ATHOL — Anyone interested in seeing the sea of asphalt at Lord Pond Plaza transformed into a pedestrian friendly, aesthetically pleasing location that accommodates passive recreation while also serving the needs of local businesses is invited to a public meeting and site walk at the plaza on Wednesday, May 25. The meeting gets under way at 6 p.m. inside the Athol Council on Aging.
Attendees will get a chance to view and comment on the preliminary plan for creating more green space at Lord Pond. The proposal also calls for uncovering — or “daylighting” — a portion of Mill Brook, the stream that runs beneath the parking lot of the plaza.
“The purpose of the meeting,” said Athol Planning and Development Director Eric Smith, “is basically to have an unveiling of the 30 percent design plan, building off the three concept designs from last year. Most of the support was for doing the daylighting option, then kind of building on that. We also want to do a traffic study of the area, looking at proposed changes in and out of the complex.
“What we’ll do (on the 25th), we’ll have the presentation of the plans first, inside the Senior Center, and then we’ll actually take a walk outside to take a look at where the stream would be daylighted. We’ll also look at where some green space in the parking lot could be created.”
Smith said that, weather permitting, engineering consultant BSC Group wants to visit Athol the day before the public meeting and mark things out in chalk so people can see where changes in the parking area could be made.
BSC’s services are being paid for with funds from the state’s Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Action Grant.
All three of the basic concept plans presented last year via a virtual public meeting included the planting of dozens of trees and, in some cases, the creation of green space for pedestrians and patrons. An MVP survey done last year identifies Lord Pond Plaza as a “heat island” in the middle of downtown, which adds to the discomfort of visitors and residents during the hottest times of the year.
“The concept plans,” said Smith, “were just kind of drawn up by landscape architect last year. ‘Thirty percent design’ comes from a civil engineer taking those plans to a scale level and actually doing some elevation drawings, in terms of how much we need to cut and fill, and things like that — especially regarding how we’re going to put the stream in there. It’s like the first level of engineering design.
“This public meeting is part of the public review process. BSC Group, on behalf of the town, will work on the various permits that are needed to go ahead with the work. For the stream, for example, we’re going to have to deal with the Army Corps of Engineers — DEP — and so they’re going to start to prepare some of the permits we have to go through in order to do this project.”
The meeting on Wednesday, May 25, will allow the next step in the process to get started.
“Next will be a 70 percent design,” Smith continued, “after we get the feedback from the regulatory reviews and the public groups on the design plans. The 70 percent design plan is the next step, before you actually have the final design. It’s like a three-phase approach.”
Smith said estimated costs for the project won’t be known until the process gets close to a final design.
“They did have kind of a rough scale of the estimate of costs as part of completing the concept plans,” Smith explained, “and I did ask them to have some numbers available. But I think when they get to 70 percent, that’s when they’ll have much more nailed down at that point in time.”
In an interview with the Athol Daily News in April of last year, Smith said while there are different costs associated with each option, there likely are also different funding sources or grant programs available for each one.
At that time, Smith said state officials overseeing the MVP program are excited about Athol’s plan because it’s one of the only — “if not the only” — that includes the daylighting of a brook or stream.
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com