The Watertown Planning Commission voted 5-0 against rezoning the Ives Hill Country Club clubhouse from residential to neighborhood mixed use. The proposal would carve the clubhouse off from the golf course and rezone it — and under the new zoning, a future owner could put a gas station or a car wash on the site.
Developer Jake Johnson says that’s not the plan. He’s offered to support a deed restriction limiting the property to a restaurant or office building. Sounds reasonable. The commission didn’t buy it — unanimously.
They’re right to be skeptical, and the reason is the oldest lesson in land use: don’t read the promise, read the code. A developer’s assurance covers today. Zoning covers every tomorrow after the property changes hands, the market shifts, or the restriction gets challenged, renegotiated, or simply outlived. The commission wasn’t voting on Jake Johnson’s intentions. It was voting on what the zoning would permit for the next owner, and the one after that.
Here’s the irony: deed restrictions are already the load-bearing instrument in the entire Ives Hill saga. When the city bought the Thompson Park golf course for $3.4 million, P.J. Simao was paid $850,000 for a deed restriction keeping Ives Hill a nine-hole course (Club + Resort Business). Johnson — a local landscaper who bought the course from Simao — has been working within that restriction ever since, fixing up greens and bunkers and reopening the restaurant (currently Bad Apple Social). Now the clubhouse needs its own restriction to make the rezoning palatable. At some point you have to ask: if the protection requires a custom legal instrument every time, maybe the zoning itself is telling you something.
None of this is an accusation against Johnson. By all accounts he’s invested real money and effort into the property, and a restaurant or office at the clubhouse is a perfectly sensible use. The commission’s vote isn’t about him — it’s about the principle that zoning decisions outlive the people who request them. That’s literally the commission’s job: to think past the applicant standing in front of them.
What happens next: the commission’s vote is advisory. The final call belongs to the Watertown City Council, which meets on the first and third Mondays — the next regular meeting is October 19. Whether the Ives Hill item makes that agenda should be clear when it’s posted later this week.
This is the kind of small-city story that deserves watching, because the pattern repeats: a reasonable proposal, a reasonable promise, and a code that permits something nobody in the room actually wants. The council’s job now is the same as the commission’s was — decide based on what the zoning allows, not what anyone says they’ll do with it.