BELCHERTOWN — Nicholas O’Connor, who won a seat on the Select Board last year, is leading what he terms a “community development exercise,” bringing together groups to imagine a vision for interconnected hubs of commerce, recreation and civic life extending from the town common to the courthouse and from the schools to the Stop & Shop plaza.
At the same time Douglas Albertson, the town planner, also is addressing the future uses of those areas. He recently received a grant to bring in a so-called Design and Resiliency Team, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects and the New England Municipal Sustainability Network. It spent three days gathering information and heard from residents at a public forum.
That group, led by Wayne Feiden, the director of planning and sustainability for Northampton, wrote a report on directions residents would like to see the town take.
“It’s an interesting convergence, all these things are happening at once,” said Albertson, noting that plans for developing a section of the former Belchertown State School are moving forward with the anticipated construction of an 83-unit assisted living facility awaiting action on its application for a federal tax incentive. And the town is undertaking road improvements in the areas being reviewed.
Albertson said he hopes that in five years, “We’ll have some things built,” he said. “Once you get the first one or two in, people will feel more comfortable about investing.”
The idea is to create a sense of cohesion between the town common and the area along Route 202 bordered by the public schools complex on the south and the former Belchertown State School on the north. The police station, the senior center and some businesses are also located in what is starting to take shape as a civic complex.
At the far end of that corridor is the Eastern Hampshire District Court. It is 1.3 miles from the Town Hall, which sits at the southern end of the common.
Another goal is to shift ownership of an area called the Lampson Brook Farm, which at one time was an agricultural component of the state school, from the state.
Gov. Charlie “Baker announced a few months ago that he wanted to get a lot of this property off of the state surplus rolls,” creating an opening for the town, said O’Connor. It includes 222 acres of woodland and 166 acres of farmland which, from the early 1900s until the state school shut down in 1992, produced fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and dairy for 1,800 people, according to a presentation created by O’Connor.
That land could be used for hiking trails and possibly agro-tourism in the form of eateries connected to local crops with a dose of history thrown into the mix.
Feiden said his design team, which called its report “Three Villages and a Farm,” believes the history of the former state school, which was open from 1922 to 1992, adds value to the farm. The report advocates for preserving four state school buildings, and suggests that the former power plant could be turned into a brewpub and farm-to-table restaurant. Even if the building is beyond repair, a potential developer “can save the memory of it” by preserving the smokestack and foundation, said Feiden.
O’Connor would like the town to ask the state’s Department of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance, which owns the Lampson Brook Farm as surplus property, to move it to a “mission-aligned organization.”
That could be the town’s Agricultural Commission or a state agency that promotes agriculture or conservation, thereby creating opportunities to make the land more accessible for things such as hiking trails and eventually agriculture-related enterprises.
The New England Small Farms Institute is already on part of that land and could play a role in promoting future uses that could include things such as a community kitchen for food preservation, a winter farmers’ market or a small farm discovery center.
O’Connor, who has enlisted more than a dozen collaborators from town departments and boards, also has ideas for part of the area closer to the schools. The Recreation Department has identified a need for more sports fields as some recreational areas will be lost as former State School land is developed.
O’Connor said one possibility for the future is construction of a sports complex extensive enough to host tournaments that attract people to town. In the near term, constructing new fields and improving existing ones fits in with the immediate needs of the town, he said.
“My thoughts are in concert with the master plan for the state school property” which includes creating more retail space along Route 202, said O’Connor.
“Our existing playing fields are used quite extensively for everything from lacrosse to flag football, to soccer, and a bunch of other things,” he added. “We need to go above and beyond because nobody is going to open a business here unless we have other things to offer.”
O’Connor said the Cultural Council would also like to create a performance and community space for concerts, dramatic productions and other kinds of gatherings.
“We are trying to build an overall vision for the town,” O’Connor said. The overriding goal is to create vibrant spaces that will attract people to Belchertown.
“We are going to need more than just the citizens in town,” he added. “We are going to need pass-through traffic and walking traffic by giving people reasons to come to Belchertown to then spend money at these retail locations.”
These ideas are related to longstanding efforts by the Belchertown Economic Development and Industrial Corporation and MassDevelopment to attract investment in the former State School grounds.
Feiden’s team recommended things the town can do right away to better connect different areas.
Among those is to adopt the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s “complete streets” policy making it eligible for money to add sidewalks, bicycle lanes and bus routes. Albertson said that would include extending the PVTA bus route that connects Amherst and Belchertown to the courthouse.
Albertson said it is now difficult for people to get to the courthouse unless they have a car, and there are no sidewalks. “You see a lot of people walking along the side of the road,” he said.
The parking lot of the courthouse, which was built a little over a decade ago, is not laid out to accommodate a bus turnaround. Options could include reconfiguring the parking lot or finding a nearby spot to turn around. “We need to find a way to make that happen,” said Albertson.
Other things that can be done immediately include creating safe pedestrian crossings and sidewalks along the stretch of Route 202 between the Town Common and the courthouse, said Albertson.
O’Connor said he is also hearing support in the community for extending the Norwottuck Rail Trail to revitalized areas of Belchertown as a way of bringing more people into the town and thereby supporting local businesses. “It’s right there anyway, we could bring it through the Lampson Brook Farm right into the MassDevelopment site,” he said.
Recalling battles 20 years ago when property owners along the former rail bed blocked efforts to bring the rail trail into Belchertown because they did not want it going by their land, Albertson said part of the bike path would have to go along roads.
Feiden said that the community should continue to work at building a consensus around “a clear vision” of how it wants the projects taken as a whole to fit in with the character of Belchertown. Those discussions would include questions like, “what are the anchors, how do you attract those anchors, and how do they all fit together,” he said.
It also includes having a sense of the types of developments the town should reject. He heard from some people that Belchertown “is so desperate” to attract businesses that “it will take anything that comes through the door.”
Albertson said he is happy to see the kind of civic participation O’Conner is leading to bring different groups in town together to determine in a coordinated way a direction for the community.
“There is energy towards things happening and we can just kind of let it happen on its own and have no control, or we can take control and shape it into something that the community wants and can benefit from,” said Albertson. “That’s what we are choosing to do.”