A residential tower soaring hundreds of feet above the Fenway’s standard zoning limits has passed city approval, but still needs the City Council to take action to exempt it from parkland regulations.

The proposed redevelopment of 2 Charlesgate West got approval from the board of the Boston Planning and Development Agency on July 18 despite opposition from the community in public meetings.

The almost 300-foot tower is still in violation of the city park and parkland ordinance, however, and is counting on a specific exemption from City Councilor Sharon Durkan to proceed.

Durkan has supported the plan on the basis that it’s one of the only developments offering desperately needed housing in the neighborhood and has been working with the parks department to craft a cutout that tries to avoid setting ordinance shredding precedent.

Still, in a city where zoning laws are often less of a hard limit and more of a speed bump, Fenway stakeholders worry the move could set a new de facto norm of simply requiring a supportive councilor to ignore the parks ordinance.

“I don’t know how you’d avoid setting precedent. There’s nothing that keeps anyone else from doing the same thing,” said Fredericka Veikley, co-chair of the Fenway Civic Association’s open space committee. “Setting a precedent for a 30-story building that’s far in excess of what the ordinance is meant to do. That doesn’t bode well for the future of this city and its unbuilt space. It’s a big deal.”

“I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say all the ways that the interpretation of these things can change over time. It is something we always have to be vigilant about,” said Karen Mauney-Brodek, president of the Emerald Necklace Conservancy. “The Emerald Necklace is an amazing resource, but there's always a tremendous desire to develop housing and other things around public spaces like parks.”

Mauney-Brodek said the Conservancy still has “significant concerns” about the impact the project would have on neighboring parkland, even after developers performed studies they say show the effect will be negligible.

She did note, however, that the parks ordinance is in many places very limited and often only covers parcels directly adjacent to parkland. A similarly controversial project in Longwood last year supposedly allocated funding to develop a dedicated shadow ordinance, but that legislation is yet to materialize.

“The city’s approval for the Longwood redevelopment project provided $1 million to develop rules and guidelines for protecting parks from shadow, and to find a way to balance development and parks. Those have not come forth,” said Mauney-Brodek. “We're now in a situation where the protections that we need just don't exist, or aren't being enforced where they do.”

Durkan’s office declined to share the actual language of the parks ordinance amendment they will propose. That will become public on August 5, ahead of its formal submission at the next City Council meeting on August 7.

In a July 18 letter to the BPDA board, Councilor Durkan said her amendment would aim to “set a high threshold for exceptions to ordinances,” and noted that if she hadn’t agreed to amend the ordinance the developer had planned to make a more radical departure from zoning norms by splitting the parcel in half.

“This project puts us face-to-face with a critical dilemma. How do we accommodate the needed growth in our housing stock when open space requirements can’t be fulfilled and might be diminished? There’s no easy solution, but I believe that thoughtful design, the proponent’s ongoing commitment to funding maintenance of surrounding parks, and finally my commitment to amend the ordinance strikes an uneasy but successful balance to the fraught question of our city’s sustainable growth in the coming decades,” she said.