Williamstown's Spruces Committee Picks Guntlow for Engineering Work
Spruces Land Use Committee Chairman Thomas Hyde, left, and committee member Nicholas Wright participate in Wednesday's meeting.
The committee received two bids for the work, which is being funded from Community Preservation Act funds awarded at May's annual town meeting.
Williamstown-based Guntlow submitted a bid of $36,500. Foresight Land Services of Pittsfield's bid was $50,000, above the $41,500 in CPA funds available for the project.
"So we'd need to ask the town for the difference [if Foresight was selected]?" Chairman Thomas Hyde asked.
Committee member Andrew Hogeland said that would be one solution, or the town could try to negotiate with Foresight. The committee members agreed there were elements of the firm's written scope of work that could be pared down.
But in the end, the members decided they were happy with the Guntlow proposal.
"Guntlow refers to their familiarity with the project, covers exactly what we want done and comes in at a price we can afford," David Rempell said.
Hogeland noted that the quoted rate allows for a small contingency budget if more predevelopment work is needed.
The committee is charged with developing a plan to utilize the flood-prone former mobile home park, which came into the town's possession as part of a federal Hazard Mitigation Grant negotiated between the town, the park's former owner and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA restricts what can be done with the land, from which the town removed the abandoned mobile homes and concrete pads.
Based on input from a townwide survey, the committee is looking at a variety of uses ranging from recreation — playing fields, biking trails and the like — to agriculture.
Town officials expect that any amenities placed on the site would be phased in over a period of years rather than hitting the town with one big expenditure.
Hogeland noted at Wednesday's meeting that the town should ask Guntlow to work on an accelerated timeline if the town wants to start implementing its plan in the 2017 calendar year.
"We had been anticipating we might ask for CPA funds in December," Hogeland said. "We would need most of this work — at least the part that tells us how much we need to ask for for a particular project -- before then."
The committee agreed to ask the town's procurement officer, Town Manager Jason Hoch, to enter negotiations with Guntlow with an eye toward getting the engineering work started — and finished — as soon as possible.
Committee member Nicholas Wright told his colleagues about work he has been doing to explore the possibility of establishing a food pantry agricultural area on seven to eight acres of the Spruces site.
At its June meeting, Wright showed the committee a map suggesting where a vegetable garden and/or orchard could be located.
On Wednesday, he told the panel that soil samples had been collected by Williams College students, and the samples are being tested for heavy metals, including PCBs. Eventually, Wright said he plans to submit samples to the University of Massachusetts Extension lab to test for soil quality.
Meanwhile, Wright said he reached out to Wendy Krom of the Berkshire Interfaith Food Pantry in Pittsfield about the demand for locally grown produce.
"She reassured me that the distribution for foods now in place for small farms and people who contribute to pantries could accommodate anything we could produce," Wright said. "Wendy was quite excited about the possibility of having more food to distribute."
Wright also said he planned to talk to the New England Small Farm Institute in Belchertown to explore the possibility of the town leasing part of the Spruces parcel to a farmer who could use it to produce food for sale and for donation to the pantry. Wright floated the idea of establishing a community-supported agriculture farm at the site — close to town for residents who are older and who may find it more convenient than the town's established CSA farm, Caretaker Farm on Hancock Road (Route 43).
Hogeland thought that the town should be sensitive to existing agricultural operations.
"My concern is if we're going to do something with subsidizing a farm operation, we don't want to somehow give an advantage to a new farm at the expense of an existing operation, all of which are struggling," Hogeland said. "If we don't put in a whole lot of public funding, maybe it's OK. But let's make sure we're not going down a path that raises these issues."
In other business on Wednesday, the committee received an update from Hyde about the Hoosic River Watershed Association's plan to plant native plants along a drainage swale on the southwest corner of the property.
Hyde said the association, which received a separate allotment of CPA funds, is acquiring 1,000 plants from North Branch Landscape in Stamford, Vt. HooRWA will have a volunteer crew of Williams students plant the specimens starting Sept. 1.
Tags: conserved land, CPA, Spruces,
