‘HOPE IT GOES AWAY’
Residents blast proposed warehouse in East Chelmsford
CHELMSFORD >> Since Mercury Systems moved out of Chelmsford in 2017, the buildings they once occupied on Riverneck Road have remained empty.
Developer Davis Cos. hopes to change that, buying 191, 195, 199-201 Riverneck Road in 2021 under DIV Riverneck LLC. Residents, however, are less than thrilled about the company’s proposal.
While there is not yet a tenant, Davis Cos. plans to build a 247,860-square-foot “flex” warehouse on the combined four lots. That includes several hundred parking spaces and 25 active loading bays, reduced from the original 50.
Locals have been outspoken about their disapproval of the project. Many, including Armen Jeknavorian, “hope it goes away” or that developers come back with something different.
Jeknavorian lives on a small residential street that sits off Riverneck Road, about a fourminute drive from the proposed warehouse site. He often drives on Riverneck to visit his parents across town, so when he first heard about the development, he said he felt it was “quite concerning.”
For starters, Jeknavorian said a 250,000-square-foot warehouse just seemed “too big.” The Chelmsford Mall at 265 Chelmsford St. is about 241,000 square feet, according to the town assessor’s database.
But it’s the potential increase in trucks, as drivers come and go from the site, that’s a major concern for Jeknavorian, so much so that he’s gone out to different segments of Riverneck Road — “a narrow, curvy road,” he called it — to measure the width of the lanes. The lanes average about 10 to 11 feet, he said, but it’s about 8 feet wide where he lives.
The developers estimate that about 40 “Class 8 or above” trucks will make daily roundtrips.
Jeknavorian set up a trail camera at various locations to capture truck activity on Riverneck Road last year, sharing that footage on his Youtube channel Stopriverneckroad.
“It’s just common sense,” he said. “I’ll do whatever I can, realistically, to show the Planning Board that this doesn’t belong here.”
After complaints about increased trucks traveling on Riverneck Road, Davis Cos. is now proposing to grant trucks access to the site via the nearby access road off Apollo Drive, which has solely been used by firefighters and police.
For people like Katie Melville, of Monmouth Street, that means allowing trucks to travel just 70 feet from the edge of her property, from 5 a.m. to 12 a.m. And because of the company’s truck definition, it could mean that smaller box trucks are not lim
ited to the same number of daily trips, she said.
“It’s only taking the highest ratings off Riverneck, and it’s not getting rid of them, it’s just shoving the problem on someone else in an even worse way, on a quiet street that has no traffic,” Melville, a Town Meeting representative, said. “It’s not eliminating any problems, it’s spreading out the problem to affect more people in a worse way.”
Melville said she’s heard some residents say they might move if the project is approved.
In researching the use of similar large-scale warehouses, Chris Lavallee, a Town Meeting representative and resident of Edgewood Street, said he came to the conclusion that most are used as distribution and fulfillment centers.
At a recent Town Meeting, Lavallee helped redefine the term “warehouse” and use table in the town’s bylaws, but the Riverneck Road project has been “grandfathered in,” meaning those changes can’t apply here. Lavallee is now advocating to change how the plans define trucks to include other types of vehicles which he said may be smaller but could “be just as destructive.”
Lavallee said he hopes the developer could work alongside residents “in a more collaborative way” and be more forward with their plans.
“They’re using their words very carefully,” Lavallee said of Davis. “While it may not be a last-mile distribution center, it may very well be a distribution center. There are many types of distribution centers, not just last-mile, and so we want to make sure it’s no distribution center.”
Sean Campbell grew up on Monmouth Street and now lives in his childhood home. His father, David, is a former Chelmsford firefighter who frequented that fire lane “for decades” and shared his frustrations with it, Campbell wrote in an email.
Campbell stated the residents on his street and in the surrounding area agreed with the town to allow the fire lane to be built off Apollo Drive, because it was just for emergencies. But now, Davis seems to be “breaking previous promises without a care,” he wrote.
At the latest public hearing on Jan. 25 — the seventh concerning the project — Jeknavorian brought copies of meeting minutes from the 1980s to share the intended purpose of the road. Jeknavorian said he believes a “precedent” has been set, despite no official easement being issued.
Evan Belansky, the Chelmsford community
suffer from long COVID, which is defined as having COVID symptoms four weeks or more after the initial infection. Symptoms can include fatigue, fever, and a variety of respiratory, heart, neurological, and digestive symptoms.
The researchers for the study analyzed data from more than 32,000
with CTE grab headlines, we want to remind people at risk for CTE that those experiences are in the minority,” said Ann Mckee, director of the BU CTE Center and chief of neuropathology at VA Boston Healthcare System.
“Your symptoms, whether or not they are related to CTE, likely can be treated, and you should seek medical care,” Mckee added. “Our clinical team has had success treating
is 3.3% higher than the same period of FY2022. The decrease in non-withholding income tax is most likely the result of passthrough entity members utilizing credits to reduce income tax payments and weakness in financial markets in calendar year 2022. The increase in sales and use tax reflects, in part, continued strength in retail sales and the increase in corporate and business tax is primarily due to an increase in estimated payments and a favorable decrease in refunds.” development director, said the emergency access road does not appear to have any specific deed restrictions, conditions or “other specific language” around the use of that road, despite the possible promise to neighbors that it would remain emergency-only.
While “the spirit and intent appears to be pretty clear,” Belansky said that doesn’t prevent Davis Cos. from legally amending the decision.
“What that means is that there’s a legal mechanism in which the decision and the plan can be modified, which is what Davis
female nurses in the Nurses’ Health Study II, which had data on their lifestyle from 2015 and 2017 along with their COVID infection history from April 2020 to November 2021.
During that time, more than 1,900 participants contracted COVID. Among these individuals, 44% developed long COVID. Compared
former football players with mid-life mental health and other symptoms.”
Research on CTE has advanced considerably over the past five years, and the BU CTE Center will soon publish its 182nd study on CTE.
In part because of advances in CTE research, the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke recently updated their position on
Fiscal 2023 tax collections are still ahead of the year-to-date benchmark, but that gap is closing. Heading into January, tax collections were $1.087 billion or 6.5% more than what had been expected to that point. After January, state revenue is now $922 million or 4.4% ahead of yearto-date expectations.
And the monthly benchmark that was missed (as well as the year-to-date one) is now outdated since Administration and Finance Matthew Gorzkowicz last week upgraded the current year’s final revenue estimate by $151 million. DOR said new benchmarks will be ready by the time February revenues are reported in early March.
Before marking up fiscal 2023 revenues by just 0.4%, Gorzkowicz acknowledged that he was not confident the $1 billion over-benchmark dynamic would continue and said, “we need to be cautious as we look at the second half of the year where the largest amount of tax collections are, and understand how much of that might be timing that we’re was presenting,” Belansky said. “If the Planning Board decision clearly had a condition in there that said, ‘The emergency access road shall remain in perpetuity,’ then the context of that meeting’s conversation would be entirely different.”
Town Counsel Paul Haverty, a partner at Blatman, Bobrowski, Haverty and Silverstein focusing on real estate and land development, echoed Belansky’s statement.
“It would have to have had an expressed condition that says ‘use of this roadway is limited to
to women without any healthy lifestyle factors, those with five or six had a 49% lower risk of long COVID.
Among the six lifestyle factors, maintaining a healthy body weight and getting adequate sleep — 7 to 9 hours daily — were the ones most strongly associated with a lower risk of long COVID.
what causes CTE: “CTE is a delayed neurodegenerative disorder that was initially identified in postmortem brains and, research-todate suggests, is caused in part by repeated traumatic brain injuries.”
“We’d like to thank our 1,330 donor families for teaching us what we now know about CTE, and our team and collaborators around the world working to advance diagnostics and treatments for CTE,”
seeing in the first half of collections.”
Snyder said recently that a big factor in the abovebenchmark performance to that point was that the amount of credits claimed by pass-through entity members was lower than expected, “which we do expect to reverse in the second half of this fiscal year.”
He explained the passthrough entity, or PTE, excise issue and how it affects state revenue reporting during the consensus revenue hearing in late January. PTES generally do not pay tax on their income, he said. Instead, their income is passed through to the members, who then pay taxes on their share of the entity’s income.
In response to the federal 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s $10,000 cap on state and local taxes that can be deducted at the federal level, Massachusetts lawmakers in 2021 created a work-around.
The fiscal 2022 budget included a provision to allow DOR to implement an optional PTE excise — meaning taxes would apply at the
to support 40 companies and have filed or been issued 14 patents.
In Differencemaker, the Green Fertilizer team worked with Umass Lowell mechanical engineering associate professor Juan Pablo Trelles and electrical engineering associate professor Cordula Schmid to develop the product. Their efforts won praise and $4,000 from the program, which honored the team in 2021 with its Commitment to a Sustainable Environment emergency access only,’” Haverty said.
Campbell wrote he’s also frustrated by Davis’s perceived lack of care for the residents and their feedback. The company has held three community meetings with residents, the last of which focused on the Apollo Drive suggestion, but Campbell wrote the conversations just felt like a to-do list.
“It seems at some point the Davis Companies realized they needed a new way for accessing this mega warehouse they intend to build,” he wrote, “so they came up with an
The results also showed that even among women who developed long COVID, those with a healthier pre-infection lifestyle had a 30% lower risk of having symptoms that interfered with their daily life.
“In the past decades, scientists have accumulated evidence that healthy lifestyle is good for overall health,” said lead author
Mckee said.
Mckee and her team are inviting former athletes, including women, to participate in research studies designed to learn how to diagnose and treat CTE.
The BU CTE Center is collaborating with its education and advocacy partner the Concussion Legacy Foundation to recruit former football players and other contact sport athletes to five active clinical studies.
entity level rather than after income was passed through — and a corresponding tax credit equal to 90% of the member’s portion of the excise.
But the time between when an entity pays the excise and when its members claim the credits has essentially inflated state revenue numbers on a temporary basis. DOR has been pointing out that “most of the increase in collections associated with the PTE excise is temporary” and adjusting for it in its monthly revenue reports for more than a year.
“Our experience to date with PTE excise indicates that a significant amount of the member credits generated from the excise collections received in the current fiscal year are not realized until the taxpayer files their return in the following fiscal year,” Snyder said. “Because the PTE excise was enacted during Fiscal Year 22, the result is an estimated one-time revenue increase of approximately $1.4 billion in FY22.”
That gain is thought to be a “one-time timing event,”
award.
With the additional support of an $8,000 grant from the university’s Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy, the team began refining the fertilizer system last year at Umass Lowell’s O’leary Library Green Roof and Rist Urban Agriculture Greenhouse and Farm, in partnership with Mill City Grows.
“The Green Fertilizer team was selected from the university’s Sustainability Encouragement idea to run a road through people’s backyards.”
Planning Board member Annita Tanini has lived in East Chelmsford her entire life and said they need to find the right kind of business for the property.
Though she’s unable to vote on the project, Tanini said developers should find a suitable use for the site, like biotech companies, small manufacturers, private schools and medical facilities.
“No one is saying, ‘Don’t build something here.’ I don’t think anybody has ever said that,” Tanini said. “However, come to the table and let’s negotiate, what works for them and what works for the developer. There’s plenty of room for compromise, but it’s been clear that Davis, at least in the last 18 months, haven’t been willing to compromise.”
In a statement, Davis Cos. wrote they will continue to listen to those impacted by the project.
“Davis has continued to work with our neighbors and local stakeholders to determine the most appropriate development plan for our Riverneck Road site,” the company wrote. “These discussions are ongoing and we look forward to sharing more details as plans for the site progress.”
A representative from Davis said the company does not wish to comment further “until plans are finalized.”
Siwen Wang, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition. “However, in the U.S. for example, 70% of the population do not have a healthy body weight and 30% do not sleep enough. Findings from this study suggest that simple lifestyle changes, such as having adequate sleep, may be beneficial for the prevention of long COVID.”
One of the studies, Project S.A.V.E., is recruiting men and women ages 50 or older who played 5-plus years of a contact sport, including football, ice hockey, soccer, lacrosse, boxing, full contact martial arts, rugby and wrestling.
To learn more about Project S.A.V.E. and four other studies enrolling participants, visit www. bu.edu/cte/our-research/ clinical-research/.
the revenue commissioner said, because DOR expects that “a significant portion of PTE excise payments collected in the current fiscal year will be offset by member credits that were generated by the excise payments remitted in the prior fiscal year.”
“Looking forward, you will have payments and credits pretty much in balance on a going forward basis,” he said last month. “That’s why our estimated PTE effect in 23 was a minus $13 million — de minimis, if you will — and $102 million for FY24, but relative to billions still small.”
When DOR released a study of the idea of a PTE excise and credit as a SALT deduction cap in March 2021, the department estimated that roughly 55,500 Massachusetts personal income tax filers would benefit and could save up to an average of $20,158 in federal taxes annually or a combined $1.12 billion. DOR said that the excise would be “revenue neutral for Massachusetts, or slightly revenue positive.”
and Enrichment Development (SEED) Fund based on the technical strengths of their project and the students’ continuous refinement of the technology,” said Ruairi O’mahony, the Rist Institute for Sustainability and Energy’s executive director. “Innovation support through Rist Differencemakers and then practical, community-based implementation through the Rist institute, are hallmarks of the unique Umass Lowell approach.”