The Bromfield rowers and the summer Learn-to-Row program will soon be back on the pond.
Following a month-long—and at times contentious—negotiation with the town over the terms of its rowing programs on Bare Hill Pond, Bare Hill Rowing Association officials finally signed a license agreement on Sunday. The selectmen co-signed the agreement following a unanimous vote at their Tuesday night meeting.
"Without this program and their [coaches, Bare Hill Rowing Association] dedication there could be 80 kids hanging around with not much to do."
—John Lee, former chairman
Parks and Rec Commission
“[The agreement] provides for a balance between competing issues in the use of a limited resource,” said Bragan, who led the negotiations for the town, and he praised the work of Terry DeWitt and Patrick Hart of the BHRA.
“This would not have happened without [their] efforts,” he said. “It also would not have been possible without the help of the superintendent of schools, the Bromfield principal [Jim O’Shea], the athletic director [Pam Alexander], members of the Parks and Rec Commission, the Harbor Master [Bob O’Shea], and members [Marie Sobalvarro and Leo Blair] of the Board of Selectmen.”
A difficult negotiation
“It was a difficult situation,” added Selectman Blair,” when asked by Selectman Ron Ricci to comment on the process by which the agreement had been reached. “It unusually involved a lot of different constituencies, including another elected board [Parks and Rec], the school department—neither of which we have any jurisdiction over—and [the Board of Selectmen] as the titular owner of the property and as the board responsible for protecting the town against liability issues and also for balancing the demands on a very limited resource.”
“The thing we tried to do was to find that balance,” he continued, “understanding that nobody was going to be entirely happy with the result.” The negotiation got played out in the public, Blair said, “mainly on one side.” But the selectmen and town administration, he said, were constrained by the open meeting law, “so that our ability to deliberate on this on the fly was zero” and the board, which had never considered the issue, “had to rely on Tim [Bragan] to take the lead on this.”
“I think it’s a good first step,” said Blair. “I think it will evolve over time. I think the key now is for everybody to be good neighbors down there and … things will get a lot easier if everybody does that.”
In moving that the selectmen approve the agreement, Selectwoman Lucy Wallace added that the board should “acknowledge that Tim worked really hard to try to bring this to closure.” “I’ll second that,” added Selectman Ron Ricci.
Rowers happy to be ‘back home’
In an email to the Press earlier this week, Terry DeWitt, president of Bare Hill Rowing Association (BHRA), wrote: “I want to thank Tim Bragan, the Board of Selectmen, and the other town boards for all of the time and energy they invested to get us to this place.”
“While we were not able to address every concern, we and the town have committed to continue working together to create the best possible experiences for our athletes and the Harvard community,” DeWitt said. Everyone was looking forward to soon being “home,” BHRA Program Director Holly Hatton said.
As of Wednesday, the terms of the agreement had yet to be made public by either party.
This past week, while coaches and parents began the work of setting up the launch area at the beach, the Bromfield-Acton-Boxborough rowers shared facilities with Essex Rowing, a multi-community rowing program in Methuen. Hatton said she didn’t want the team to miss any practice time before its upcoming race against Wayland-Weston on Saturday. Both Essex Rowing and Community Rowing, Inc., in Watertown had offered to share their facilities “for as long as it takes,” she said.
A change in attitude
Contract disagreements surfaced in mid-March, when BHRA received a license agreement from Town Administrator Tim Bragan that BHRA board members say differed substantively from the one the rowing association thought it had worked out in conversations with the town, schools, harbormaster, and the Parks and Recreation Commission last fall. Coincidentally or not, the new agreement was preceded by a crescendo of complaints directed at BHRA by Parks and Rec, which began abruptly a year ago, according to multiple people interviewed by the Press.
Parks and Rec minutes available online and dating back to 2007 contain no record of complaints prior to last May, when Parks and Rec’s relationship to the team turned sharply adversarial. The commission’s change in attitude coincided with a change in the Parks and Rec membership, and a squeeze on boat storage, parking, and rowing launch space following a stormwater management control renovation.
According to Parks and Rec minutes, in May, a newly elected commissioner Pat Nelson said she would review all past agreements with BHRA to see where the rowing association was in violation, while another member would look at what contract changes had been made over the years. At the next meeting, June 3, Nelson was reported to say, “BHRA has outgrown their welcome at the pond,” and commissioner BJ Pessia recommended not renewing BHRA’s Learn-to-Row contract. Nelson questioned renewing the BHRA contract at all. The minutes do not indicate what drove those statements.
Decreased space and changed space allocation may also have been a factor. For the preceding seven years, the rowing crew launched from a floating dock in the cove area east of the regular boat ramp during its spring and fall seasons and racked their boats in the same area, along with kayaks and canoes.
But last spring and fall, the shared space was squeezed by a series of renovations to control the runoff of stormwater. Although the original plan of the Bare Hill Pond Watershed Management Committee had included space for BHRA, when the work was done the promised space was no longer there.
Beach space at a premium
At that point, Parks and Rec told the rowing team to move their dock to the right side of the beach front and to leave their boat racks in the parking lot. This led some commissioners to complain that the rowers were occupying too much of the beach, that the float was unsafe, and that carrying boats from the parking lot to the beach was a hazard.
This winter, searching for a way to allow BHRA back onto the beach in the cove area, Commissioner Joe Schmidt, Harbormaster Bob O’Shea, and Parks and Rec Commissioner Steve Gordon tried moving the kayak racks into the woods to see if they would fit and yet still have easy access to the beach. Schmidt said he and Gordon presented their solution to their fellow Parks and Rec commissioners, but the proposal was defeated on a vote of 3 to 2.
Schmidt, who was elected to Parks and Rec last spring, said he received few if any complaints about Bare Hill Rowing. Former Parks and Rec Chairman John Lee, who resigned last August, (“Why I resigned,” Harvard Press, August 16, 2013), said, “Without this program and their dedication there could be 80 kids hanging around with not much to do. There seems to be a few adults, and I mean just a handful, that are trying their hardest to ruin this program.”
“In my last five years on the commission we never received a direct complaint from a resident about the BHRA,” Lee said.
For the past week, the selectmen were the ones hearing from constituents.
“I heard … through calls that this was becoming a big issue,” Selectman Blair said Tuesday. “I struggled to see when, if ever, this Board had ever considered this. It has not. It has never been on our agenda—it’s never been in our minutes.” People were calling up and saying, “‘How can the board do this,’” recounted Blair? His answer: Before Tuesday’s vote, “The Board of Selectmen really hasn’t done anything.”
