It depends on the municipality but in the case of that particular project it’s technically a planning board so it’s both design review and zoning review. The hearing is for all projects of a certain size and also serves as the public meeting. They wrote the zoning and oversee it, but because it’s not strictly a zoning board there is subjectivity in the approvals.

It’s a joke and the night before our hearing and a month after we submitted all the required documentation the deputy planner sent us a list of questions that pretty much showed they didn’t know their own zoning rules nor did they spend the time to thoroughly review what we submitted. Every response was basically “see submission” or “that’s not actually what the zoning code states”.