“Wouldn’t that be premature?” asked Ayer’s Jannice Livingston, when Harvard’s Victor Normand described the plan to the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee this month. Later in the same meeting, John Katter, who represents Devens residents on the committee, put it more bluntly: “We hear from our esteemed colleague from Harvard that the position is the reacquisition of Devens, full stop, with the endorsement of the board of selectmen. Is that accurate?”
This wasn’t the first time Harvard’s intentions have been questioned. A nearly identical exchange occurred at the joint frameworks committee’s April meeting, where Harvard representative SusanMary Redinger said she routinely wore “two hats”—Harvard’s and the committee’s. But Aug. 19 was the first time the committee had met since then. And in the interim, the Select Board had set its goals for the new fiscal year, among them an article that would ask Town Meeting to weigh in on whether Harvard should push to reclaim land within its historical boundaries.
Two committees, contrasting mandates
Harvard’s committee—the Harvard-Devens Jurisdiction Committee—traces its mandate to a nonbinding referendum that Harvard voters passed in 2017: Question 4 asked whether the Select Board should begin planning to resume jurisdiction over the land in Devens formerly under Harvard’s control, provide services, and collect property taxes. It passed 571 to 141, and the board formally created the committee the following year, charging it specifically with developing a resumption plan, not weighing other options.
In contrast, the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee’s founding premise is that every option stays open until a consultant can be hired to help the committee find consensus and produce a recommendation. In a phone interview, Normand described the Harvard committee’s expanded review as necessary preparation rather than a foregone conclusion. “We want to have answers to those questions,” he said. “We want to do our due diligence, so that everybody, all 39 bodies that keep Harvard functioning as a town, have an opportunity to weigh in on it.”
At stake is who will govern and regulate the roughly 950 residents and nearly 100 businesses within the Devens Regional Enterprise Zone, and who will pay for and deliver municipal services.
The Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee voted 18 months ago to study the delivery of 19 municipal functions and services to Devens given three scenarios of future governance: the towns resuming jurisdiction of their historical, pre-Fort Devens land; Devens becoming its own town; and the status quo, with MassDevelopment and the Devens Enterprise Commission continuing to govern and regulate the Devens Regional Enterprise Zone. A fourth option, a hybrid of the three scenarios, was left for future discussion. Meanwhile, Harvard’s own committee’s study of what resuming jurisdiction would require has grown, from those 19 topics to a study of the changes that would be required of all 39 Harvard town boards, departments, and commissions.
The joint framework committee met Aug. 19 over Zoom and in person at Ayer’s Town Hall. Members representing all three Devens towns were present along with John Katter, who represents Devens residents, and the Devens Enterprise Commission’s director, Neil Angus, and DEC president Bill Marshall, who joined remotely.
Michael Sweeney, MassDevelopment’s executive vice president for Devens operations, also attended. Livingston said MassDevelopment’s return is now official and that the relationship, once marked by what she called “animosity,” is “healthy again.” .
A promise to keep every option open
Normand’s stakeholder report prompted Livingston’s question about Harvard’s timing. Katter followed with one of his own: were the other options now off the table, he asked? Normand said no; Harvard was just gathering information to see whether the town was interested.
Later, during a discussion about how to collate the joint committee’s research, Livingston, the committee’s current chair, urged regional unity despite the friction. “We can’t tell a town what they can or cannot ask of their people,” she said, but the committee’s own job was to find “the best way forward for the majority,” knowing that whatever the towns ultimately decide, “there’s going to be people that are very happy” and “people that are very upset.” “We’re all still going to be neighbors,” she said, and would have to keep working together no matter the outcome. Everyone needed to set aside “whatever preconceived idea” they had and approach the question “with that part of our brain empty.”
Normand explained Harvard’s own committee’s charge again. “It’s not the intent of Harvard to interfere with the work of this committee,” he said, framing Harvard’s effort as “not in contradiction to the work this committee has done.” Katter was unpersuaded: “We understand that you’re restricted by your charter,” he said. “Maybe that charter needs to change.” Livingston cut off that line of questioning, saying it would “have to go offline.”
Sorting out roles
At last week’s meeting, the joint committee’s response to the tension was, for now, procedural rather than substantive. After MassDevelopment dropped out of the committee in 2023, the remaining members spent 18 months working through 19 categories of town business, from schools to public works, each stakeholder describing how it would handle that function under one of the three scenarios. Their work is available at the Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee website (https://devensjfc.weebly.com/other-documentation.html). The trouble, several members said, was that everyone had submitted their answers in different formats, making them hard to collate and synthesize.
So at Angus’s suggestion, members voted to form a subcommittee charged with reconciling that material into something usable for a consultant. Ayer, Shirley, Harvard, the Devens Enterprise Commission, and Devens residents have each named a representative: Rachel Friedlander for Ayer, Bryan Sawyer for Shirley, Select Board Chair SusanMary Redinger for Harvard, Devens Enterprise Commission director Neil Angus, and John Katter for Devens residents.
Vicksburg Square, revisited
Much of the meeting was given over to a repeat presentation on the condition of Vicksburg Square’s four historic barracks buildings, the same findings MassDevelopment revealed at an Aug. 4 Devens Committee meeting already covered in this paper: an estimated $44 million to stabilize all eight buildings studied, with Allen Hall alone accounting for close to 40% of that cost.
What was new came in the questions that followed. Paul Green told the committee that MassDevelopment has owned the buildings since 1996, when it paid $17 million to acquire them from the Army, and let them decay for three decades. Sweeney said he wasn’t aware of any inaccuracies in what Green had said, and confirmed that MassDevelopment does own the buildings.
Normand asked whether MassDevelopment should set a firm deadline for choosing between renovation and demolition. Sweeney said no date has been set, but cited real urgency—a partial collapse could turn debris into hazardous waste and drive costs even higher—and said funding will ultimately decide the timeline. Patrick Field, undersecretary of economic foundations at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Development, added that MassDevelopment competes with other surplus state properties for the same pool of capital dollars.
In other business
A school-needs assessment, funded through a state grant that Ayer administers, has drawn one bid so far, f rom a firm called MGT. The working group is checking references, with an eye toward starting work in October.
The Devens Enterprise Commission has issued four new building permits for the final four of six planned duplexes at Adams Circle, part of a 12-unit modular housing project by Reframe Systems. Two of the six were already under construction.
The clock is ticking
State law requires the three towns and MassDevelopment submit a recommendation to the Legislature by July 1, 2033, after a study that must begin no later than July 1, 2030. Paul Green, addressing the committee again during public comment, urged members to set a timeline for their own work. The Legislature, he said, operates on two-year cycles, and any recommendation on Devens’ future needs to reach lawmakers early in one of those cycles to have a chance. “You’ve got like three or four two-year cycles that you have to hit,” he said.
The Devens Jurisdiction Framework Committee will meet next at 3 p.m. on Oct. 14 in Ayer Town Hall.
