The Dover Amendment is the common name for
Massachusetts General Law
The Massachusetts General Laws is a Codification (law), codification of many of the statutes of the Massachusetts, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth's laws are promulgated by an elected bicameral ("two-chamber") Legislature, legisla ...
(MGL) Chapter 40A, Section 3. This law exempts agricultural, religious, and educational uses from certain
zoning restrictions
Zoning is a method of urban planning in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into areas called zones, each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones. Zones may be defined for a si ...
. By limiting what zoning requirements apply to land and structures that hold these uses, the Dover Amendment makes it easier for these uses to build structures to serve their needs. The Dover Amendment allows many developers to build facilities that are substantially larger than zoning laws would ordinarily allow or which would be considered inappropriate, by some, for the neighborhood {{Citation needed, date=November 2021.
Considered by many
ho?to be overly broad, the exemption granted by the Dover Amendment has been narrowed somewhat by recent
rovide datescourt decisions. While a corporation must merely be nonprofit and legally able to engage in educational activities to be considered a "nonprofit educational corporation," the actual use of a particular facility must have education as the “primary or dominant purpose" to qualify for Dover protection. See ''Whitinsville Retirement Society, Inc. v. Northbridge'', 394 Mass. 757, 760 (1985).
Exemptions
It is unclear if the city of
Boston is exempt from the Dover Amendment. The ''
Boston Globe'' has referred to an exemption for the city on occasion. The
Massachusetts General Court approved exemptions for the City of
Cambridge (Acts of 1979, Chap. 565 and Acts of 1980, Chap. 387) allowing it to regulate educational and religious uses of property, which Cambridge then incorporated into its zoning laws.
Notes
External links
The Dover Amendment online
Massachusetts statutes
Zoning in the United States