After voters at Town Meeting twice rejected a proposed multifamily housing zoning district to comply with the MBTA Communities Act, Wilmington is poised to vote on the district for a third time in a special Town Meeting Nov. 21 amid a lawsuit against the town and lost grant funding.

The Wilmington Select Board and Town Manager Eric Slagle went through a draft special Town Meeting warrant during their Oct. 13 meeting, and on the warrant once again is the same MBTA Communities district Town Meeting had shot down two separate times.

The town first took up the issue in a Town Meeting in May 2024, but voters at that meeting opted to postpone the town’s decision while the law was considered in the courts, most famously through the lawsuit by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell against the town of Milton that had been filed a few months before.

The issue was then brought up in a special Town Meeting that December, just a few weeks before the original Dec. 31, 2024, deadline Wilmington and other communities covered under the law were facing to approve a multifamily housing district. Despite the looming deadline, however, Wilmington voters rejected the zoning 288-154.

Weeks later, on Jan. 8, 2025, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in the state’s favor by calling the MBTA Communities Act constitutional, and ruling that the 177 cities and towns covered under the law must comply by creating the required zoning.

When the same districts came back to Town Meeting that May, it was rejected, this time more narrowly 152-165.

Earlier this year Wilmington and eight other noncompliant communities including Dracut and Tewksbury, were sued by Campbell’s office, and noncompliant communities began reporting that they were losing grant funding as a result of their failure to pass the zoning.

During the Wilmington Select Board meeting Monday, Slagle told the board that the AG’s office would likely not accept the bylaw being proposed if the town has to be compelled to create one through a legal settlement or court order, primarily because it is only “paper compliance.” In a Sept. 25 memo to the board, Slagle said the only way a paper-compliant district would be accepted by the AG’s office would be if it is passed at a Town Meeting.

Paper compliance is a strategy many cities and towns covered by the law have employed to create an overlay district with the required specifications, but to do so in an area that is already developed or unlikely to be developed into housing any time soon.

“The vast majority of the acreage in this bylaw already has multifamily housing on it or is not likely to have any housing built on it, and frankly the goal set up for the Planning Board was for us to go out and take credit for the multifamily housing we had already built,” Slagle told the board Monday.

He noted to the board that in the lawsuit it appears the AG’s office intends “to very quickly get the judge to rule that all existing towns in that litigation are noncompliant with the statute and therefore lose the case on the papers.”

“So this is a chance for us to get this bylaw through and get the paper compliance as opposed to compliance that has actual buildings being built,” said Slagle.

The zoning district Town Meeting will consider consists of largely the same map of four subdistricts that had already been rejected twice. One subdistrict will be centered around West Street. Three of the subdistricts will be centered within half a mile of the town’s MBTA Commuter Rail station, which is a requirement of the law. One of those districts will consist of the area between Burlington Avenue and Floradale Avenue. Another will be in the area between Main Street, the MBTA rail tracks and the Hyundai dealership to the north. The fourth subdistrict will consist only of properties on Deming Way, which includes the Wilmington Housing Authority.

Wilmington voters will consider the MBTA Communities zoning across two articles. Article 4 will be for the passage of the bylaw and zoning itself, while Article 5 adds an affordable housing requirement for housing developments.

Wilmington’s reconsideration of the zoning law comes after Tewksbury finally moved to get into compliance with its own Town Meeting vote earlier this month which resulted in the passage of a newly created district.

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