The Planning Board voted 4–0 on Wednesday, October 14, to recommend Article 17, the update to Holliston’s groundwater protection rules, but only with three changes it plans to offer from the floor of Town Meeting: dropping the new limit on animal feedlots, taking landscape refuse out of the bylaw’s definition of solid waste, and letting the six kinds of businesses the article would newly bar from the zones around the town’s wells operate there anyway if they use technology, such as sealed holding tanks, that keeps their stormwater and spills from reaching the groundwater (Recording, 1:13:04). (from the meeting recording; minutes not yet approved)
Article 17 itself asks Fall Town Meeting to tighten the Groundwater Protection District, the part of the town’s zoning bylaw (p. 60) that controls what can be built and run on the land feeding the five public wells, by adding commercial feedlots, dry cleaners, auto businesses, chemical labs, metal plating, paint shops and large stores of pesticide to the uses barred there. Town Meeting takes it up Monday, October 19, at 7 p.m. in the high school auditorium, and as a change to the zoning bylaw it needs a two-thirds vote. A subcommittee of Envisioning Future Holliston wrote it, and that committee sponsors it together with the Select Board and the Planning Board.
What the article would change
The bylaw already keeps a number of uses away from the wells, including landfills and junkyards, most businesses that handle hazardous waste, underground storage of toxic materials and unprotected storage of road salt. Article 17, as printed in the warrant, adds seven more to the list for Zone II, the main recharge area for the wells, and through it to the two stricter zones closest to them:
commercial animal feedlots, unless inside a structure built to keep runoff from escaping
dry cleaners, laundromats and other coin or commercial laundries that clean on the premises
commercial chemical or bacteriological research and development labs
commercial businesses that sell, service, fuel, wash, lease, rent, repair, solder or weld “automotive vehicles, machines, and equipment”
storage of 250 pounds or more of herbicides or pesticides on one lot, unless kept in a weatherproof building with an impermeable floor
commercial plating, finishing, etching or polishing of metals or semiconductors
commercial painting, wood preserving or paint stripping
The Select Board’s summary counts the same seven. The feedlot limit joins a 2013 rule that already bars storing animal manure in Zone II unless it’s inside a structure built to keep runoff from escaping, and Article 17 defines a feedlot as a commercial operation keeping 25 or more livestock per acre to prepare them for slaughter.
The article changes several definitions too. One describes “automotive” as anything “of, relating to, or concerned with motorized vehicles or machines,” so the auto entry above is worded to reach past car dealers and repair garages to businesses dealing in other motorized machines and equipment. Another defines petroleum products and leaves out propane, butane and liquefied natural gas. A third lengthens the definition of solid waste, which now covers garbage and rubbish, to take in scrap materials, junk, refuse, inert fill, landscape refuse and asphalt grindings, and that matters because the bylaw already bars disposing of solid waste other than brush and stumps in all four zones. And the article drops the word “liquid” from the existing ban on storing petroleum products in Zone II, which keeps its exceptions for household use, heating and emergency generators.
What the Planning Board wants changed
The board closed its public hearing on October 14 and voted 4–0 to recommend that Town Meeting adopt Article 17 with three revisions, which its staff planner restated just before the vote (Recording, 1:08:09):
Drop the feedlot limit. Strike “animal feedlots or” from the Zone II prohibitions, and the new definition of a feedlot with it, which would leave the 2013 rule on manure storage as it stands.
Take out “landscape refuse.” Keep the rest of the longer definition of solid waste, but without landscape refuse, so that the existing disposal ban doesn’t reach piles of yard waste.
Allow the six new business uses with safeguards. Let the dry cleaners, labs, auto businesses, pesticide storage, metal finishing and painting uses in items q through v operate in Zone II if they use technology that keeps stormwater and other material on the site and out of the groundwater.
Members pointed to sealed holding tanks, often called tight tanks, which collect a building’s runoff and spills so they can be pumped out and hauled away, and the owner of an auto body shop on Jeffrey Avenue, one of the businesses on the subcommittee’s list, told the board his shop has collected its rainwater and everything from inside the shop in holding tanks since 2021 (Recording, 0:39:26). The staff planner said the exact wording would need Town Counsel’s review, because state law limits how far a zoning proposal can change once it has been advertised; she said loosening a proposal is generally less of a problem than tightening it, and the board kept the safeguard to the six new uses rather than extend it to every Zone II prohibition (Recording, 1:00:37). Just before the hearing closed, a resident asked who would make sure such systems keep working, saying the town doesn’t have the staff to monitor them, and the board closed the hearing without taking up the question (Recording, 1:10:45). (from the meeting recording; minutes not yet approved)
James Read made the motion and David Thorn seconded it, and Courtney Black and Barbara Peatie, who ran the meeting, voted with them (Recording, 1:14:38). Jason Santos was absent but sent an email, read into the record, saying he supported the limits on auto businesses, dry cleaners and metal plating, opposed any new restriction on agriculture or landscape debris, and would support the bylaw without those two (Recording, 0:15:52). The staff planner said she would write the board’s report to Town Meeting from the discussion and send it around to members. (from the meeting recording; minutes not yet approved)
Where the zones are
The district is drawn in four zones, working outward from the wells, and the bylaw spells out each one:
Zone I is the 400-foot circle around each public well, land the town owns or controls.
Zone IA is a zone Holliston created for itself, the area each well draws down when it pumps at full capacity for five straight days.
Zone II takes in the Hopping Brook, Jar Brook, Lake Winthrop, Dopping Brook and Bogastow Brook aquifers, other thick water-bearing sand and gravel, and the land the state has mapped as feeding the wells in a long drought, which it models as 180 days of pumping at the full rate with no rain.
Zone III is the land beyond Zone II that drains into it.
The new limits apply in Zones I, IA and II, since each stricter zone inherits the prohibitions of the zones around it, and not in Zone III. Zone III gets one change: a commercial or industrial business there that makes, stores, transports or disposes of toxic or hazardous materials already needs a special permit when that is its principal activity, and Article 17 extends the requirement to businesses for which it is an incidental one. The subcommittee’s slides put the protection zones at 26 percent of the town’s land and 1,064 homes. The official maps, drawn in 1996 and approved by the state Attorney General in 2000, are on file with the Town Clerk and the Building Inspector, where an owner can check whether a particular lot is inside, and where a map line and the bylaw’s written description of a zone disagree on a property, the written description controls.
The town’s project page shows the protection zones shaded on a map.
The five wells, numbered 4 through 8, are off Washington Street, Central Street, Brook Street, Mohawk Path and Maple Street, and together they pumped more than 400 million gallons in 2025, according to the town’s 2025 water quality report. The state lets Holliston pump up to 1.16 million gallons a day, the facilities director told the Select Board in February (minutes). The same report shows no contaminant over its state limit last year, with quarterly readings for the six PFAS chemicals the state regulates ranging from 4.58 to 10.1 parts per trillion against a limit of 20.
Who would be affected
The Select Board’s summary says the new limits are meant for future changes in how land is used, and that existing permitted uses, along with businesses outside the zones, are not affected. The subcommittee’s slides list 22 businesses inside the zones that would continue under the new rules: nine that store pesticides, eight auto businesses, three paint or printing businesses, one laboratory and one metal manufacturer. According to the slides, no feedlots, dry cleaners or laundromats operate in the zones now.
How that protection works comes from the zoning bylaw’s general rules in Section I-C, which Article 17 doesn’t change. A use that is lawfully in place, or that holds a building or special permit issued before the town first published notice of the Planning Board’s hearing, isn’t subject to the new limits. The Zoning Board of Appeals can let an owner change or extend such a use by special permit if the change isn’t substantially more detrimental to the neighborhood, and in Zone II an expansion also turns on whether it would be substantially more detrimental to the water supply. A protected use that is abandoned or goes unused for three years loses its protection, although the Zoning Board can restore it by special permit. The town’s project page says the limits “will only apply to permitting changes in land use” and that parcels with existing permits “will not be affected.”
Selling one of those businesses came up at both Planning Board sessions. Town Counsel Jay Talerman told the board on October 8 that a sale doesn’t end a business’s protected status, which carries over to the new owner, unless the business’s original special permit says it can’t be transferred (Recording, 0:48:31). On October 14 the owner of the Jeffrey Avenue auto body shop said he hadn’t known about the hearing until a friend told him, that his shop’s special permit isn’t transferable, and that he worried the change would put off buyers when he sells, and the sustainability coordinator said the subcommittee had mailed invitations to its August question-and-answer session to every affected business it could find, some of which came back undeliverable (Recording, 0:06:45). (from the meeting recordings; minutes not yet approved)
For homeowners, six of the seven limits are written for commercial businesses, and the seventh, on pesticide storage, starts at 250 pounds on a single lot.
A resident raised the proposed housing development at 194 Lowland Street when the Select Board took up the wellhead bylaw on February 25, according to the board’s minutes, and MassDEP says that site lies in the Zone II of three town wells (letter). Article 17 wouldn’t apply to that project, because it is before the Zoning Board of Appeals as a Chapter 40B comprehensive permit, which state rules judge against the town’s bylaws as they stood when the application was filed in January, and housing isn’t among the article’s new limits in any case. The project’s water questions are being decided in that hearing and in MassDEP’s review of its wastewater discharge permit.
How it got to the warrant
Holliston has had a Groundwater Protection District in its zoning bylaw since 1983, and in more than four decades only three permits have been denied under it, according to the subcommittee’s slides. The subcommittee, which the Select Board appointed with members from sustainability, planning and conservation, compared Holliston’s rules zone by zone with those of 11 towns it considers comparable, among them Hopkinton, Medfield, Millis, Natick and Sherborn, and drew the new limits from their bylaws, the town’s project page says. Its slides give two kinds of reasons: new information about contaminants and other towns’ recent revisions, and public concern, citing what they call the top priority in the survey for the town’s Strategic Plan, to “protect and conserve the Town’s water to preserve it for future generations,” along with the discussion over where to put a new DPW facility.
Article 17 amends that bylaw. The wellhead protection plan MassDEP recommended in 2002 would be a separate document, and [add the DPW’s answer on whether the town has one, or that it hadn’t answered by publication]. The sustainability coordinator told the Planning Board on October 8 that the bylaw is meant as “the first step in many,” and that the group hopes next to bring in the Water Department and the Board of Health, seek state money for a study of the town’s aquifers, and take up the septic systems at the homes in the zones (Recording, 0:20:41). (from the meeting recording; minutes not yet approved)
The record, in order, with the bylaw’s own history drawn from the notes printed with it in the warrant:
October 1983. A Special Town Meeting adopts the Groundwater Protection District as Article 20.
1996 to 2000. Whitman & Howard draws the district’s maps in 1996. The May 2000 Annual Town Meeting revises the bylaw under Article 35, and the state Attorney General approves the maps on September 21, 2000.
February 26, 2002. MassDEP issues its Source Water Assessment and Protection report on Holliston’s wells (report, pages 614 to 626 of the Central Region file). It ranks the recharge areas for four of the town’s six wells at the time highly susceptible to contamination, listing an auto body shop, an auto repair station, a machine and metalworking shop, an industrial park and hazardous materials storage among the high threats inside them. It recommends that the town develop a wellhead protection plan, which it describes as a way to coordinate community efforts, identify protection strategies and set “a timeframe for implementation,” and that it form a wellhead protection committee, noting the town had neither.
October 2013. A Special Town Meeting amends the bylaw under Article 19, including the rules for house lots in Zone II and the limit on manure storage.
December 2017. Researchers from Clark University and Boston University, working with three Holliston residents, publish a peer-reviewed study of the town’s very shallow aquifers, which they rate highly vulnerable to contamination. It documents metals and solvents reported in the groundwater at several sites, and of the wellhead protection plan the 2002 report recommended, it says “none seems to have been developed” (study).
October 20, 2025. At Fall Town Meeting, during a $508,766 article to study treating the town’s water for PFAS, a resident says a state environmental report about 20 years earlier had recommended a wellhead protection plan for Holliston that was never carried out (minutes), although Article 17 itself doesn’t mention PFAS.
January 20, 2026. Marcus Partners files a Chapter 40B application with the Zoning Board of Appeals for 250 rental units, 63 of them affordable, on 42 acres at 194 Lowland Street (presentation, MassHousing letter), and the Zoning Board opens its hearing on February 11 (agenda).
February 25, 2026. The town’s sustainability coordinator tells the Select Board the subcommittee has no draft language yet and is aiming for the October Town Meeting, and in public comment a resident asks about the bylaw and reads a statement about 194 Lowland Street into the record, according to the board’s minutes.
June 11, 2026. MassDEP conditionally approves the groundwater study for 194 Lowland Street’s wastewater discharge of up to 48,060 gallons a day for 425 bedrooms, finding the site inside the Zone II of Wells 5, 6 and 7, about a mile from Well 5, and requiring its stricter effluent limits.
August 12, 2026. The subcommittee presents its proposal at a public question-and-answer session (agenda).
August 19 to October 8, 2026. The subcommittee meets five more times, going over the public’s comments at its August 19, September 24 and October 8 meetings (agendas for Aug. 19, Sept. 2, Sept. 3, Sept. 24 and Oct. 8), and posts its August 19 draft and its October 1 draft online.
September 10, 2026. The Planning Board discusses the amendment as a possible Town Meeting article (agenda).
October 8, 2026. The Planning Board opens its public hearing and continues it to October 14 (agenda).
October 14, 2026. The Planning Board closes the hearing and votes 4–0 to recommend Article 17 with three changes to be offered at Town Meeting (agenda). (from the meeting recording; minutes not yet approved)
October 19, 2026. Town Meeting takes up Article 17 at 7 p.m. in the high school auditorium.
What it takes to pass
State law requires a two-thirds vote of Town Meeting to change the zoning bylaw (M.G.L. c. 40A, § 5). The same law says Town Meeting can’t vote to adopt a zoning change until the Planning Board has given it a report with recommendations, or until 21 days have passed after the board’s hearing without one. The board voted its recommendation when it closed the hearing on October 14, and its staff planner said she would write the report for Town Meeting.
Town Meeting can adopt the article, reject it, or amend it and adopt it. It takes up any amendments, such as the Planning Board’s, before the article itself, and the article, amended or not, still needs two-thirds to pass. If Town Meeting rejects the article, the same proposal can’t come back for two years unless the Planning Board recommends it in its final report. If it passes, it takes effect as of the vote once it has been published, though the state Attorney General’s office reviews it afterward and can disapprove parts of it.
Where the boards stand:
Planning Board: recommends adoption with its three changes, 4–0, with one member absent. (from the meeting recording; minutes not yet approved)
Select Board: the warrant prints no recommendation; its comment says it approved the article for the warrant.
Finance Committee: none, since it makes recommendations only on financial articles, according to its report in the warrant.
If Town Meeting turns it down, the subcommittee’s slides say it would look for a compromise with the Board of Health, the Water Department and the town’s economic development officials.
How to weigh in
Town Meeting is Monday, October 19, at 7 p.m. in the Holliston High School auditorium, 370 Hollis Street, where registered voters can speak and vote (warrant).
The subcommittee takes comments by email at Envisioningfuture@holliston.k12.ma.us.
The subcommittee’s October 1 draft shows every change to the bylaw, with new text in bold italic and deletions struck through. The warrant prints the article too.
The subcommittee’s August 12 slides list the 22 businesses and the comparison towns.
The Planning Board’s hearing is on the record: the recordings of October 8 and October 14, and the agendas for October 8 and October 14.
If you spot something wrong here, reply to the email or leave a comment, and the correction will run in the next issue with the date.
I use AI to transcribe meetings and to help pull details out of town documents, and I check every figure against the source before publishing; everything in this post links to where it came from.