North Andover Conservation Commission Approves Four Projects at January Meeting

Conservation · Meeting of January 14, 2026

North Andover Conservation Commission approved four project orders and opened a bylaw overhaul discussion at its January 14 meeting. The most contested action was a three-to-two vote to issue an amended order of conditions for a retaining wall and driveway modification at 989 Salem Street, with homeowner Colin Moriarty telling commissioners his former site engineer had drawn the wall "in the wrong location" — the chair broke a tie on the underlying waiver before the modification passed. At 121 Millpond Townhomes, the commission unanimously approved an order of conditions for Verizon New England Inc. to install underground fiber conduit, requiring open trenching and continuous on-site monitoring at building 13 after a third-party arborist from Heirloom Tree and Shrub warned that root damage to large bank-stabilizing trees could flood ground-floor units.

A greenhouse project at 243 Great Pond Road was approved unanimously with a $2,500 performance bond, and a four-story mixed-use proposal at 1591 Osgood Street was continued to January 28 pending a DEP file number. The commission also began substantive review of a proposed wetland protection bylaw amendment that would reclassify the 50-to-100-foot buffer zone as a jurisdictional area rather than a wetland resource area — a change members said could affect how contiguous buildable area is calculated across dozens of North Andover parcels.

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Source: the Conservation meeting of January 14, 2026, reported from the official video recording and transcript.