By Erin Tiernan
Concord officials say the town needs expanded public works and public safety facilities — and a new land-use matrix is intended to help officials decide where to build them.
“We need to determine the best matches between municipal needs and potential land available,” Assistant Town Manager Megan Zammuto said in presenting the 12-page matrix at a December 16 joint Select Board meeting. “This is a very large undertaking that impacts the entire community.”
The document details 21 town-owned facilities. A color-coded ranking highlights which are in the most dire need of reconfiguration or expansion.
The biggest needs
Six properties are coded “red,” indicating they require immediate attention. They include:
- The public safety complex at 219 Walden Street is too small, but expanding it is “complicated” because it abuts a river.
- The Beede Swim and Fitness Center at 498 Walden Street is insufficient to house exercise and group activities.
- The West Concord Fire Station at 1201 Main Street is too small for modern equipment and apparatuses and cannot properly store gear, adding to emergency response times. A facility reconfiguration would not completely solve this issue.
- The seven-acre Concord Public Works campus on Keyes Road, which has three buildings, is half the 14 acres that experts said are needed to meet program needs effectively. There isn’t proper storage for equipment and town vehicles, and the office space is insufficient.
A “new light”
“With these new properties coming potentially online and available, it’s kind of letting us view this in a new light,” Zammuto said.
The document is an initial discussion intended to “launch a community conversation,” she said.
Zammuto said the goal of the property matrix explores opportunities for “reuse or disposition, increasing tax revenue generation, and protecting and enhancing the diversity of housing stock … via affordable housing.”
“We’re developing a process to look at that more holistically,” Select Board chair Mary Hartman said.
That process will include a new “working group,” Hartman said. The Select Board has yet to define a charge, but Hartman gave a few hints about who she feels should be at the table.
She said she invited the Finance and School committees to attend the December 16 meeting because their input will be crucial as the town makes decisions about development and expanding municipal services.
“This is a complex problem, and we’re starting to get our arms around it,” Hartman said.
The working group would help create land-use recommendations that consider program needs and the site constraints of available properties, Zammuto said.
“For example, with police and fire, we’re going to be looking very closely at response times and weighing that appropriately,” Zammuto said. Officials will also consider environmental factors, like flood plains, “to match needs and optimize land use.”
“Unvetted” costs
Recommendations on land reuse and development will be prioritized and eventually added to the town’s 10-year capital plan, Zammuto said.
On the town side, the need reaches into the hundreds of millions of dollars, a department head wish list revealed last month.
Finance director Anthony Ansaldi qualified the November discussions on the 10-year capital needs by saying the figures provided were “unvetted” but would be ironed out ahead of Town Meeting requests.
The wish list includes $35 million for a new public safety building and $54 million for a public works campus.
A separate request would target $18 million in capital allocations over 10 years from Concord Public Schools.
Design costs will also cost millions with roughly $3.5 million for the police/fire building and another $5.4 million for the public works campus.
