Bourne To Enter Negotiations To Acquire Motor Way Property For Fire Station
The Bourne Select Board has authorized the town administrator to enter into negotiations for acquisition of land on MacArthur Boulevard for the site of the new fire station in town.
South Side Fire Station Building Committee chairman A. Wayne Sampson spoke to the select board during its meeting on Tuesday, November 15, to give an update on the committee’s progress in recent months, which includes having zeroed in on an optimal site to build the station.
“We’ve met every single month since the initiation in early spring,” he said. “We’ve made a great deal of progress so far. We have our project manager, we have our architect, we’ve been doing our due diligence.”
Mr. Sampson said that the committee’s greatest challenge yet has been narrowing down the parcels proposed as potential building sites. With the help of external expert services, Mr. Sampson said, the committee worked to ensure that the station would meet the needs of both the community and the fire department and, in order to choose the right site, examined each property closely.
The town also put out an additional Request For Proposals in October, which Town Administrator Marlene V. McCollem said was essentially the same as last year’s RFP for this project with a few added requirements, such as frontage on a public way. The owner of the Motor Way property was the only one to respond to the town’s land acquisition Request for Proposals.
“At this point, we’ve narrowed it down to three potential properties that we’re interested in; one jumps ahead of the others,” Mr. Sampson said. “The other two are left in the back in case something doesn’t work out. But [that] one piece of property is the Motor Way property on Route 28 MacArthur Boulevard.”
The proposed site at 316 and 320 MacArthur Boulevard measures 11.3 acres. It is the location of a planned subdivision that was approved but never built. The subdivision was approved for nine lots, bisected by Motor Way. The owner, whose identity was not announced at the meeting, has offered Lots 5 through 9 at a cost of $2.8 million. The town would also be responsible for constructing Motor Way.
At last week’s meeting of the South Side Fire Station Building Committee, Ms. McCollem said that the town does not need Lot 5 within the subdivision—the parcel farthest back from MacArthur Boulevard—for the new station. Negotiations, she said, could reduce the number of lots the town buys and decrease the cost.
Mr. Sampson told the select board that the committee’s vote to recommend that the board authorize the administrator to enter negotiations for land acquisition of the chosen property was unanimous.
“We feel that there are a number of factors about the property that would lend [themselves] well to confidential negotiations between the town and the property owner to get the best possible financial deal for the town in the long run,” Mr. Sampson said. “There are different things that we want to go back and forth on; it’s best done through the town administrator and town counsel at this time.”
Board member Mary Jane Mastrangelo questioned what the next steps would be, to which Ms. McCollem said she would next consult with town counsel and bring a recommendation back to the board. She explained that the board would then be briefed on negotiations during executive session, and when the board decides to make that information public, the matter would then go through various town bodies and processes, including the capital outlay committee, finance committee and Town Meeting.
“When you are ready to release it as public, that’s when those other groups would be informed of the terms and conditions,” Ms. McCollem told the board. “Until you release it from executive session, nothing happens publicly.”
A motion to accept the committee’s recommendation and authorize Ms. McCollem to enter into negotiations to pursue site acquisition for the Motor Way property, subject to review and approval of the board and Town Meeting, was approved unanimously.
“I just think this is a big step moving forward,” board chairman Peter Meier said. “The South Side Fire Station Committee has put a lot of time into this, and this has been long overdue.…The conditions that fire and EMS have to work with on the south side of the canal, we need to do it for them, and with the construction of the new bridges coming up, this couldn’t happen at a better time.”