EAST LONGMEADOW — East Longmeadow has been awarded two grants that will help the town plan for revisions to the rotary and the latest iteration of a center town district.
The public has had difficulty “visualizing” what a center town district may look like, Town Manager Tom Christensen said at the July 8 Town Council meeting.
He said a $22,000 grant from the Massachusetts Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs to hire a consultant to help with its planning. Earlier this year, a steering committee that had been charged with the area’s planning was dissolved after the Town Council decided not to create the district under the state’s Chapter 40R regulations, which would have made the town eligible for significant state funding.
The grant would be used in concert with funding from the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. The commission’s Community Mitigation Fund is designed to help communities surrounding MGM Springfield offset the effects of a casino in their geographical backyard. Of the $347,200 that the town will receive, $60,000 will be devoted to transportation planning, which includes a redesign of the Center Square rotary.
Councilor Marilyn Richards noted that redesigns of the rotary have been undertaken several times in the past. Christensen said that previous plans had always assumed that to “do it right,” private land would need to be taken. While those plans will be used to help inform the rotary design, he said concepts in design have changed in recent years. Christensen speculated that one or more of the seven roads that converge at the rotary will be made one-way. Richards recalled that a previous plan had called for at least one of the roads to be closed.
“One of the ideas that comes out of someone’s head is going to be the winning idea,” Christensen said.
The remaining money from the Community Mitigation Fund grant will pay for public safety needs. This will include police equipment, traffic cameras, automated external defibrillators and lighted roadway signage.
The council approved an amendment to the town’s bylaws which laid out restrictions on the sale of motor vehicles on private property. The amendment allows the sale of one vehicle at a time and no more than two vehicles in a 12-month period. The initial version of the amendment, proposed by the Planning Board, limited the length of time a vehicle could be for sale to 28 days. However, the board subsequently removed that language so as not to be overly restrictive, Planning and Community Development Director Rob Watchilla said.
Councilor Ralph Page said he was glad that clause had been removed because it was more restrictive than the state’s law, which allows the sale of three vehicles per year without being considered a vehicle sales business. He also expressed concerns over the practicality of enforcing the bylaw.
Richards said the bylaw refers to two state statutes of which people may be unaware. She described the bylaw’s purpose as giving “notice” to residents that there are state and local laws around the private sale of vehicles. Town Council President Connor O’Shea agreed, saying he was also hesitant for the town to be more restrictive than the state, but that there was “value” in making the public aware of the laws.
The council also approved the execution of a purchase and sale agreement for a parcel of land on Allen Street, across from Skyline Drive. The property was leased in the 1970s and became the Allen Street Landfill. The landfill, which Christensen described as “a trash dump” rather than a bulk waste site, was capped around 1980 and covered with dirt, as was the practice at the time. East Longmeadow created a “corrective action plan” to properly decommission the site, but as the town did not own the property, it was hesitant to spend money on it, Christensen said. The town recently allocated funding to buy the land and a price of $20,833 was arrived at using state guidelines for the municipal purchase of property. Christensen said that, once the landfill is properly capped, the town will have an “attractive” property.
