Applications due Feb. 3 for first-round lottery

Bowers Brook Apartments, a three-story apartment building under construction behind the Ayer Road Dunkin' Donuts, will "potentially be ready for moving in" by April, according to its builder, Lou Russo of Harvard.

Russo is also a general partner in the project with Boston Capital Corporation, a real estate investment firm. He spoke on Tuesday this week to roughly 20 people in the Town Hall meeting room who came to hear more about the rental units.

Russo urged anyone interested in living at Bowers Brook Apartments to get an application at Town Hall or the Council on Aging and to call property manager Barry Leblanc of New Hampshire-based Stewart Property Management, Inc.

"Usually it takes about five minutes or so on the phone to review income and assets with someone, to see whether they ought to apply," Leblanc told the Press on Tuesday.

Those who apply and are accepted by Feb. 3 are eligible for the first lottery, the method by which 38 out of the 42 apartments will be assigned.

"Janet Vellante, our town clerk, will be setting the lottery date soon," Russo said.

All apartments are income-restricted, and all except two are restricted to those 55 years of age and older, although one half of a couple could be as young as 50, Leblanc said.

The two non-age-restricted apartments are reserved for disabled adults through the Community Based Housing Program, Russo said.

The income restriction requires prospective tenants to complete a four-page application that measures yearly income against the income caps, which are set at $43,680 for singles and $49,920 for couples. Assets, such as annuities, stocks, IRAs, bank accounts, and property, always figure into the yearly income calculation and can do so in one of two ways, Leblanc said: as interest earned on total assets, or as two percent of total assets.

The one-bedroom apartments will rent for $965, the two-bedroom units for $1,165. However, a total of five apartments, including the Community Based Housing units, will rent for less. Four will be assigned to the disabled by waiting list instead of lottery, through a Gardner-based, non-profit community development agency called RCAP Solutions.

The fifth lower-rent apartment will be reserved for a disabled person, too, but assigned by lottery at a rent of $530, Russo said.

The rents and income limits are based on federal Housing and Urban Development guidelines, Leblanc said, because Bowers Brook Apartments were funded in part by the federal Low Income Tax Credit Program and by the state's Department of Housing and Community Development. Harvard's Municipal Affordable Housing Trust also contributed $200,000, in the form of a long-term, no-interest loan.

The informational meeting included a question-and-answer session, where it was learned that leases run on a yearly basis; the apartment must be a person's primary residence; the security deposit is one month's rent; Bowers Brook will not provide its own van; both heat and air conditioning are included in the rent; smoking is not allowed; and one cat or small dog per apartment is OK. A small dog, Leblanc said, is a dog "weighing 20 pounds or less. But we're not going to weigh your dog."

The Bowers Brook development was granted a special (not comprehensive) permit in March 2009, under Ayer Village Special Permit zoning, which allows denser-than-normal, mixed-use development on parts of Ayer Road. Meeting minutes and news reports from 2008 and 2009 that covered hearings of the Planning Board, which granted the permit, and the Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, which provided a $200,000 interest-free loan to the developer, show that both groups believed the project's benefits outweighed its drawbacks.

Disadvantages discussed by the boards included increased traffic at the accident-prone Dunkin' Donuts exit, lack of sidewalks on busy Ayer Road and within the development, and a building footprint that exceeded the maximum size by exploiting a zoning loophole.

"The Planning Board, while acknowledging some drawbacks to the plan, was attracted by the affordable, age-restricted rental apartments and by a two-year moratorium on new Chapter 40B applications that it could bring to Harvard," a Press article reported when the permit was granted in 2009.

All 42 units counted toward Harvard's state-mandated, 10-percent-affordability goal, instead of the usual 25 percent, and without adding students to the schools. And the numerous units to be built all at once activated the safe-harbor clause in the 40B regulations, where Harvard would be allowed to reject with impunity—for two years— applications for comprehensive permits.

But the safe harbor never took effect, according to the state. A November request by the Press to the Department of Housing and Community Development to verify the start and end dates of safe harbor in Harvard, and its duration, exposed a problem: the moratorium had not kicked in, and the time to initiate it was over.

A Dec. 15 letter from DHCD Associate Director Leverett Wing informed the town of the moratorium that never was: "Although the building permits for the Bowers Brook were issued on March 7, 2011, the units were initially eligible for SHI [subsidized housing inventory] inclusion when the [permit] was issued in 2009 and not in calendar year (2011) for which the Town is seeking certification."

"Our attorney is dealing with DHCD's attorney," Town Administrator Tim Bragan told the Press on Tuesday. "There is a difference in interpretation of the regulations by the attorneys that we are pursuing."

No comprehensive permit (40B) applications were submitted to Harvard during the past two years.