At its Monday, Nov. 19, meeting, the Capital Planning and Investment Committee (CPIC) proceeded with its annual review of capital requests by hearing from two town departments: Town Hall and the Conservation Commission. Fiscal 2020 requests received by the committee, including those reviewed at the Nov. 19 meeting, thus far total $1.86 million, with remaining applications scheduled for scrutiny in coming weeks.
Town Administrator Tim Bragan presented three requests to CPIC on behalf of Town Hall. He requested $400,500 for a replacement roof for the old library. According to Bragan, the current slate roof has lasted more than a century, but the downside of slate’s longevity is its eventual replacement cost. Bragan also requested $20,300 for repairing and repainting the old fire/ambulance building, which has been repurposed as storage space. He also requested $21,500 for the addition of parking at the fire station. According to Bragan, recent Hildreth House renovations eliminated a grass strip that firefighters had previously used to park their cars quickly at the station when responding to calls. The inconvenience of reduced parking has affected their response times, he said, leading them to ask for part of the nearby hill to be filled in to provide additional parking. Bragan also noted that this project made more sense in light of the recent traffic study confirming that the traffic flow around the fire station’s current location is acceptable.
The only request of the Conservation Commission is $100,000 for the purchase of a property on Willard Lane. The land was once part of 281 Still River Road before the property was divided in the spring of 2018. Conservation Commission Chair Don Ritchie said the land’s owner, Robert Capobianco, is considering selling the currently undeveloped land to a developer. According to Ritchie, Capobianco believes that it would be subdivided into seven lots. The Conservation Commission thinks the land would make three lots, Ritchie said, and the Planning Board expects to approve only two. Regardless, development of the land would break the connection between adjacent conservation lands (Willard, Clapp Scorgie, and Sprague), interfering with the Conservation Commission’s goal of creating interconnected parcels. The $100,000 requested from CPIC is part of a larger package drawing from multiple funding sources, but negotiations with Capobianco are still in progress.
Harvard’s capital bylaw requires that any request for spending greater than $20,000 or with a useful life greater than five years, must be reviewed by CPIC, which rates and then recommends to the Select Board which expenditures to fund.
