DCR Buying 170 Acres Off Henderson Road in Clarksburg
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| Planners Karin Roberts, Chair Tom Bona and Dan Tanner look over a map of the parcels. |
CLARKSBURG, Mass. — The Planning Board last Thursday signed a form A that cleared the way for the state to purchase nearly 170 acres of undeveloped land.
The state Department of Conservation and Recreation is planning to purchase a total of 250 abutting acres in Clarksburg and the town of Florida. The purchase was on the Florida Select Board's agenda on Wednesday night.
Steve Salvini of Salvini Associates Land Surveyors of Chester and Westfield attended the meeting to represent DCR.
"To preserve it because it's going to adjoin other land that they have up on top," Salvini explained to a query from the board. "They buy land all over the place, and they don't want anything to happen to it. They want it to remain the way it is."
The land is owned by the Gallup Nominee Realty Trust, part of what had once been the Gallup farm. The form A separated 31.78 acres with frontage on Henderson Road from 169.79 acres of steep woodlands that meets the Florida border near the Hoosac Wind Project. The cost of the purchase is not known yet.
Salvini said his firm had been hired by the state to do the surveying, which began last winter. He said it was a lot of work because they had to set the pins every 400 feet on lines longer than 800.
"We had to set somewhere in the vicinity of 47 or 48 pins," he said.
The planners were interested in how the sale of so much acreage might affect the tax rate. But Chair Thomas Bona he'd checked and the assessed value for the entire piece was $16,380, which was maybe $300 in property taxes.
That's because the property has been designated as 61A, agriculture, for decades despite, as far as the board knew, not producing any agricultural products. Now that the property is separated into two parcels, the remaining 32 acres could be reassessed while the state's portion will likely revert 61B, recreational.
"The plan will go to assessor and then she's going to look at that," said Bona, who also sits on the Board of Assessors. "They're going to have to do a new deed, and that's when the assessor usually picks it up. ...
"We'll sit down in our meeting and say, OK, this isn't 61A anymore. So then the assessed value will change."
The planners believed this would likely mean a higher assessed value, and therefore more property taxes than had been paid annually to date.
The board endorsed, rather than approved, because as Salvini explained, it was being presented as an ANR, approval not required. "It doesn't fall under subdivision control," he said, "because it has a lot that has frontage and area, and there's no road being put in, so it falls under the approval not required, and you're endorsing the fact that it doesn't need the approval."
The new lot abuts the Clarksburg Cemetery on the north side and has more than 500 feet of frontage.
Tags: DCR, land sales, Planning Board, state land,
