Helping Businesses Find Their Way in Burlington
Burlington is quietly reshaping how it does business — from zoning overhauls to developer-friendly guides. Here's how town leaders are envisioning a more accessible, walkable future.
Change is inevitable — and Burlington officials are paying close attention to how the town’s economy, housing needs, and development patterns are evolving. While municipal governments aren’t always known for agility, town leaders are actively working to make Burlington easier to navigate for businesses, developers, and entrepreneurs.
Since the 1960s, Burlington has blossomed from a small agricultural community to a bustling suburb with a healthy commercial sector. The technology businesses that settled here during the tech boom, coupled with the mall, helped Burlington build a healthy commercial tax base – one that foots nearly ⅔ of the bill for town services – while remaining an attractive place to live.
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Changing housing needs over the last several years, as well as the evolution of how people work and shop (accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic), have led the town to pursue ideas in the Mall Road and Town Center areas that will help preserve the vibrancy of the business community while offering a greater diversity of housing inventory for everyone from young professionals to seniors looking to downsize. These zoning changes, say Economic Development Director Melisa Tintocalis and Planning Director Liz Bonventre, aim to encourage more accessibility and connectivity in these areas of town, which are already community hubs. “We want to take a 1950s auto-oriented town center and turn it into an accessible, walkable area,” said Bonventre.
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But the town bylaws governing how these areas can be developed are long and can be difficult to fully parse. To make things easier for developers wishing to take advantage of these new opportunities, Bonventre is working to codify design guidelines for the Mall Road area and the Town Center that build on the bylaws – a document that can serve as part-brochure, part-checklist for developers. The Planning Department is also working on modernizing their signage bylaws, district by district, while the Economic Development Department collaborates with other town departments to create a “How to Do Business in Burlington” document in the hopes of lowering barriers for entrepreneurs.
Taken together, these efforts — along with the work of Town Communications Officer Laura Zakrewski to streamline information and make town processes more accessible — reflect a shift toward a more user-friendly and transparent approach to development, bringing departments, developers, and residents onto the same page as Burlington grows.
