Green Hill parking

Environmentalists wage war against plans to pave paradise

by Chris Kanaracus

The Green Hill Park Coalition has long been one of the staunchest supporters of local, green-space preservation. Though the 15-core-member, grassroots organization was formed specifically to defeat a city proposal to dump street sweepings in a currently closed landfill near Green Hill's entrance, a number of members were involved in a fight against a proposed driving range there, which would have required clear-cutting several acres of woodlands. Members also successfully battled plans to irrigate the park's golf course with water from its pond.

But those actions pale when compared to what's at stake in their latest fight. For the past year, the coalition has attempted to scuttle plans for a much-needed new vocational high school off Belmont Street and on a portion of park land. At first, heated, ultimately unsuccessful lobbying efforts were employed. But now there's the coalition's latest effort: members have filed an appeal to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), attempting to overturn a wetlands permit granted to the city. If successful, the coalition could defeat plans to move the vocational school.

The coalition's move has left them with their backs against a number of political and social walls: a place they're not used to being. For unlike their previous struggles, no politicians, few city residents, nor even fellow environmentalists (including a former, key coalition member) have come on board. Not surprising, considering this is a battle that extends well beyond park borders, to the interests and educational future of some 1000 Worcester vocational students and their families and, perhaps, even to the way school-building projects are funded across the state; for a time, it even jeopardized the construction of a new courthouse.

But to Brian McCarthy, coalition co-chairman, such an undertaking is well worth the risk; in fact, his position on the proposed school hasn't wavered since the debate went full throttle. "Green space is critical, the number-one priority of city growth. No one disputes that we need a new voke school . . . we're saying that it can be done in much the same location, in a way that doesn't destroy park land."

WHAT IS IN QUESTION is a 5.8-acre parcel of Green Hill woodlands that was signed over to the city in September. It's a pleasant, slightly ramshackle patch of trees, shrubs, and rocks that, should the plan go through, would be replaced with a large parking lot and an access road. Save for the East Side Trail, a portion of which runs through the area, the plot seems one of the lonelier, more isolated areas of the 400-plus acre park. The land sits parallel to Skyline Drive, from just beyond its entrance point at Belmont Street, all the way up to the Air National Guard base.

And while that 5.8 acres would be razed, Green Hill technically wouldn't lose any acreage; the land was taken in a swap for a 6.6 acre parcel along Belmont Street that currently holds the defunct Belmont Home and the former Worcester Technical Institute. The proposed 370,000-square-foot voke school, which was expected to be constructed beginning in the spring, would abut the 6.6-parcel. Also, as a part of the arrangement, 30 additional acres behind the school site have received state wetlands-preservation designations. What appears to be a generous deal has, frankly, baffled many of the coalition's myriad opponents.

And that's what irks coalition members, who acknowledge they've taken an unpopular stance, but assert that the whole story hasn't been told. Through the appeal, they hope to tell it. "Basically, this site should have never been approved," says McCarthy.

The coalition says its own evaluations of the area have drawn markedly different conclusions than those provided by the city's experts. And, members point out, the group's findings are backed by the state-funded Natural Heritage Foundation, which certified a number of areas within the site contain vernal (seasonal) pools, red maple swamps, and intermittent streams -- all of which are protected under current wetlands legislation. The city's experts have contested the findings, calling the vernal pools "areas subject to seasonal flooding," and the maple swamps and intermittent streams to be nothing unusual.

In addition, says coalition co-chairman Gary Dusoe, the land sits on top of "at least 20 feet" of bedrock, which would require extensive and costly blasting before any work could take place. "Not only is it illegal to build on wetland areas, this site is practically unbuildable in the first place," says McCarthy.

And the coalition has managed to keep it that way, at least for a while. They've procured the services of noted environmental lawyer Kevin Kimmell, who led a successful 10-year fight to block a proposed landfill in the town of Douglas.

Kimmell has filed for and received an adjudicative hearing concerning the wetlands issues from the DEP. Such hearings are arranged much like a court proceeding, with an administrative judge presiding over the presentation of evidence and witnesses from each side. Until the hearing is completed, which could take up to a year, the city can't fire up a single bulldozer. But the appeal, while an effective measure for now, is a one-time deal. The next step, should the judge's decision go against the coalition, would be a lawsuit, something coalition members say they would be more than ready to initiate.

McCarthy estimates that it will be not only a long, but also an expensive fight for the coalition. Kimmell's legal fees, which have come out of the group's pockets, could exceed $30,000 for the appeal process alone. But as Kimmell himself points out, the coalition isn't merely throwing money behind a legal point man in hopes of winning a case. "I've never seen the amount of preparation and advance research from a group like this before," says Kimmell.

There's no doubt that the coalition is a committed bunch. McCarthy's lived but two houses away from the park's golf-course entrance for most of his life; he played there as a child, even proposed to his wife there. Dusoe's lived on Green Hill Parkway for nine years and was instrumental in blazing the East Side Trail, part of which would be re-routed by the project. Other members live across the city, and even out of town, a point that McCarthy stresses. "This isn't just a bunch of abutters whining. We're a wide-ranging group of concerned citizens. . . . It's a citywide, even statewide issue."

Their dedication has been less than infectious, though. The coalition has had a difficult time of late getting anyone in city government to join the fight. And it even lost a key member, former school committee member and influential activist Edith Morgan. Morgan remains a staunch supporter of the park itself, but sees the voke proposal as imperfect yet acceptable: a position that the coalition's opponents share.

The coalition's protest has gone on for some time, though. The wetlands appeal is only the latest move by the group in a debate that stretches back several years, to when the pressure to build a new school went full-on in the wake of the New England Association of Schools & Colleges warning that the voke would risk losing accreditation by 2001, if its woefully inadequate, circa-1910 facilities were not replaced.

Should the voke lose its accreditation, the damage, says the NEASC's Richard Mandeville, "would have major impact . . . you would lose credibility with parents, with the industrial and business community, and with potential colleges." In fact, many colleges consider diplomas from non-accredited schools to be invalid.

The city heard the call, and then quickly explored the possibility of siting the new school in the Beacon Brightly neighborhood, and at the now-defunct Wyman Gordon facility on Madison Street, but came up short with the money that would have been required to purchase and prepare either plot.

It was then that the push for a Belmont Home location took force, and it was met with widespread support. A vocational school built on city-owned land would be cost-effective, would expedite the allotment of crucial state funding, and thus be of much-needed benefit to Worcester's large number of vocational school students.

It would also help Green Hill Park by implementing several key components in the park's long-awaited "master plan," a concept developed a few years back by city officials and park boosters (including some current coalition members) that proposed about $10 million in improvements over a 12-year period.

First, the notorious landfill would be permanently capped, upon which practice fields and additional parking for the school would be constructed. The Skyline Drive entrance would be improved with a monument and signs to finally give Worcester's largest park a properly conspicuous "gateway." Finally, the land added to the park in exchange for the contested parcel would be reforested.

The plan was, and still is, often referred to as a "win-win situation" by many. Except, of course, by the coalition.

EDITH MORGAN SPECULATES that the impetus behind the coalition's continued opposition to the voke plan perhaps isn't due to members' commitment to the environment, but, in fact, may have arisen from a perceived dismissal of activists' concerns by city officials, specifically former school superintendent James Garvey, during planning meetings for the park proposal.

"Garvey was known for his brusque personality," says Morgan. "I think he may have rubbed certain people a bit too raw."

And Morgan, who left the coalition in late 1998 when she ceased to agree with the group's position, points out that "these people weren't around when the Mass Pike connector, which took apart God knows how many wetlands, involved the removal of who knows how many trees. . . . Why does their concern begin and end at Green Hill Park? I don't see them fighting so hard about other things that have been going on."

But the group is called the Green Hill Park Coalition, after all. Dusoe, for one, offers a different perspective, pointing out that few area preservation groups joined the coalition's camp. "The supposed stewards and advocates of our natural resources have all rolled over on this one -- and they should be ashamed."

Even an initial, powerful ally, the Regional Environmental Council (REC), has taken leave of the debate. Last November, the REC released an extensive report, concerning the potential impact increased auto traffic would have on the park should school construction be approved. But today, says REC director Peggy Middaugh, REC is not tied to the DEP appeal.

At least the coalition's peers' reluctance to join the fray has been of a passive sort. The same can't be said for the Telegram & Gazette, whose latest editorial-page condemnation of the coalition ran on November 8. While the T&G has painted the coalition, for example, as individuals with "political and ideological axes to grind," coalition members, unsurprisingly, assert that that's a shallow, if not outright incorrect, view. Says McCarthy: "Robert Nemeth [T&G editorial-page editor] hasn't called us once, or responded to any of our letters . . . all we've been asking for is what the city originally planned."

What the city originally planned, says McCarthy, has been almost completely lost in the intervening two years of debate. The city's original plans, he says, didn't call for the taking of the 5.8-acre parcel of wooded park land, but instead for the school to be built on the area the coalition has proposed: land which currently sits under the defunct Belmont Home, and under additional buildings toward Belmont Street that once housed the Worcester Technical Institute.

The city says it was forced to redesign its plans to include the contested land when it was found that a "campus"-style school, one broken into a series of smaller, program-defined buildings, wouldn't fit onto the initial parcel. Also, says the city, the grade of the Belmont Home land is too steep; there's a 30-foot drop from top to bottom.

McCarthy and the coalition say they can't fathom that. According to their measurements, not only can a campus-style school be sited at the original location but also the Green Hill parcel's slope actually exceeds the Belmont site's, with an approximate 35-foot change in slope from end to end. The city's architect, Dick Lamoreaux, has disputed the findings. (Lamoreaux declined further comment, citing the ongoing appeal, when contacted for this story). But McCarthy says that while "they (local officials) might have their experts, we've got ours, too."

Yet the focus of the hearing is on the wetlands issue, and experts from both sides are sure to have it out over the course of the next year.

Kimmell, for one, is confident. "They [the city] haven't done the research we have, and have drawn some questionable conclusions about the land. . . . We've got a city that wants to build a school on top of an interconnected wetlands system, which is something you just can't do. We'll be fighting pretty vigorously."

THERE'S LITTLE DOUBT that the city will fight, too, having already sunk millions into the project's design. But beyond the appeal, says McCarthy, there's a whole other issue that could, and perhaps should, arise from this debate -- namely, the nature of the state's vaunted School Building Assistance Act (SBAA), a program that provides cities and towns with up to a 90 percent reimbursement of the construction costs of new school buildings, including the proposed $60 or so million for the voke. The SBAA, though, doesn't allow for land acquisition. Any proposed school must be located on city-owned land.

Hence the battle over Green Hill, which, McCarthy, says, "might have never been necessary." And in another view, he says, the battle as it stands is more than a bit silly. "The state will gladly pay millions of dollars to bulldoze and blast out six acres of forest, but they won't spend a nickel to buy land."

That fact has been a caveat of the SBAA since its inception, in 1948. The rationale behind the provision is murky, but could be centered around property taxes: land already owned by the city is preferable to the purchasing of private land; for upon acquisition, once-private land must be removed from the tax base.

At times, the provision hasn't been an issue. Ultra-modern elementary schools at Canterbury, Woodland, and Gates Lane, built in recent years under the SBAA, were built on their original sites.

On other occasions, though, lack of available land has resulted in the cutting into Worcester park land, such as Elm Park for Doherty High School, and a sliver of the Cascades for a parking lot at the West Tatnuck School.

It's here the coalition sees the most danger in the Green Hill Park proposal. McCarthy says the city of Lowell is a good example, where no less than 11 schools built under the SBAA sit on former park land.

"Hasn't this park been through enough? Haven't we taken enough away? There's a lack of green space in Worcester as it is, and if you set an example like this, we might end up with nothing at all," says McCarthy.

But one notion floated by the coalition's critics has been the fact that cities change -- have to change -- in order to grow.

Dusoe agrees with the notion, but offers a different perspective. "It's obvious that things are changing here in Worcester. And as new business comes in, there will be a continued need for new schools, courthouses, whatever. . . . But by the same token, there's a deficit of open space, one that will only get smaller if we're not careful. Here we have an opportunity to try to save some."

Dusoe also sees some hypocrisy in critics' charge that the coalition is hell-bent on saving every tree it can, at any cost. "This [open-space preservation] is a statewide thing, and it has been for quite a while. You're always seeing politicians break out the balloons and the marching bands when they manage to save something green. . . . But here's an opportunity to do something else, and they're not. And the same blighted areas they'd rather overlook for usage in favor of park land will be here in the future."

WHATEVER THE OUTCOME is won't be known for at least a year, even longer should the matter then go to court. And while the city and the coalition are no doubt in anxious wait for a decision, perhaps no one is more impatient than Worcester's vocational-student body, which has heard 30-odd years of "new school" talk.

One factor that may have chipped away at their down time, though, is gone as of last week, when the state chose a north Main Street site for a new courthouse. What had been a leading motivation to site the school in the park -- namely, when the new courthouse was proposed for vocational-school's current Salisbury Street address -- is no more.

The city was so keen on the voke-school location for a new courthouse, in fact, that plans were in place to begin shuttling students to classrooms, currently in the former Lincoln Square Boys Club, to another city-owned building about a mile away on Gorham Street, so courthouse construction could begin in the spring.

Now, without such a pressing outside force to weigh the scales, it's tough to say how long the school project could be held up. The coalition is certainly in for the long haul, and if city manager Tom Hoover's November 23 closed-door executive session with city councilors to discuss the appeal is any indication, the city is taking the coalition seriously. The futures of Worcester's vocational students and Green Hill Park will just have to wait and see.