Above: Once again, voters will be asked to deal with how much money the Town should borrow to restore Breakneck Hill Conservation Land. (images from 2025 announcement and Town seal)
At Saturday’s Special Town Meeting, voters will be asked to rescind a portion of previously approved borrowing authorizations that the Select Board determined was larger than needed. But one of those requests is being questioned.
Last week, the Select Board rejected a request by the Stewardship Committee to leave an additional $100K available for the remaining work to restore and repair Breakneck Hill.
But don’t be surprised if an amendment is presented on Town Meeting floor.1
Article 6 is a request to rescind Unused Debt Authorizations by $1,102,960.
The second listed item under the Article is for the borrowing that was approved in 2022 to cover the Town’s study of Neary School as part of the prior effort to renovate or build a New Neary. $375,000 of that cost was covered by the MSBA (Mass School Building Authority).
The first bullet item in the Article is the one that is likely to prompt debate. That seeks to rescind $727,960 of the $4.33M that was borrowed for cleaning up an old farm dump on Breakneck Hill Conservation Land. (The hazardous cleanup was required under a consent order with the Mass Dept of Environmental Protection.)
The cleanup has been completed. And the rescinded authorization would still leave $176,000 in unspent funds for additional restoration work at the site.
Last week, the Select Board discussed the Stewardship Committee’s request to lower the rescind amount by $100K. That would bring it to the same level as the Select Board unsuccessfully requested be rescinded in the 2025 warrant. (Scroll down for more on that.)
Stewardship Committee members worried that since their project hasn’t gone out to bid yet, they don’t know how much the remaining work could cost.
Select Board Chair Kathy Cook and Vice Chair Andrew Pfaff recently visited the Conservation Land parcel. They described it as in good shape. Since the cleanup contractor’s work is done and paid out, they believed remaining funds would be plenty for any work still needed.
Board members noted that the original borrowing was for the remediation that was already done. They believed that if the committee wants to do more extensive work, they should propose that project to voters, possibly as a CPA project.
Stewardship Chair Joyce Greenleaf advocated that the original authorization was always meant to cover restoring the area “to meaningful and biodiverse habitat and repairing the damage done by the contractors”.
Greenleaf gave examples of the kinds of things they will be seeking to tackle depending on what comes back through the public bid process.
She described five areas where they believe restoration/repair work is still needed:
- Removing gravel left behind that is spilling into wetlands.
- Beecology Research Meadow repairs: The meadow was a big investment by the committee, planned and planned over a number of years. Several thousand feet of it “were essentially destroyed leaving soil that is so compacted from the heavy equipment we can’t plant into it.”
- Repairs where a path from to community gardens was widened, damaging some of the surrounding habitat.
- Creating biodiversity in the spot of the removed farm dump:
The farm dump has a potential for a vernal pool. That area it is now just planted with a what’s called a nurse crop or a cover crop, which is a rye grass. We’d want some biodiversity there, some meaningful habitat there. We need a plan for that. What plants? How many?
- Fixing the parking lot and driveway apron to the street. The heavy cleanup equipment caused “quite a lot of damage” to an area that Stewardship had “just redone” in the past several years.
The work that would actually get done would be prioritized and decided based on the results of the bids that come back.
One of the objections that Select Board members raised in their meeting last week was the timing of the request. Member Sam Stivers noted his disappointment that they waited so long to request a change on a Warrant that “has been out there since mid August”.
Greenleaf said that as a volunteer committee, “we meet as often and as quickly and efficiently as we can, but yes, our timing was imperfect.”
Stivers asked Greenleaf if the damage done by contractors should have been taken care of by them.
The Stewardship Chair described efforts her committee had made to get the contractors to avoid damage before they made it and fix damage as it was being done. But she said they ignored their requests.
She believed that as a result some of the contractor’s billing had been cancelled/returned due to the damage.
Conservation Agent Melissa Danza explained that the path Stewardship had wanted the contractors to take wasn’t wide enough for the large trucks. The contractors turned back $45K because issues they agreed that issues would be better handled by someone with expertise in habitat management.
She clarified that the contract didn’t cover some of the “afterwork” that Conservation always knew would be needed after the site was stabilized.
Pfaff argued that the afterwork described wasn’t part of the “four corners” of the original borrowing Articles. Those had only asked to cover the contracts for the the cleanup work, not this additional next phase.
The board unanimously rejected Stewardship’s request. They will ask to rescind $727,960.
As I noted this isn’t the board’s first attempt to rescind Breakneck Hill remediation borrowing.
In April of 2025, the Annual Town Meeting Warrant asked to rescind $627,960. Questions were raised on the floor about whether that would leave enough money to remediate the harm to the Conservation Land from the cleanup work. At the time, Danza was on leave. The Select Board had relied on a prior report from her and were unable to answer detailed questions. Voters indefinitely postponed the Article.
Once again, Special Town Meeting is set to open this Saturday, October 17th at 10:00 am. For more details on the meeting, check out my related posts here.
- Any voter at Town Meeting can make a motion to amend any Article. If seconded and accepted by the Moderator, the meeting is required to consider it. (The Town Moderator can reject an amendment as straying too far from the Warrant’s public notice to voters. But in this case, the request to reduce the rescind amount would clearly be within the “four corners” of the Article.)
