Rubber Soul
Canton is a commuter’s dream, only 16 miles from Boston and bracketed by three highways– Routes 128, 95 and 24 – and two branches of the commuter rail. Canton became a popular target for development during the recent real estate boom when several old farm and factory sites were sold to developers and subdivided into large house lots while other sites became condo complexes.
However, it wasn’t until the boom was over and the real estate market in a shambles, that the citizens of Canton were faced with deciding on zoning changes that could add thousands of new residents to the town in one fell swoop. Forty acres of land right in the center of town, and directly adjacent to a commuter rail station, were sold to a developer. The land, the former site of the Plymouth Rubber factory, is currently zoned for industrial use and Napleton Acquisitions Ltd., the new owner, petitioned for a change to mixed use in the hopes of building 650 condos and apartments on the site.
There is a lot at stake in whatever decision the town should come to, not just building density, but money, history and the environment. Canton, recently so flush that a new police station and schools were built and the library building doubled in size, is now reeling from state local aid cuts and failed proposition 2 ½ overrides and has already laid off 27 teachers and can not afford to replace a condemned Department of Public Works building.
The proposed housing units would increase the tax bill on the property from the $180,000 a year Plymouth Rubber last paid to nearly 2 million dollars, and the developer has offered another 7 million dollars in “mitigation.” However, there is a great deal of debate locally over whether the increased tax revenue would be cancelled out by the hundreds of new residents and the resulting increased costs for fire, police and schools.
The School Committee was quite interested in the development. With classes already stretching the legal limits and layoffs and cutbacks in sports and other extra curricular activities the Canton Citizen reported that former School Committee Chairman, John Bonnanzio announced at a community open house, “Let me be clear on this matter: Should Napleton break ground, we had better be pouring concrete for a fourth elementary school, and adding classrooms at the middle school.” He went on to present a four-point list of suggestions that started with a request for Napleton to pay $6,250 for a third party enrollment projection study.
Apparently everyone in town wanted a piece of the mitigation package. The Department of Public Works wanted to know if there is any money for a new utility building to replace the condemned one. The Parks Commission was interested in public access to the riverfront. The Board of Selectmen wanted a community center, the Council on Aging hoped for a senior center. There is also the matter of the estimated 20 million dollars it will cost to clean up the polluted land.
About all of the competing demands for land and money from the project the developers attorney, Paul Schneiders said, “We’re running from board to board, trying to make everybody happy.”
Asked if the town was looking at Napleton as a cash cow to solve the budget crisis, local blogger and former local newspaper columnist, Carl Lavin, explained that before the Plymouth plant was ever for sale the town spent three years coming up with a master plan for managed growth in the downtown area. “Everything that is being asked for was in the plan all along, there are no surprises there. They call it mitigation. Its extortion. But its extortion for the benefit of the town and that’s what it’s all about, what it’s been about for 300 years.” Lavin frames the question simply: “What is good for the people of the town?”
The land in question is layered with history. It is the original site of Paul Revere’s Copper Rolling Mill. The copper sheathing the dome of the Massachusetts State House was rolled there, as were the sides of the U.S. Constitution, “Old Ironsides.” Before Paul Revere bought the property it housed a gunpowder mill that supplied the colonial army during the revolutionary war. Sitting on the east branch of the Neponset River the plot of land has always been conducive to industry of one sort or another. In the 1600s the scattered farmers in the area banded together and built a mill and house there “for an honest miller” to grind their grain. The last known Native Americans to occupy the site were the Neponsett. They too used the river for commerce, carrying furs down stream in canoes to sell to the Europeans who had set up a Trading Post on Thompson Island in Boston Harbor before the Pilgrims ever set foot on the Mayflower.
The remnants of all this history are two buildings from Paul Revere’s occupancy. There is a gracefully aged, ramshackle barn, one of the first buildings he erected, and a nine thousand square foot brick building that was one of the copper rolling mills. Leading the charge to save the historic buildings is attorney George Comeau, a member of the town Historical Commission. Comeau has stated in the local press that he will do everything he can to save the buildings and will take legal action if necessary. “In buying the property, they bought two historic buildings. As part of this it’s their ethical, and, in time they will find, their legal, obligation to preserve these buildings.”
The town Historical Commission wrangled a tentative agreement with the developers to leave the two buildings standing by holding their demolition permit hostage. A bylaw passed in 2003 allows the town to delay demolition permits on any buildings constructed prior to 1940. Napleton’s original plan called for demolishing all of the buildings on the site.
In an interview with the Canton Citizen Schneiders, protested that Napleton had always intended to save the barn and was surprised by the request to add the mill to the do not touch list. Weaving a pitch for the developers plan for 650 units into his quote he pointed out that preserving both buildings would subtract 12 acres of land from 24 buildable acres on the river front lot, “which is just too great unless the planning board supports 650 units.”
Despite over two years of negotiations the developers and the town Planning Board have reached an impasse over the density and height of the buildings that would be allowed on the site and whether apartments would be allowed in addition to condos. The board and the developers had been hoping to come to an agreement and submit one rezoning article to the Town Meeting for citizens to vote on.
At a Planning Board meeting in January 2008 dozens of citizens showed up to voice their concerns over traffic, schools, and public safety. Hillary Blocker, a local resident and columnist for the Canton Citizen, referred to the fact that the Planning Board is trying to work with the developer to come up with a single article, saying, “People don’t get it. They don’t understand the process, and why you are trying to work with the owners. It looks like the owner is writing the Board’s article.”
It was shortly after this, according to the official meeting minutes, that George Jenkins, the chairman of the board, “felt disturbed” and stalked out of the meeting.
An abutter spoke up and threatened to submit his own article to the town meeting calling for the zoning to stay industrial. Napleton’s attorney Paul Schneiders, retorted that the town tax assessors had agreed with his client that that idea “is simplistic and stupid.” That was the night that the board decided it was too deadlocked to make a decision and agreed to turn the matter over to Town Meeting and let the citizens decide.
Throughout the early spring the Napleton Company and the town boards continued intensive negotiations in the weeks leading up to the April Town Meeting. In addition to extensive meetings between attorneys and board members Brian Napleton flew in from Chicago twice for early morning meetings with all of the town boards combined. As the developers and the boards laboriously argued through covenants, zoning restrictions, density, and whether apartments would be allowed in addition to the condos they steadily inched closer to agreement.
Meanwhile changes were starting to take place at the center of all this controversy, the plant itself. Built over the east branch of the Neponset River the 40 acre site is a crazy quilt of bizarre buildings, towers and smoke stacks that serve as a greatest hits of ugly utility and urban blight from the past three centuries. Stretching over two blocks down Revere street are the facades of buildings that start with the 200 plus year old Revere barn, with its cedar siding peeling off in strips and walls buckling under its sagging roof, transitioning through an Art Deco stucco office building from the turn of the century, its banks of upper windows peppered with ancient window unit air conditioners, complemented by a mid 20th century red brick building with 12 foot windows, and finally ending with a 1980s vinyl sided monstrosity with the Anderson stickers still on its windows. The river runs in a canal to the entrance of the factory where it splits into two channels one of which disappears into an underground piping system where the water is used to cool equipment in the factory. Running behind the factory is a spillway built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s to control flooding. Who owns this spillway, the town or the developers, has recently become an important question as the Army Corps has declared it in need of repairs, to the tune of over five hundred thousand dollars, and if it is not fixed within a year the property insurance rates of dozens of abutters will sky rocket. The fairly scenic spillway is sandwiched between the back view of the factory, featuring an incomprehensible maze of silos, chutes and tubes that look like something Wile E. Coyote would have ordered from the Acme Company, and a tall rusting chain link fence. This fence runs across the backyards of several houses on Neponset and does nothing to shield their view of the rusting factory buildings. But very quietly, one by one, these buildings started coming down. Day by day more slivers of sky replaced the rusty roof lines, the piles of rubble hidden behind the torn and fraying green privacy tarp that flutters from the chain link and barbed wire fence.
The cold, persistent rain of the night of April 28 did not deter 483 registered voters who flooded the high school parking lot and formed a standing room only crowd in the auditorium. Brian Napleton, fresh from more 11th hour negotiations with the town boards stood stiffly by a poster board showcasing the paradise he was promising in the Revere Commons Development. Contrasting the artist’s rendition of lush green river front parks and artist’s lofts and farmers markets and band gazebos were stark photos of the rubber plant.
The text was blunt bullet points:
Vote No
Vote Yes
There were 41 articles on the agenda, but the fact that the crowd was there for the rubber plant vote became obvious when under the lottery system used to determine the order the articles would be considered in the plant vote came up second. The chair of the Board of Selectmen stood at the microphone and moved that consideration of the article be delayed until the third night of town meeting. An angry murmur rose from the audience and someone stood to challenge it simultaneously with the moderator approving it. The crowd grew louder with a few shout outs that by law articles had to be considered when they were drawn by the lottery. The moderator consulted the town attorney who agreed with the crowd.
For three hours the debate raged in the same circles it had run in for the previous two years. Abutters were desperate to get rid of the eye sore at almost any cost. Others were sure that the development would end up being a drain on town resources despite the tax increases and mitigation. Many people were sure that the impact on traffic would be unbearable, depite the town’s own traffic engineer assuring them that there would be no more traffic than when the plant was running at full capacity. The school committee was worried about increased enrollment.
When a vote was finally called at nearly 11 p.m. no common ground had been found and claims had been made that could not be verified, the developer was just going to flip the property anyway, whether it was used for industrial or housing the same cleanup standards would apply. In the end the vote was split almost exactly 50/50 for and against the zoning changes that would allow the condos to be built. Since zoning changes require a two thirds majority to pass it was the equivalent of a No vote.
In the days after the meeting Scheniders said that one town official who had opposed the rezoning called him after town meeting to inquire when they were going to “discuss this thing again.”
Schneiders told him, “We’re not. It will be an industrial use. There is no more discussion about this being residential.”
Rick Brandstetter, Napleton’s Director of Real Estate, said that the developer’s next step is to sign contracts ,either leases or purchase agreements, with industrial users for the site. “Speaking as a real estate person, not the landowner, I think the site is the poster child for smart growth and green redevelopment. It is a loss for the Town that will never be recouped. We will be OK.”