Time for honest talk about Boathouse Park
I was enthusiastic at the outset about the prospect of Boathouse Park in Stonington, a public park at the gateway into Mystic, opening new vistas for arriving tourists, creating water access for town residents and a home for Stonington High School’s estimable rowing program.
I live in town, and I voted enthusiastically for the $2.2 million in bonding sought for the project. I believe First Selectman Rob Simmons deserves kudos for his early advocacy and work to get the park planning off the ground.
But in the two years since residents approved the project, it seems to have run into serious obstacles, and I would urge the first selectman to be less cheerleader and more realist as the town must come to grips with considerable problems that must be resolved.
To start, the town waited more than a year to submit the paperwork required to start a review by the state Historic Preservation Office, an assessment required because the town intends to use state money for the project and demolish two buildings that are on the National Register of Historic Places, contributing elements in the Rossie Velvet Mill Historic District.
The historic preservation office review, which eventually could result in an order to prevent the demolition of the buildings, finally has begun. The goal of the review, says the state’s architectural historian, is to find a way to meet the needs of the community while saving the historical buildings.
Given that one of the buildings is already being used for the purposes of the new building proposed to replace it, I would suggest it is unlikely the state is going to let the town tear down anything.
If restoration and renovation, instead of demolition, is required, much of the master planning for the park will have to begin over.
This would by no means be a dead end. I personally would prefer a new park that saves the architectural fabric of the old mill village. But even for those who dismiss the notion of respecting the existing buildings, it would seem obviously wise to slow down planning and design for a new building until the state makes a ruling and it’s clear one can be built there.
More worrisome is the considerable pollution of the site, a land mass created with industrial fill from the mill, including, according to an environmental assessment by consultants Fuss & O’Neill of Manchester, “coal ash, slag, coal fragments, metal fragments, glass, concrete, brick and wood.”
The Fuss & O’Neill report details the pollutants: arsenic, metals and some low concentrations of PCBs, among many others. The report is an extensive catalogue of the toxic and carcinogenic materials found on the brownfield site.
The first selectman, in a recent meeting of the park implementation committee, which he chairs, suggested, according to a news report, that the state has promised funding to remediate the site.
This is a wild misrepresentation of where things stand.
Chad Frost of Kent + Frost of Mystic, landscape architects and park project manager, explained Fuss & O’Neill was hired with some of a $200,000 remediation assessment grant approved in early 2017 by the state Department of Economic and Community Development. They eventually will prepare a remediation plan — it could include moving and capping some polluted soil and covering the entire site with new topsoil — and seek further state permits and permission and grant money to do the work.
DECD brownfield program officials told me this week grants for remediation money are awarded in rounds of competition. There is currently no funding available and there won’t be until new bonding money is approved. Grants are capped at $4 million. Nothing has been promised for Boathouse Park, they said.
Frost said he can’t estimate a timetable for when the remediation grant request will be made to the state or suggest even a broad estimate of how much money the kind of cleanup being contemplated will take.
Frost said the park plan includes ways to respect the history of the site, including signs to explain how the property was created with industrial fill from the mill, and he is optimistic the state will allow demolition of the buildings. It’s optimism I don’t share.
Meanwhile, to my alarm, the existing building on the site — considerably polluted, according to the assessment — continues to be used by the high school rowers. Shells are stored inside and moved in and out of and around the building.
There was a news picture of team members this fall on rowing machines spread out across the lawn. Frost said they were asked to stop launching boats at the waterfront last year, because of the extensive glass debris that surfaces from the sand and dirt along the tide line there.
Can’t the town find a better temporary home for these young people and keep them off a polluted brownfield, one with now documented toxic waste and carcinogens, inside and around the building the young people are using? Lock it up until it is cleaned up.
Shame on people who suggest they are not in there that long.
Stonington can do better than that.