Voters OK buying land for possible solar swap

By Alice Waugh

Thanks to a vote at the March 19 Town Meeting, Lincoln will buy a new piece of conservation land that could be used as part of a “land swap” with the state to allow a solar array to be built on the capped landfill.

Voters approved spending $225,000 on a three-acre portion of the seven-acre Hargreaves-Heald property in Sandy Pond Road, which includes the meadow just to the east of the Old Town Hall Exchange. Converting the three acres into town-owned conservation land means that it will be preserved as open space and that the town can run a conservation trail through it.

The purchase was one of 11 projects to be funded by a Community Preservation Committee (CPC) allocation of $897,882. Housing and recreation reserves brought the total for the CPC measure (which was approved with a few “nay” votes) to $1,030,162.

According to state law, if the town decides to remove the conservation designation from a parcel such as the landfill for purposes of installing a solar array, it must compensate by designating an equivalent amount of other land as conservation property. While a solar array will not be proposed for the Hargreaves-Heald land itself, that land could potentially be “swapped” for the landfill in exchange for permission to site a solar array on the landfill conservation land.

The idea of putting solar panels on the landfill site was discussed at the State of the Town meeting in November 2015, though no concrete proposals have been put forth yet.

Green Energy Committee chair John Snell proposed amending the CPC motion to specify that the Hargreaves-Heald purchase could be counted as a conservation land swap in a future application to the state. “It would really help if this was an option… it would be a good forward-thinking thing to do,” he said.

After a lengthy on-stage huddle among Lincoln officials, Town Counsel Joel Bard drafted amended wording for the motion. “It’s just a paper designation, if you will—the acquisition and use of the parcel is not going to change,” he said, adding that the amendment conferred “the option but not the obligation” to use the property as part of a future conservation land swap.

“We’ve done such a good job with conservation land that we don’t really have any fungible municipal land” to use in a swap, said Selectman Noah Eckhouse, who along with Snell is a members of the Landfill Solar Steering Committee. “The state is trying to keep towns from cracking into conservation land they already have.”