Town fathers lash out at DCR in letter
Published on July 26th, 2006
STONEHAM, MA - The town’s Board of Selectmen lashed-out at state officials this Tuesday for what they perceive as an intentional effort to stonewall required deliberations over the Gutierrez Company’s proposed Langwood Commons development.
According to Board of Selectmen Chair Robert Sweeney, town officials partook in a meeting with officials from the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) last March in an attempt to get some direction on how to proceed with the Gutierrez Company’s stalled mixed-use redevelopment plans for the former Boston Regional Medical Center (BRMC) site.
And with over three-months passing since those talks — reportedly without any word from the state agency — the Board of Selectmen drafted a letter to DCR Commissioner Stephen Burrington that charges the delay has been intentional.
“As a matter of procedure, our Town is deeply concerned that your agency is deliberately or otherwise avoiding to address issues before you that need action,” the correspondence reads.
“We would like to emphasize that we are not asking you to give favorable treatment to the proponent, but to simply engage the proponent with a result-oriented plan and timeline,” the letter continues.
After a previous office park proposal was defeated by the Mass Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA), the Gutierrez Company teamed up with Colorado Housing firm Simpson Housing, LP, to pitch a mixed-use 550-unit affordable housing development at the BRMC property.
The plans also called for the use of an existing 250,000 square foot building at the site for commercial space.
Although the town’s Selectmen and Zoning Board of Appeals later endorsed the project — the ZBA knocked 100-units off of the residential portion of the proposal — the state’s EOEA Secretary Stephen Pritchard again shot down the development last January.
In his ruling, Pritchard demanded that the applicants scale-down the size of the project plans, and meet with DCR officials, who had concluded that the development would have an adverse impact on the surrounding Fells Reservation if built as planned.
However, according to local attorney Charlie Houghton and Gutierrez Company Project Manager Bill Caulder, DCR has refused to set specific guidelines to assist them in planning for a new development.
“They’re non-responsive. They just don’t have a process,” Caulder alleged. “From the MEPA process, [DCR’s] comment letter was somewhat subjective in saying that [Langwood Commons] will have an ‘adverse impact’. So we’re just looking for some objective parameters in this process.”
“We’re not asking for a rubber stamp. We’re just asking for a process,” the former Simpson Housing Vice-President added. “We’re not going to progress forward with creating hundreds-of-thousands of dollars worth of traffic and roadway improvement plans for [the Fells Reservation Parkway] when it’s not our property. So we need a dialogue about what they’d like to see.”
According to Sweeney, who met with DCR officials along with Selectman Tony Kennedy and Town Counsel Bill Solomon last March, given the Gutierrez Company’s repeated failures to garner state support for previous developments, it only makes sense that the environmental office assist the applicants in creating a suitable project.
And regardless of what DCR has to say, even should that answer be that the state agency doesn’t want to any project at the site, all parties would at least be satisfied, the Selectman Chair argued.
“Every plan we give to them gets holes shot through it. So we would like them to give us a [traffic] number which is acceptable to them. And it’s unbelievable that we can’t get that answer from them,” Sweeney vented on Tuesday night.
“This is really not fair to Gutierrez. Tell us no. Tell us you want nothing. Tell us you want 10,000 cars. But just give us an answer,” the Selectman Chair pleaded. “Even no would be an acceptable answer because at least they’d know what road to go down.”
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