The Longmeadow Select Board unanimously voted to approve the Future Building Use Task Force’s preliminary recommendation on Sept. 8.
Photo credit: LongmeadowTV
LONGMEADOW — Longmeadow is moving forward with the Future Building Use Task Force’s distribution of a request for future use without restrictions for Old Town Hall’s development after the Select Board approved the request at its meeting on Sept. 8.
The Select Board’s decision allows the town to inquire private developers, businesses or buyers for proposals regarding the building’s future without zoning restrictions or proposal rules.
The request only applies to Old Town Hall and not the other two buildings the task force is documenting – Town Hall and Community House. The building is estimated to cost around $800,000 for ADA-compliance, not including structural analysis and engineering expenses.
Old Town Hall has been vacant for over two years and department heads indicated the building’s use would not help address unmet needs, according to the task force’s Aug. 17 recommendation memorandum.
Task Force Chair Paul Dunkerley said Old Town Hall has fewer restrictions because it is outside of the historic district at the Select Board’s Aug. 17 meeting. He said the other two properties are “unique” and would require approval from the Zoning Board or a potential town vote, and said the Community House is still used extensively.
Select Board member Josh Levine said he hadn’t heard of a request for future use before and asked Town Manager Lyn Simmons if it were binding and what the next steps are.
Simmons said it isn’t binding and that the Select Board’s decision goes back to the task force to refine the scope and request. She said the distribution is “casting a wide net to see what the future use could be and any ideas people have.”
“We’ll work with our procurement director to actually distribute that out to relevant parties that may have interest in submitting something,” Simmons said. “We’ll promote it on our social media and include it in my town manager newsletter. Interest can come in from anyone and everyone … The building task force will look at those ideas and figure out if there’s some narrowing we want to do, but this is really just an informal information gathering process and will help inform next steps.”
Levine asked if it can be a “half-baked” idea, and Simmons said hopefully people will put time and effort into submitting well thought-out or realistic proposals or “something that has some background to it or other examples of similar things that have worked in other places.”
“The group will have to decide what to do next,” Simmons said. “I know that they did spend some time talking about whether developers or real estate professionals would actually spend any money going in and looking at the building and coming up with a full design, I think that’s unlikely at this point, but that would be the next step after this process.”
Simmons said the next step could likely be a request for proposal, but the board also needs to discuss rezoning or surplusing the property, which is when a piece of real estate or land is declared to no longer be needed for operations.
Surplusing would require a vote at Town Meeting, and rezoning would either be on the town or a potential buyer.
The task force is collecting data for the next few weeks and will construct a follow-up survey for resident wishes for the buildings before making a final recommendation to the Select Board around the year’s end.
