By Alice Waugh
Candidates for local office shared their views at a March 15 forum, starting things off with answers to a resident’s question about what selectman candidates and the town learned from the failure of the school building project vote and the Route 2 tree-cutting issue.
Regarding the school project, “the top lesson learned is that we need to have a lot more process and dialogue with our community before we present large proposals,” incumbent Selectman Peter Braun told the audience of about 60. The prospect of getting $21 million in state funding was “a huge financial incentive, but the process didn’t allow us to consider the full range of options.” Going forward, efforts to secure residents’ approval for a plan should be “a little less marketing-oriented and a little more listening-oriented,” he said.
Vincent Cannistraro, who is running against Braun, compared the stances of those who voted for and against the school proposal to the situation involving Egypt and Israel, saying it was important to “find the feeling” at the root of each political position.
“Until you work with those feelings and understand the other person’s point of view, nothing’s going to get done,” he said. “It’s not the words, it’s what they mean to the person speaking them and what the person hearing them interprets. What people [who voted against the school project] are saying is, ‘I’m extremely concerned and it seems that town government hasn’t been responsive to me. Tell me this is an option and tell me what it would cost.’ They fought that way of thinking for a long time.”
School Committee chair Jennifer Glass, who is running unopposed for a second term, noted that voters will be asked at Town Meeting to approve using up to $250,000 from the town’s stabilization fund to come up with cost estates for school repair and renovation options that would be paid for entirely with town money (see the Lincoln Squirrel, March 23, 2014).
A resident noted that Lincoln has one of the highest per-pupil school budgets in the area and asked if there was a way to lower this figure. Glass acknowledged that Lincoln’s per-pupil spending was relatively high compared to surrounding towns but said that the school district’s small size drives up per-pupil costs.
“We need to be able to provide everything and do all of the tasks that much larger districts like Lexington need to do,” she said. “We are not the most efficient size to be doing those things.” Nonetheless, the School Committee keeps a sharp eye on spending and has in fact returned a surplus of about $200,000 to the town over the past two years, she said.
Route 2
The lesson to be learned from the excessive Route 2 tree-cutting, Braun said, is that “when you ask for a major highway project, you have to come to expect that there are going to be major changes in our landscaping” and that state agencies such as MassDOT “don’t necessarily share our values… we need to have more say than we had.”
Cannistraro maintained that town officials did not do enough to monitor or prevent the tree-cutting by state contractors who violated a contract stipulation that trees above a certain size were to be preserved. But former Planning Board chair Dan Boynton, who is also a Route 2 abutter, disputed Cannistraro’s view.
“You need to get some education around this issue. Some of the things you’ve said around this issue are just incorrect,” Boynton said, adding that the state has sole oversight over the project.
Those state officials “should have been explained to neighbors why some trees had to go,” Cannistraro responded. “When something is in a contract, they have an obligation, but you go there the first day, and unfortunately no representative from the town did, and that was the most important thing to do,” he said. Just as with a kitchen renovation project, “before the first piece of cabinet gets touched, you talk to the guy doing the work.”
Braun said that when crews first started to cut trees in the construction easement next to Boynton’s property, the Boyntons asked the crew to spare several large trees. “The Boyntons managed to chase the crew away, but when they went out from their house, they came back and cut the trees down,” Braun said.
Since that time, the town has gotten the state to agree in principle to improvements to post-construction landscaping, Braun said. “What we have done is to turn that horrendous event into a leverage point to negotiate much improved landscaping all along Route 2 with complete input from all the neighbors, who are very happy with the product,” he said, adding that he expects formal approval soon from the state of the revised landscaping plan.
“I apologize to Dan for [him] trying to chase the chainsaws away. You should not have had to do that,” said former Selectman Sara Mattes. She and others in Lincoln had worked in earlier years with state officials and “developed a system of communication and collaboration… but somewhere along the line, the ball was dropped, quite honestly.”
The new landscaping agreement “will bring some things back, but certainly not the mature trees and certainly not the trust and faith,” Mattes said.
“I can’t guarantee that would never happen on my watch,” Cannistraro said. “But if something did, one thing I learned growing up in a large Italian family is to say you’re sorry and start from there.”
Asked by a resident about an assertion by Lincoln Journal columnist Neil Feinberg that Route 2 traffic would soon be diverted onto local roads through town, Braun said that “the information was completely and utterly false… shame on the Journal for having published something like that with absolutely no factual backup.” All four lanes of Route 2 will be shifted slightly north for construction, but they will remain open, he noted.
Cannistraro said he agreed with Braun on that point, adding that “my impression of Neil Feinberg is that he’s more of an entertainer than a journalist.”
Hanscom’s future
Resident Adam Greenberg asked about the future of Hanscom Air Force Base, saying that if the federal government closed the base or turned the base housing over to Lincoln, “it will make the Route 2 project look like a very easy warmup.”
The possibility exists that the federal government might divest itself of Hanscom’s base housing, saving money for the military while still keeping the base open, Cannistraro said. “This goes back to the need for a long-range plan… rather than putting our head in sand and saying it’s never going to happen and then scrambling to catch up. I’d rather wait two years for a train to come than try to chase it 10 minutes after it’s left the station
“I don’t share your pessimism” about the base, Braun said in response to Greenberg. “There’s a high likelihood that [the federally managed base] will be in our future for a long, long time… there is no way we can afford 73 units and 2,500 people. That’s not going to be an option,” he said. Since the last time Hanscom was considered for closure several years ago, the state and federal delegation is “a lot more organized than it was before… and we’ve built tremendous alliances,” Braun said.
Mattes, who was a key local official in the 2005 BRAC (base realignment and closure) process, said that as a result of negotiations at that time, Lincoln “would be essentially indemnified from any changes that would have impact on us regarding housing.