Monthly Archive for April, 2005

I attended the public hearing on the Watertown Open Space and Recreation Plan on April 5. Here are my notes.

When
I arrived, Tom Sullivan, Recreation Director, was just beginning his
review of the town’s open space. We have about 95 acres of public open
space maintained by the Park Dept. and the School Dept. Here is the breakdown.
The DCR (formerly the MDC) controls another estimated 80 acres along
the river. So that’s a total of 175 acres. There’s probably a little more, for
example I don’t see listed the piece of Newton’s Boyd Park that extends
into Watertown along Jackson Road.

There are also 65 acres of State and Federally owned open space (including areas such as the 9-acre GSA site on Greenough Blvd) and 268.5 acres of private open space (like the Oakley Country Club).

Tom Sullivan said that Watertown
should have about 320 acres of open space based on population (1 acre
per 100 people). I did a little research and discovered that the
National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA) sets a “target of
excellence” of 6.25 to 10.5 acres of park land per 1,000 persons in
urban areas. So even if we had about 200 acres we would still be in the
“target of excellence” but we only have 175.

Just as important as the amount of open space is whether people have access. In the report, No Place To Play, the Trust for Public Land
studied access to parks in seven major cities. They used a quarter mile
buffer around a park to measure access (The NRPA recommends this
distance). If you live within a quarter mile of a park then
you have access. Boston came out on top with 97% of children living with a quarter mile of a park. I wondered how Watertown would fare in an access analysis. So I visited the MassGIS online data viewer, one of my favorite online tools, and printed out this map. The purple and green areas are public open space.

I drew
rough quarter-mile boundaries around the parks and it looks like nearly
all of Watertown is within a quarter mile of a park Unfortunately this
confirmed that my neighborhood east of Oakley Country Club is one of
the few areas in Watertown that doesn’t have “access” to a park. Our
closest park is Payson Park in Belmont and that’s nearly four tenths of a mile. There are a couple of deltas – one on Carver Road and one on School Street where we can kick a ball around though.

Tom
Sullivan reported that playgrounds have been built new or renovated in
the last few years in Arsenal Park, Casey Playground (by the old Parker
School going up to Newton), Moxley Playground, O’Connell Playground (at
the Hosmer School), Saltonstall Park, Sullivan Playground (Arlington
and Mt. Auburn), and Victory Field. The Filippello playground was built
new five years ago. The playground at the Cunniff School is going to get a rubberized surface. Also the Farren playground on Charles River Road was renovated by the DCR over the winter. The playground at the Browne School and the Stamatakis Playground (on the Concord Road side of the Hosmer School)
are also due for upgrades. This led a representative from the
Conservation Commission to comment that the tot lot crowd has gotten
its needs met so now let’s look to wilder public spaces like Whitney
Hill, Sawins Pond and Walkers Pond. Speaking as a member of the “tot
lot crowd” I have to agree.

Here are some other things I learned:

• The house on Grove St
  next to where the incinerator used to be was a junk yard. Mt Auburn
  Cemetery bought it and now owns the land behind it and the land between
  it and the Aggregate Industries ready-mix concrete plant. Mount Auburn has been using that land as a snow dump and plans to use it as a tree nursery.
• The town granted Oakley 61B tax status. Here’s an explanation of Chapter 61B (link): In
  exchange for the right of first refusal to purchase any Oakley land if
  it decides to “sell or convert it to a residential, commercial, or
  industrial use,” the town will tax Oakley not on the fair market value
  of the land but on the “value of the land for recreational purposes”
  which can’t exceed 25% of the fair market value. I’m not sure how much
  the town gives up by reducing the assessment of Oakley’s land by 75% or
  more but Greg Watson said we are “not giving up that much.” I assume
  this tax change happened since the development of the condominiums on Belmont Street
  because I never heard of the town turning down the option to buy that
  land. Oakley is currently zoned for “cluster housing.” The zoning was
  changed from “single family” some years ago. Here is Watertown’s zoning map.
• Sawins Pond Brook and Williams Pond are privately owned and in dire need of cleanup. Sawins Pond appears on the DEP 2004 List of Impaired Waters (here’s an excerpt of just the parts about Watertown).
  I found a comment from the Watertown Conservation Committee that
  explains that Sawins Brook drains a substantial portion of Watertown
  and has frequent high fecal coliform counts in both dry and wet
  weather including a reading of 240,000/100ml in wet weather and is
  likely an important source of fecal coliform in the Charles River (in general; water should have less than 1/100ml to drink, less than 200 to swim in and less than 2,000 to boat in. Here’s a great explanation
  that converts the numbers to meaningful measures like “turds per
  swimming pool”). In earlier testing the WCC also confirmed the presence
  of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and PCBs in soil and metals
  (arsenic, barium, silver and lead), oil, grease, TPH and one PAH
  (bis-ethylhexyl) in surface water.
• Peter Brooks (chair of
  Bicycle Committee and a member of the Open Space Committee talked about
  the two bike paths (from Mount Auburn Street to Arsenal Street at
  School Street and the “community path” from School Street to the west
  part of town). He said the path from Newlyweds Foods to School St.
  has been purchased, is under design, and needs just a little funding to
  be constructed. He is interested in studying the community path. Lexus
  had to construct the path around their bldg. There is a Somerville
  community path that also leads to Alewife in the works. Connecting
  these community paths would make it possible to do an off-road loop of
  22 miles in Greater Boston. Brooks also said that Harvard is interested
  in connecting the Arsenal to Longwood. The obvious problem in
  connecting the bike path to the existing path along the river is
  getting across Arsenal Street. But Brooks said there is an aqueduct from the railroad track to Arsenal St with a stoplight there on Arsenal St. and there’s an easement by the Harvard Vanguard site to the river.
• The
  Conservation Commission is hoping to arrange a walk on the river
  to kick off getting maintenance done. The walk would invite the
  community and the Charles River Conservancy which has been helping with
  maintenance. Here are excerpts from the MDC’s Master Plan (a beautiful
  piece of work by the architecture firm Goody Clancy) provided by the Charles River Conservancy

  Charles River Road (called Watertown’s Waterfront):

  Little Greenough Boulevard

  Greenough Boulevard

  GSA Site

The
hearing included a review of the first 1,000 Open Space Surveys tallied
of the 3,000 returned (3,000 returned out of 12,000 households is a
pretty impressive return. Usually 10% is considered good). I’d rather
wait for the full 3,000 to be tallied rather than assuming that the
first 1,000 are a good sample because my hunch is that the first
surveys in are from the people most concerned about using and
increasing open space. So, with that caveat…of the first 1,000, 82%
said they use open space with about a third of the people saying they
use it for walking. Lots of people like having a place for dogs to
walk off leash. 78% want to see the tax surcharge for the Community
Preservation Act put on the ballot (and presumably they would vote
yes). On closing Little Greenough Boulevard 50%
said yes, 41% said no and 9% said yes but only on weekends. On the bike
path question 61% said they want a bike path from Mount Auburn St. to
Arsenal St. and 22% said no, while 54% said they would support a
community path (from School St through the Square to the west part of
town) while 20% said they would not.

After this hearing
the Town Council will review the plan then the State will approve it
and then Greg Watson, the Watertown Town Planner, will be
responsible for monitoring it.