‘Inflection point’: Town seeks $600K for land use planning

Town leaders are facing a traffic jam on the road to Acton’s future.

They want outside experts to vet recommended overhauls to public works, public safety, and municipal offices — and ask voters to approve $600,000 toward the bill. 

Officials tout what Finance Committee Chair Lois Wasoff recently termed a “unique moment” as sites like the shuttered state prison and Peabody School sit vacant.

A “yes” vote on Article 12 at this month’s Town Meeting will fund feasibility studies, cost estimates, and designs for things like a new West Acton fire headquarters, officials say. A “no” vote, they warn, could slow progress. 

Without these studies, Land Use Working Group Chair Sven Weber told The Acton Bridge, the process is “stuck,” and it would be “not a good sign” to the state as the town negotiates over the prison site. 

“We really are facing an inflection point,” Wasoff said.

Leaders bemoan the inefficiency of municipal offices scattered over more than a dozen properties. They say several are obsolete.

With Acton already years deep into determining how it might solve these problems, FinCom’s Don Kupka said during a March discussion that the $600,000 proposal felt like “floundering.”

“It’s far from floundering,” outgoing Select Board Chair Mark Howell said, arguing that the studies sought under the funding request are a direct follow-up to the findings of the town’s Land Use Working Group.

Kupka ultimately joined the majority of his colleagues in backing the request.

Town Meeting begins April 27.

‘The momentum is high’

Howell alluded to the children’s game “Rush Hour” in a recent call with The Acton Bridge. The puzzle takes inspiration from the kind of tie-ups Route 2 commuters know well and requires players to navigate a plastic car to an exit. Moving one vehicle can make room to slide another into place.

Acton planners are doing a similar exercise, freeing up space in some buildings as they shuffle municipal uses.

The Land Use Working Group relayed preliminary recommendations earlier this year. Among them:

• Moving public works headquarters onto 7.8 of the roughly 52 developable acres at the prison and the adjoining Junction Village property. 
• Relocating Fire Department headquarters to West Acton while the police renovate their HQ or build anew. 
• Consolidating municipal offices into an existing building. 

Article 12 would help determine whether the non-binding recommendations from the volunteer group’s subcommittees will work, Howell said.

Officials are also promising more public outreach.

The tab could run higher than the $600,000 requested under Article 12, but officials already have money in place to cover the budget, including money from the American Rescue Plan Act and a $125,000 allocation for public works planning that voters approved in 2014. 

MCI master planning

Select Board member Mary Hartman told The Bridge that she thought redeveloping the 2229 Main Street Superfund site would be “the big issue” of her first term. The 2024 prison closing changed things.

Now, Hartman worries 2229 Main is “kind of getting a pass” as attention shifts to MCI-Acton and the Superfund cleanup hits delays. 

The now-dissolved MCI Acton Advisory Group helped guide early prison conversations and worked with a consultant on a roughly $400,000 “vision plan.”

Separate from the studies under Town Meeting Article 12, officials are embarking on a new master plan that Howell said should deliver a zoning proposal this year.

The state still owns the land and plans to offload most of it to a developer. Local zoning could delineate where features such as housing, businesses, and open space would be permitted on the former prison campus. It will be the town’s most powerful tool to shape the redevelopment. 

The difference between the vision plan and the master plan, Howell said, is that the former was meant to “understand the different things that could be done with the property.” 

The master plan is intended to help officials sort through the ideas, he said, and pick an option. 

Officials expect to pay $550,000 for the MCI master plan using cash already approved at last year’s Town Meeting, more ARPA money, and a state earmark. 

A push for mixed use

There’s no prison rezoning plan on this year’s warrant. Officials think they might bring the proposal to next year’s Town Meeting, Howell told The Bridge.

State and local officials agree the MCI site should have housing. The vision plan sketched out one concept with up to 750 units. Howell said he thinks the count will fall below that, especially as hundreds of apartments come online elsewhere in West Acton.

Acton Business Partnership President Tyler Spring hopes for a project with retail, office space, and housing. 

“All I’ve seen since growing up in this town is that we’ve added a lot more residential units,” he told The Bridge. “We need more commercial.”

The state is also ramping up its process to eventually redesign Route 2 near the Acton rotary. 

As Howell wraps his tenure on the Select Board, he’s highlighting prison planning and says Concordians should keep their eyes out for options to weigh in.

“Big pieces of this are going to happen,” he said, in the weeks after Town Meeting wraps.