each member of the public will be muted until it is your turn to speak. If you came in through Zoom, please use the raise your hand function and you will be unmuted when it is your turn to speak. If you called in on one of the telephone conference call phone numbers, please press star nine and this will raise your hand, and then press star six to only when you are called on to speak. When members of the public speak, please give us your address for the record and whether you are in favor of or opposed to the application. The board requests that members of public limits your comments to it so that everyone will have a chance to speak. The meeting is being recorded and will be posted on the board's website.gov slash zone. One announcement before we start, the two applications for 1150 Summer Street that would be the map change and the general development plan application. Those have been withdrawn by the applicant. And in order to for us to hear them, they'll have to be refiled. So they are not being heard and they're no longer active. So we have uh for tonight a public hearing continued from our meeting of June 8th, application 22608, City of Stanford Zoning Board, zoning text change. The purpose of this text amendment is to strengthen the zone relations with regard to sustainability. It would require to one, achieving a certain grade on the sustainability scorecard for certain developments, two, adding solar panels or roofs to larger newly constructed roofs, and three establishing standards for tree protection for zoning board application. This would implement several strategies and supporting actions from the city's 2035 comprehensive plan. Specifically, strategy 11 significantly expand Stanford's green infrastructure, such as street trees and bioswales, and strategy 14, improve energy efficiency in Stanford's building. So let me share my screen. Okay. Thank you again for the opportunity to present this application. I won't go through the whole presentation, but just as a little uh refresher, and as the chair has um already mentioned, there's three main goals with this application. The first one is to make the sustainability scorecard a requirement or achieving a certain uh grade on the scorecard requirement. The scorecard has been a requirement, it needs to be filled out and the rating needs to be posted, but um the new thing is that uh now you have to achieve um a B or C rating depending on which zoning district you're located in. Um the second uh um aspect of this text change is to add measures for tree protection. Um the zoning board has already been reviewing applications uh with regard uh to tree protection. Um so uh this is really formalizing a policy uh that has been in place and adding uh standards uh to those procedures. So if you recall many um uh applications that you've reviewed, you wanted to see which trees are being cut down, and you had asked applicants for uh replacing trees uh that needed to come down as part of the redevelopment, um, and it's also uh adding to other uh tree-related um zoning regulations such as the street tree planting requirement, and um the third item is that roofs over a size of five thousand square feet would need to provide either um uh a solar roof so solar panels um or a green roof. Uh a green roof is basically um a vegetated roof, and uh the uh advantages of a green roof are that they reduce the urban heat island effect, they extend the lifetime of uh roofs uh and they add insulation um to roofs. So as I said, I won't go into the details that I presented the last time. Um but um I just wanted to um add the following information. So um as uh the chair mentioned uh in its introduction. Um those measures, sustainability measures are uh things that um are in the 2035 comprehensive plan, and uh one of the items the comprehensive plan highlighted is um the urban heat island effect. So um what you see here on the map um on the left of your screen are the relative temperatures uh in Stamford, and as you can see, uh the red areas are the hotter areas and the green and blue areas the uh the cooler areas. Um, so um areas that are heavily vegetated, um, like in North Stanford and the more uh single-family suburban areas in town, uh, they tend to be cooler, um, and uh areas that have um a lot of impervious surface roofs, streets, parking lots, and so on, uh tend to be uh much hotter.