September 28, 2022
The long fight over a digital billboard conversion in the parking lot of Boston Bowl on Morrissey Boulevard looks to have cleared the lane and the pins are falling in the direction of the project’s proponents.
While MassDOT officials said on Tuesday that no decision had been made on the permitting of the digital billboard conversion, Administrative Law Judge Al Caldarelli ruled last week that the conversion should be approved, given that another billboard on Tenean Street will be removed.
In January, the switch was denied by the state Office of Outdoor Advertising (OOA) due to the board being too close to the one on Tenean Street. Boston Bowl owners appealed the ruling, and in the interim, the owner of the Tenean Street billboard agreed to take it down.
Said Caldarelli in his ruling “The surrender of those permits will resolve the spacing violation that currently exists with respect to the sign at 820 Morrissey Blvd., thereby removing its non-conforming status.
“Assuming no other issues of non-compliance have been identified, upon surrender of permits and removal of the sign located at 65 Tenean Street, there will no longer be any impediment to granting the permits to convert the static billboard…to an electronic sign.”
The issue was remanded to OOA for the final decision, which is expected to be an approval any day now.
Port Norfolk’s Maria Lyons led a group of residents from Dorchester who tried unsuccessfully to intervene in the case and had concerns about the billboard’s proximity to Tenean Beach and the forthcoming Neponset Greenway. She said they were discouraged those arguments were not reconsidered.
The judge “would not even consider the factual evidence in the MassDOT file that it is in within 300 feet of Neponset River Reservation…or the Greenway, making it against state regulations,” she said. “Bay Colony was allowed to update their digital billboard request, with no public input, but we were not allowed to add any evidence or updates.”
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