Council to mayor: New Cass Park plan is needed

Councilors concerned with field capacity, ability of gravel to cover costs

WOONSOCKET — Members of the City Council are telling Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt to come back with better plans for the Cass Park athletic complex before they decide whether to support the project.

During a roughly hourlong Zoom meeting Wednesday, council members expressed concerns similar to those school officials have already expressed about the project; namely, that it may not provide all the field capacity of Barry Field for various high school sports.

Despite the administration’s plans to finance the project through the sale of gravel excavated from Cass Park, at least one member expressed concerns that the gravel might just not be enough. Council Vice President John Ward, for example, did an offhand estimate that the project might cost about $3.5 million, a figure Public Works Director Steve D’Agostino said was “in the ballpark.”

“I recognize there are steps, but if you commit to doing something not knowing the total cost, or at least an estimate... I don’t want to say you’re putting the cart before the horse, because I’ve used that already, but you’re putting yourself in a situation with too many unknowns,” Ward said.

But Baldelli-Hunt offered a spirited defense of the criticism leveled against the project regarding field capacity. Contradicting the claims of school officials, the mayor said Cass Park – with a softball field, a track oval and a football field with nighttime illumination – would provide high school athletes with field capacity comparable to Barry Field.

“There are no lights at Barry Field,” the mayor said. “At Cass Park there will be lights... You can have multiple practices. You don’t have to have everything end at 4:30 or 5 in the afternoon.”

The mayor also observed that the high school does not use Barry Field for baseball, softball or tennis.

“And if for some reason you need additional space, we have the ability to utilize fields that are closer to the high school than having students have to get up to Barry Field,” she said, pointing to River’s Edge Athletic Complex of the fields between the twin middle schools.

But much of the discussion focused on the only rendering of the Cass Park project councilors have seen so far – the same one distributed when the gravel-quarrying component of the project was announced last October. Several members said it’s insufficient to make an informed judgment about field capacity one way or the other.

“If I have any criticism for the folks at the school department, frankly, it’s that they commented at all,” Councilman James Cournoyer said at one point.

The back-and-forth turned briefly terse when Councilman Roger G. Jalette told the mayor he felt as if he was wasting his time continuing to discuss to project based on the available plans. Toward the end of the discussion, he said he hadn’t heard anything new and he wouldn’t discuss the mayor’s “dream” again until he saw some solid conceptual plans drawn up by a professional engineer.

“Until then, we are all wasting our time discussing how we’re going to sell dirt we might not even have to sell,” Jalette said.

Baldelli-Hunt shot back, “It’s not a waste of time, okay? And it’s not a dream.”

“It can become a reality and the reason it’s on the docket tonight is to give people the opportunity to speak about it,” she said.

The core principle behind Baldelli-Hunt’s plan to redevelop roughly 10 percent of Cass Park’s 66 acres as an athletic complex is to concentrate field capacity conveniently close to Woonsocket High School. The mayor favors another component to the plan – the sale of Barry Field – but that would require some complex maneuvering, legally and politically, due to deed covenants restricting the use of the parcel. Moreover, Baldelli-Hunt says selling Barry Field is not essential to move forward with Cass Park.

Though members of the council are calling for more lucid plans, the city has already hired the Pare Corporation to complete some preliminary engineering work to show grade elevations and the delineation of wetlands. As previously discussed at a meeting last month, the city paid the Lincoln company about $29,000 for the work, which also covered the cost of taking the soil borings from Cass Park that confirmed the availability of marketable gravel, according to D’Agostino.

Regardless of whether the council ultimately supports the Cass Park project, D’Agostino said the money already spent hasn’t been wasted. Some of the work Pare is doing – the wetlands delineation, for example – must be completed before the comprehensive engineering plan councilors are looking for can be crafted.

While they don’t have sufficient details to endorse the Cass Park plan, some members of the council find much to support in the general idea of it.

“I don’t think anybody disagrees with the concept of siting our athletic fields in closer proximity to the high school for the Villa Novans to play football, track, field, etc.,” Cournoyer said. “You won’t get an argument, I don’t think, from anybody on that. It’s motherhood and apple pie.”

But Council President Dan Gendron may have summed up the council’s concern best when he described the current plan as little more than “a real nice picture.”

“I don’t want to keep talking about something that is, quite honestly, a dream right now,” he said. “Looking at the rendering, the picture of the football field and the track around it, it looks great.” But he added, “This picture could be Cass Park, Globe Park – it could be in another state. p

“It’s a real nice picture and it shows a club house but no reference to where it really is in Cass Park, so it’s a little bit tough to understand,” he said. “I would like to see something a little bit more complete and comprehensive.”

D’Agostino promised he would provide the councilors with what they’re looking for. In the meantime, he said the administration is moving closer to issuing a request for proposals from excavation companies to begin removing gravel from the site.

Though it hadn’t been scheduled as of press time, the council will hold another meeting on the Cass Park project with the School Committee within a few days, according to Gendron.