Above: To spur needed economic development along Route 9, the Select Board wants to tackle an infrastructure gap that Town Meeting voters rejected solving over 50 years ago. (images cropped from presentations)
Last month, the Select Board approved an ad hoc committee to focus on one of the issues hampering development of properties along Route 9 in Southborough. And as of this week, the board has already appointed 6 members to 7 seat Wastewater Study Committee.
The committee is expected to complete its work in less than 1½ years. The goal is:
developing a plan for providing wastewater treatment services-primarily to serve current and future commercial and industrial entities located along Rt 9 in Southborough. As part of this process, the WSC may additionally consider providing these services, as may be appropriate and economically feasible, for selected residential areas of Southborough and/or entities in other communities as part of a collaborative regional approach.
The WSC charge includes assessing the feasibility of such a system, and if such a system appears to be feasible, the WSC will create a high-level, comprehensive plan for the development of such a system.
The committee’s charge states a preference for members with experience in:
public finance (including wastewater project funding sources), civil engineering, wastewater treatment, construction, sanitation, or soils
Initially, the charge allowed non-residents to volunteer. That was to allow the DPW Superintendent a voting role and to cast a wider net to recruit expert participation. However, the Select Board forgot that Town bylaws don’t allow non-residents to vote on Town boards or committees.
The revised charge approved on Tuesday night struck the non-residential option and changed the DPW Superintendent’s role to a non-voting ex-officio position.
Fortunately, it appears the Town didn’t have trouble finding experts who live in town to volunteer. Joining Select Board members Al Hamilton and Sam Stivers (who have been leading the initial research), are:
- Two Civil Engineers:
- Brian Shea — who has formerly served on Town committees including the Select Board, and Advisory Committee
- Alan Belniak — a former member of the Economic Development Committee (EDC)
- Claire Reynolds — Who wrote the successful grant applications for and project managed two wastewater studies for Southborough. In her volunteer form, she wrote, “I have spent the last several years learning about wastewater, particularly in the context of the Town’s needs.”
- Bob Moss — a retired Real Estate developer who wrote that his experience includes “permitted, constructed and sold /rented approx. 600 houses, 500 apartments, 20 subdivisions, and an 18 hole golf course (Kettle Brook in Paxton) over the past 37 years. Permitted, built and owned /operated the Madison Place Southborough apartments including the private Waste Water Treatment Plant. Very knowledgeable on soil testing and wetland/conservation issues, local, state and federal permitting issues.”
In January, Hamilton made a presentation to the Select Board about the wastewater initiative. He explained that septic systems aren’t compatible (or are challenging for) many of the businesses Southborough needs to attract to reduce residential tax burdens.
Those industries include restaurants, grocery stores, Bio-Tech, and some types of manufacturing. At that time, he claimed, “We are the only community on Rt 9 between Boston and Goshen (pop 926) without municipal wastewater services”.
You can read about the working group’s research, initial steps, and planned direction here.
Since then, in a presentation to the Planning Board and update to the Select Board, he shared information from a rough analysis he conducted on properties along Route 9. The Select Board member claimed that around 167 acres are undeveloped or underdeveloped. (About 80% of that was undeveloped.)
He clarified that was excluding Park Central and EMC properties, and clearly undevelopable properties (too wet or owned by the state). He also noted that not all of the parcels are currently zoned for commercial use. (Some were split zoning parcels.)
Hamilton asserted that encouraging full development of the properties is needed to reverse the trend shifting greater financial tax burdens on residential homeowners.
In the February 24th discussion with the Planning Board, Hamilton pitched the positive economic impact that a big box store (like Home Depot) or supermarket (like Whole Foods or Wegman’s) would bring. The board was generally supportive of the project concept. But Marnie Hoolahan and Lisa Braccio expressed skepticism about the potential for attracting brick and mortar retailers.
Braccio said that she believed the demographics including population and the number of businesses in town play a big role in determining where retailers invest in locating stores.
Hoolahan spoke about the post-Covid shift to “omnichannel” and digital resourcing. She said land is used differently for storage of cloud and server capacity. She followed:
wastewater treatment makes a lot of sense but I also don’t want to put false pretense around what can be done and what could be done in the future.
Although the project would be expensive, the hope is that the costs would be covered by the wastewater treatment system users. And to help cover initial costs, the Town will seek state grant funding.
As for the location of a potential plant, Hamilton said that it could be anywhere in town, but they wouldn’t site it in a residential neighborhood. He claimed that it doesn’t need to be close to the source. He shared that the group was eyeing the potential siting of a treatment center between the north and south lanes of Route 495. That would avoid upset by neighbors. But, they hadn’t yet spoken with anyone at MassDOT about the possibility.
Resident Paul Carter later cautioned that if the plant isn’t placed where “you can get things by gravity”, then it would require the additional expense and maintenance of a pumping station. He spoke about the engineering challenges for a project and encouraged getting the DPW chief involved since he would need to see the project through. Hamilton assured that DPW’s Superintendent Bill Cundiff was deeply involved from the outset.
Earlier in the discussion, longtime resident and developer Jack Bartolini filled in some historical gaps for Planning members wondering how the town “got here”. He recalled that a study was conducted in 1970 by Robert Charles of East Boston. A project would have hooked up Southborough MWRA’s wastewater treatment system through Framingham.
He described that as voted down by Town Meeting based on fear the Town would grow to 10,000 people. “We were afraid of the future.” He said that the Board of Health made several attempts to bring the initiative back before giving up.
