Lot 3 on Ice House Road

Lot 3 on Ice House Road –

TAX RELIEF –
Everyone likes the idea of reducing property taxes, as they should, but I fear that goal may sell  the opportunities at lot 3 short, just because someone has put one particular opportunity so directly in front of the town.  At the moment it an easy path of least resistance to follow up on what has been put so directly in front of the town, and it also mimics what we already did with the Kingsbury Club.  The Economic Development Committee may well feel a mandate now to issue an RFP for uses of lot 3, but to me that is putting the cart before the horse.

MASTER PLAN –
I think a town wide master plan is essential before the town go off in any particular direction on any one piece of land.  We want to first know how lot 3 fits into the town’s overall needs and plans, before we irrevocably commit to any one use of lot 3.

Historically, the town had a narrow focus when it pursued the development of the Kingsbury Club, responding to that owner’s request to site something on that land, rather than first deciding by planning what would be the town’s best use.  The town even gave the Kingsbury Club more land when Kingsbury Club asked for it, apparently without considering what that extra land did to lot 3.  Now Lot 3 is therefore sized such that the current proposal needs to lease land back from the Kingsbury Club to make the project work.  This is due lot 3 having a combination of the 200′ setbacks from the stream on the west side per the Rivers Act, the wetlands, the 150′ setback from the residential zoned lands, and the detention pond. Mike Sullivan told me that there are really only 2-3 usable acres on lot 3.

The problem the Town of Medfield has historically had with doing a master plan is that the town administration has not much believed in its need.  However, that master planning project is on top of my agenda of things to start on now that the annual town meeting (ATM) is behind us.   I fear that it will get delayed because we did not fund the needed consultants at the ATM to do a town wide master plan.  Perhaps we can start with the master plan for the Medfield State Hospital site, and move town wide in a year’s time.

LOT 3’S SITUATION NOW DIFFERS FROM LOT 2 THEN –
Please consider that Lot 3 is also in a much different posture now that the other two adjoining lots have been built out with the Kingsbury Club and The Center, so it is not the same as when the Kingsbury Club was proposing to locate on what was then an undeveloped, roadless gravel pit.

PROPOSED SPORTS COMPLEX –
LARGE BUILDING – With the current iteration of the sports complex proposal for lot 3, I was first struck by it being 50% bigger than Forekicks.

LOTS OF PARKING – Then I noticed the project had 307 parking spaces (about double the existing spaces at the Kingsbury Club and The Center combined) and that struck me as a lot.  I then assumed that was what was probably sized to provide for each shift of users.

VEHICLE TRIPS – In the past I found the traffic at Forekicks in Norfolk both a mad house and a big deal when I used to take Kristen there (and we were always rushing because I was the coach and like almost everyone else we were cutting it close).  I then realized that each parking space really represents two vehicle trips per hour at the turn over time because there is one trip in for people arriving and one trip out for the people who just finished.  So, for the currently proposed  sports complex there are really 600+ vehicle trips on the hour.  By contrast, the traffic study done for the Kingsbury Club, when it was proposed, expected 1200 trips per day, and at times the Kingsbury Club’s traffic seems busy to me.   600 vehicles at each shift change is a lot of traffic to inflict on any neighborhood, and the town needs to seriously factor that adverse neighborhood effect every hour of the day into its decision.

DIRECT ACCESS TO MAIN ROAD – My other random thought about a sports facility in town, now that I appreciate the large number of vehicle trips better, is that if the town were to endorse that use in town, that such a complex would be best located where it had direct access from a major road, such as Rte 27 or Rte 109.

ALTERNATIVES –
The town needs to do something to make lot 3 productive, or at least decide how it fits in with its master plan (perhaps that decision would be to hold the land in reserve for a future school or  town need).  The decision on what to do with lot 3 will now be made initially by the Economic Development Committee, and then by the Board of Selectmen, as will any decision on whether to hold off on doing anything with lot 3 while a master plan is done.

HOUSING – If an RFP is to be pursued before getting a master plan, perhaps if the RFP is broad enough to include all uses, including housing, then perhaps we could at least get some interesting housing concepts to examine from developers.  The land is zoned industrial, but the town can change the zoning if it likes the housing proposals.

Where Ralph Costello has built the paradigm of housing that generates profits to the Town of Medfield, I would hope that Ralph would be interested in sharing with the Economic Development Committee how replicating his development elsewhere in town could be an engine for property tax relief.  I think Ralph told me that he copyrighted the designs they created, just so that they can build it all again.

When the Board of Selectmen wrote the mandate to the Economic Development Committee, it included housing as part of what should be considered.

I have personally concluded, after years of trying to attract businesses to Medfield and hearing that no one wants to locate businesses in town, that housing can and should be the business of Medfield, because people do want to live in Medfield.  We just need to build the right type of housing, like Ralph Costello did at Old Medfield Square that has only one school child in the then twenty-seven occupied units the last time Ralph gave me the figures.  Ralph said the town will be getting $600,000 in property taxes when his Old Medfield Square is fully built out, and if the ratios hold there may be two or three school children at a cost of $12,000 per year each.  Medfield can make lots of money from building the right form of housing.