On Thursday, June 26, officials from the Devens Committee and selectmen from Harvard and Ayer approved a three-pronged plan of attack for getting a handle on the expense side of the equation at Devens. (No Shirley selectmen were present.) The Joint Boards of Selectmen (JBOS) agreed to ask MassDevelopment for its capital plan, the operational budgets with underlying cost drivers, and financial information on utilities at Devens. In addition, each municipality was charged with the tasks of setting up peer-level meetings with corresponding departments at Devens to determine the potential cost of providing services there and of being prepared to discuss their community’s “guiding principles.”
Each of the towns of Ayer, Harvard, and Shirley, as well as Devens residents, will be affected by the disposition of the former Army base lands, which were taken from the towns to create Fort Devens in 1917. MassDevelopment, the developer and provider of municipal services at Devens since closure of the base, recently provided the communities with estimates of the tax potential of the commercial and residential real estate at full build-out under the reuse plan. They estimated a total value for Devens of $1,553,761,490 (96 percent commercial) with tax potential of $24,369,578. The portion within historic Harvard boundaries is valued at $1,103,105,757 with a tax potential of $17,749,809.
Leo Blair, chairman of Harvard’s Board of Selectmen, was clearly unhappy with the release of the revenue numbers without the balancing information on the expense side, giving the impression of all reward and no risk.
“The cat’s out of the bag,” Blair said. “There’s $17.4 million in revenue for Harvard.”
“It’s gotten people’s attention,” replied Harvard Selectman Tim Clark.
Devens Committee member Mike Boucher said that each community needs to figure out what it would cost to resume jurisdiction of their lands at Devens by starting at the bottom and working up. This would be similar to work that was done to develop information for a previous disposition scenario (2B), whereby Devens became its own town, a scenario that failed to gain adequate support from the representative groups. Boucher said that things to consider, among others, would be salaries, benefits, equipment, children, and education.
“How are you going to service each parcel?” he asked.
He added that there are other hard questions for Harvard regarding road maintenance (82 percent of the road miles are on Harvard land) and whether to build a new school on Devens.
“The underlying work has been done and we can build on it,” said Harvard Selectman Ron Ricci.
Ayer Selectman Rick Gilles said the JBOS should look at the way the South Weymouth Naval Air Station was recently redeveloped by the three surrounding towns of Abington, Rockland, and Weymouth. They used “organizing principles” to guide their tri-town planning, and Gilles suggested the JBOS follow their example.
“What are the top three or five things that we want from this? To go through the whole exercise without higher level goals might be folly,” he said.
Clark reminded the JBOS of work done previously by a group headed by Boucher whereby “success criteria” were developed by each of the representative groups and combined into a unified document.
“I suspect there are some guiding principles buried in the success criteria,” Clark said.
JBOS Chairman Tom Kinch used as an example of a guiding principle for Devens the fact that the Devens residents want to stay together as a community. Ayer Board of Selectmen Chairwoman Caroline McCready said an example for Ayer would be a sustainable water supply. For Harvard, Clark gave the example of water and sewer to service the Ayer Road commercial district.
“In the end, the debate in Harvard is decided on money and any plan that would have Harvard incurring deficits is going to be dead on arrival,” said Blair.
McCready asked what assumptions should be made on the number of housing units at Devens. Devens Committee member Phil Crosby said that with the prospect of gas at $7 per gallon in 2010, he would expect a shift toward getting more workers close to their workplaces and a need for considerably more than the 682 units currently under discussion.
“It’s coming,” Crosby said, “and you’re fighting against the trend in economics.”
The group decided to use the housing numbers as they are now to prevent further gridlock.
“With such a sensitive issue, nothing ever gets decided,” said Kinch.
The JBOS will meet again July 24 to review progress on getting financial information from MassDevelopment and to discuss “guiding principles.” By the August meeting, they hope to have completed the peer-level meetings and to have generated the expenses associated with those.
