By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

An effort by the Boston Redevelopment Authority to change the way it regulates development on residential lots has touched off fresh controversy over City Hall zoning procedures, and added another twist to a long-simmering intra-neighborhood battle.

The BRA maintains that two proposed amendments to the Boston Zoning Code would clear up ambiguities that sometimes cause confusion in interpreting the dimensions of a lot, and its eligibility for subdivision. But critics of city development policy claim the proposal incubated behind the scenes, without community input, and that it could significantly alter existing zoning regulations.

The amendments would allow a controversial Melville Avenue house to stay standing "as of right," several City Hall and community sources said. The O'Flaherty home at 99 Melville Ave. has been at the center of a long-running neighborhood feud, with some neighbors protesting the family's construction and others insisting the house should stand.

Initially scheduled for Wednesday, with some confusion about the date, the city zoning commission's vote on the amendment was delayed Tuesday afternoon after a flurry of phone calls, e-mails, and letters hit City Hall, demanding more time.

In a response e-mailed to civic leaders Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Thomas M. Menino's Dorchester liaisons Molly Dunford and Karine Querido "apologize[d] for any confusion regarding the process," and said that, while the hearing would still take place, no vote would be taken until after a public meeting in the next two weeks. The commission officially delayed its vote Wednesday.

At the Wednesday morning City Hall meeting, roughly 50 people - including administration staff, city councillors, and neighbors - listened as BRA officials outlined the two amendments. The zoning commission sets zoning code policy, while the zoning board of appeals interprets code on a case-by-case basis.

According to Richard Shaklik, the BRA deputy director for zoning, one amendment would define "lot frontage" and "lot width" as the same measurement, repairing an "oversight" in the code. The other, he said, would add lot frontage to a clause in the code regulating exceptions to minimum lot size.

According to Shaklik, who proposed the amendment in a February 24 memorandum, the changes would apply only to existing lots which meet pre-existing standards, including "at least three-fourths of the minimum lot size and lot width requirements."

In the memo to BRA Director Mark Maloney, Shaklik wrote, "Such provisions are important not only to provide equitable relief for those who have made economic investments on the basis of prior zoning rules, but also to serve public needs for housing production, to enhance public safety by making use of otherwise vacant urban lots, to generate needed real estate tax revenues for the City, and to complete missing components of otherwise well-established urban neighborhood streetscapes."

In a phone interview Tuesday, Shaklik said, "It's not going to affect probably very many people because there aren't many lots that aren't built on, and of those not many would meet the requirements."

He said he was not aware of any estimate of how many lots could be affected in Dorchester, Roxbury, Allston-Brighton, East Boston, and the Fenway, the neighborhoods eligible for the new regulations. When questioned by Allston-Brighton City Councillor Jerry McDermott and at-large Councillor Maura Hennigan at Tuesday's meeting, neither BRA officials nor zoning commissioners could offer an estimate of how many lots could be affected. While Dorchester Councillor Maureen Feeney spoke in support of adding the amendment, after the community meeting, both Hennigan and McDermott ripped the process.

"There is something wrong when the BRA, the city administration would put forward an amendment with no public input," said Hennigan, who is running against Menino for mayor. "If this is such a little thing why can't it go through a regular community process?"

Both councillors said not enough publicity preceded the hearing.

"The arrogance of this board is really unbelievable," said McDermott after walking out of the hearing. He asked the city to schedule an Allston-Brighton meeting as well, saying he'd learned of Wednesday's hearing only after a Dorchester resident e-mailed him and he asked Feeney's office about it.

While he said he likely would have supported the proposals while serving on the advisory committee that helped shape the new Dorchester zoning code that went into effect in 2003, Lower Mills activist Richard O'Mara said he was disturbed by its rapid appearance before the board.

"I think the process is what's failing here," O'Mara said, "not the amendment. At this point, I think the community clearly feels that it's been locked out of the process."

"Part of the impetus" for the proposed changes, Shaklik said, was the 99 Melville Ave. property, which has strained neighborhood relations since at least 2001, when the zoning board approved BRA-opposed variances in the plan of Anthony and Jacqueline Flaherty to construct a single-family home beside their two-family at 95-97 Melville.

A bitter legal and behind-the-scenes battle has ensued, with the O'Flahertys continuing construction despite court warnings that it would have to be torn down, then peaking most recently in January when a state appeals court sided with the plaintiffs and earlier decisions that the ZBA "acted in excess of its authority" in granting the variances and that the home should come down.

Some feel the Melville Ave. case has been dragged too far, and Melville-Park residents report sustained bad feelings in one of Dorchester's most elegant and high-priced neighborhoods.

"It'd be absurd to tear down such an attractive house in the midst of a housing crisis," said Neil Sullivan, president of the Boston Private Industry Council and a resident of Ashmont Hill, who said he has "friends on all sides."

Sullivan added, "There are other issues, but it's not as though [the house] in any way deteriorates the quality of the street."

According to Shaklik, his suggestions could help avoid such ugly battles.

"The Melville Avenue case sort of brought this case to our attention," Shaklik said Tuesday. But he said, "I don't know whether or not it would affect that particular case or decision-making."

But the plaintiffs' attorney refuted Shaklik's contention that lot width and lot frontage should be treated as one, insisting that the BRA's argument had been made already, in the O'Flaherty's appeal, and rejected by the court.

The attorney, Barbara Gruenthal, also said the city is ignoring the amendments' broader potential.

"If you allow exceptions to frontage, you allow exceptions to the number of houses on the street, and that leads to increased density," she said.

The ZBA has been the target of civic wrath lately, as neighbors have charged that the board too often sides with developers, with too little concern for local sentiment. Last year, ZBA Chairman Joseph Feaster left the board under pressure from Menino after the Boston Globe found that Joseph LaRosa, a developer Feaster represented before the board, while recusing himself, was enjoying a high success rate. Civic activists said the perceived conflict represented ineptitude at the mayorally-appointed ZBA.

Others have concurred. In a scolding decision earlier this year, a Suffolk Superior Court judge upbraided the ZBA for "institutional deficiency" and "unreliable decisions."

Ruling against a proposed D Street single-family home, which the city's Inspectional Services Department had initially rejected for eight different code infractions, Judge Mitchell J. Sikora, Jr. wrote, "The multiple warnings of the courts through more than 75 years have not substantially affected the quality of factfinding by the Board of Appeal of Boston … They show no sign of any contribution from a legal mind."

Charging widespread waste of public and private resources as the cases drag through city and court hearings, the decision found the board afflicted with "the chronic ill of blatantly inadequate factfinding."

Feeney, who has been a staunch O'Flaherty advocate throughout the battle, called development "probably the number-one issue" in Dorchester, and said, "I believe, with everything that's in me, that there was an omission of language, that there's no agenda, other than the facts that came to our attention as a result of 99 Melville Ave."

But O'Mara said many in Dorchester have expressed suspicion that the proposal and the Melville Ave. conflict are linked.

Skeptics of the BRA's intentions also point to a personnel overlap; when Menino appointed a new senior legal counsel to the BRA in November, he plucked Rebecca A. Lee from her partnership in the real estate department at the Goodwin Proctor law firm. The O'Flaherty's new attorney, Michael K. Murray, works at Goodwin Proctor. Their former attorney, Susan Tracy, is Jacqueline O'Flaherty's aunt, as well as a former state representative from Brighton.

Neither the O'Flahertys nor Murray returned phone calls, Murray citing, in a brief initial conversation, Goodwin Proctor policy about comments to the media.