We have coming before us at Town Meeting the so-called "25% design" for the Concord portion of the Bruce Freeman Railtrail (BFRT). It comes with a request by the Board of Selectmen to accept the plan, and allow them to send it to the State for comment. Articles 27 and 28 are different designs ; Article 29 asks the entire trail to be paved with asphalt; Article 30 asks for additional funds for more planning.
The 25% design was supposed to be the initial plan for the 3.5 miles of abandoned right-of-way from the now-defunct Framingham and Lowell/Old Colony Railroad line. Instead, it's a sketchy thing that isn't even quite a plan, starting and ending somewhere in the middle of its intended span. It completely avoids dealing with the necessary Route 2 crossing and with crossing the active railroad tracks at Commonwealth Avenue. It does not join up with Acton to the north or Sudbury to the south. It does not address amelioration of the hazardous waste along the trail, and it avoids dealing with the problems of keeping people from disturbing the fragile ecosystem at White Pond as it passes by. In other words, it's just a fraction of the job -- and only the easiest parts at that.
This is a great disappointment to us, as it is to much of the community. What kind of design work is this? How can Town Meeting make wise decisions based on such a a half-baked plan?
What in the World is an "8.33% Design"?
We'd like to coin a phrase here: "The 8.33% design." Because that's what we have been presented with: about one-third of a 25% design (25% divided by three is approximately 8.33%). We know this has been called a 25% design, but that seems like such
a misnomer. Like "family values" and "moral majority" -- say it
often enough, it seems to take on some meaning. But when you really think about
it, what the heck are we actually talking about? A two-thirds missing design is what we have in hand to vote on. It's not even the majority of the work that we're being presented with, yet we're being asked to approve this plan.
What is so important about
rushing this to the State at this time? Isn't it more important to do
the whole 25% job, and to do it well? This trail will be with us for
many, many years. What is the point of such haste?
Some say that we will not have a seat at the table with MassHighway in planning the Route 2 Rotary redesign if we don't submit the "plan" now. Ditto the MBTA about the train crossing at Commonwealth Avenue. And that having spent $160,000, submitting a plan now shows we are "serious" and deserve funding as soon as it might become available (none is currently allocated by the State, by the way).
If we are trying to demonstrate that Concord is "serious" about
having a railtrail, we think this showing MassHighway this plan could actually be counter-productive. No plan before us at Town Meeting involves these two crossings. Submitting this "plan" to the State now would show we DON'T actually HAVE a plan. Why should the State care to negotiate the particulars of these two crossings with us if we haven't anything to negotiate with, such as knowing what we prefer? We've opted out from such discussions.
The fact that we spent $160,000 doesn't in and of itself doesn't show we are
"serious" if we can't demonstrate that we did the job we set out to
do. The only thing it shows is that we can spend money without full results. To submit just a little of the 25% design is again a counter-productive demonstration to the State of how ready we are NOT to be at the front of the funding line. "We didn't manage to get nearly what we wanted with $160,000, but give us $4-5 million to spend, and we're sure to to do better with that" is downright embarrassing for Concord.
Concord's Town Meeting needs to vote down all of the design options (Articles 27 and 28). We should send them back to the drawing board to be completed, and then bring them back to Town Meeting for approval before they are submitted to the State.
To ask this is not wasteful or dishonoring of the work already done.
If it takes more than two years to do the job right, then let's take
more than two years. The only dishonor is in doing only part of the job and allowing the State to foist much of the rest of the plan upon us.
Let's Give 'Em More Money!
What about more money for completing the plan, which is the intent of Article 30? In 2006, Concord's Annual Town Meeting approved $160,000 for a 25% design of
Concord's portion of the trail. This was the sum requested by the BFRT Committee. It wasn't just a number picked out of the air: it was determined concretely based upon actual anticipated costs and a specific scope of work. It was not mentioned to Town Meeting that only an fraction of a 25% plan would be generated using these funds.
So where's the rest of the plan? We got just an 8.33% design though 100% of the allotted funds have been used. Here is a list of what the State expects in a 25% design. The planners haven't fully fulfilled even the first item on this list, having utterly neglected to have communicated even once with the West Concord Village Overlay Committee.
Article 30 asks for even more money to finish the job: $35-$50,000 from the Town's Treasury is the anticipated request at this time (the scope of the article as stated in the Warrant is such that no more than $50,000 can be requested). Though we only got a small fraction of planning done with $160,000, we are asked to believe that a mere sliver of that sum is going to get us a
plan for the other two-thirds of the 25% design. And for ALL the far more
difficult stretches of the trail? It simply beggers the imagination that this sum can suddenly get the rest of the job done.
But if this is true, what we want to know is this: why couldn't we get this $35-50,000 bargain
for the 8.33% design? Town Meeting would probably have gladly approved twice that amount for the other two-thirds of the design job still unfinished.
The large-scale failure to get the job done with the funds the BFRT Committee already expended needs to be fully and credibly explained to all of us before further aspects of this project should be granted funding. We will also need to know what corrections have been made to the process to produce far greater levels of success using any future funding.
Art Credits: Photos courtesy of Rich Stevenson ©2007. For more of them, see here. Page designed by Windfall.
