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Williamstown's Spruces Committee Looking for Design Help

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Spruces Land Use Committee this month moved forward with hiring an engineer to work on plans for converting the former mobile home park to a community amenity.
 
At its June 15 meeting, the committee agreed to send a request for proposals to three firms. It's looking for help with wetlands delineation and a conceptual design for playing fields, a community garden, a bicycle loop and or any other items that might fit on 42 acres of the former Spruces property.
 
Town meeting in May agreed to give the committee $41,500 in Community Preservation Act funds for the predevelopment work.
 
The committee hopes to have an proposal for the first phase of development available for a vote at annual town meeting 2017.
 
Committee member Elizabeth Bartels stressed the importance of getting two conceptual plans with budget estimates for different elements of the project.
 
"Sometimes it's good to say you don't want a lump sum," she said. "You want items estimated. If we're trying to determine what our first project would be, it's important to know that.
 
"If we think our project might be two athletic fields, we'll want to get our arms around what the project would cost."
 
Andrew Hogeland agreed.
 
"My thought was we'd essentially get a menu with prices on it," he said in a meeting telecast on the town's community access television station, WilliNet. "If we have 13 or 14 items, it would be nice to have dollar amounts attached to each one."
 
The committee agreed that Hogeland, who helped get the $41,500 estimate last winter for the committee's CPA application, should work on an RFP with Town Manager Jason Hoch, the town's procurement officer. Hogeland said there is an exemption in the commonwealth's procurement laws for architects and engineers, so the committee does not have to go through a formal procurement process.
 
"But [Hoch] thought it might be wiser to get competitive bids from at least two or three," Hogeland said. And the rest of the committee agreed.

Members agreed to set a three-week deadline for the return of proposals and hopes to make a decision about who to hire by the middle of July.

"The wetlands delineation shouldn't take that long," Hogeland said. "I think we have a schedule where we could do conceptual plans in the fall and winter."
 
September could see the completion of one project on the site: the planting of native flora to help shade the 400-foot drainage swale in the southwest corner of the property.
 
The committee last week voted 5-0 to approve a planting plan from the Hoosic River Watershed Association. Town meeting last month gave HooRWA $9,140 in CPA funds toward the project, which will employ volunteer labor provided by Williams College undergrads.
 
HooRWA will bring its proposal to the Conservation Commission and the Board of Selectmen for their final blessing later this summer.
 
In other business last Wednesday, the committee discussed a proposal by member Nicholas Wright to set aside between up to seven or eight acres of the property for a food pantry agricultural area.
 
Wright explained that he walked off a portion of the property that he thinks would work for that use but said soil tests will need to be done to determine if the soils are suitable for food production.
 
Although part of the land in question was formerly occupied by mobile homes, Wright noted that there is a significant history of community gardens in urban locations, so there is no reason to assume the ground is unusable.
 
"The standard test will deal with lead," Wright said. "But my sense of everyone I've talked to is it's so far from Route 2 and lead has been out of gasoline for so long that this shouldn't be an issue."
 
Coincidentally, the committee had on its agenda a request from Williams College planning professor Sarah Gardner, who was looking for a project for her students for the fall.
 
The committee agreed to have Chairman Thomas Hyde talk with Gardner about whether they could construct a research project focusing on the agricultural piece.

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Mount Greylock School Committee Votes Slight Increase to Proposed Assessments

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Thursday voted unanimously to slightly increase the assessment to the district's member towns from the figures in the draft budget presented by the administration.
 
The School Committee opted to lower the use of Mount Greylock's reserve account by $70,000 and, instead, increase by that amount the share of the fiscal year 2025 operating budget shared proportionally by Lanesborough and Williamstown taxpayers.
 
The budget prepared by the administration and presented to the School Committee at its annual public hearing on Thursday included $665,000 from the district's Excess and Deficiency account, the equivalent of a municipal free cash balance, an accrual of lower-than-anticipated expenses and higher-than-anticipated revenue in any given year.
 
That represented a 90 percent jump from the $350,000 allocated from E&D for fiscal year 2024, which ends on June 30. And, coupled with more robust use of the district's tuition revenue account (7 percent more in FY25) and School Choice revenue (3 percent more), the draw down on E&D is seen as a stopgap measure to mitigate a spike in FY25 expenses and an unsustainable budgeting strategy long term, administrators say.
 
The budget passed by the School Committee on Thursday continues to rely more heavily on reserves than in years past, but to a lesser extent than originally proposed.
 
Specifically, the budget the panel approved includes a total assessment to Williamstown of $13,775,336 (including capital and operating costs) and a total assessment to Lanesborough of $6,425,373.
 
As a percentage increase from the FY24 assessments, that translates to a 3.90 percent increase to Williamstown and a 3.38 percent increase to Lanesborough.
 
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