community center*

The Special Town Meeting on Wednesday, June 25 will have up to five warrant articles — two each on the Farrington/Panetta proposal and on the community center, and one on an expected citizens’ petition.

The meeting will start at 6:30pm; barring something unforeseen, officials expect to get everything done that night — in contrast to the Special Town Meeting on Dec. 2, 2023 to vote on the Housing Choice Act measures, which stretched to 11:30pm and led to the creation of the Town Meeting Study Committee.

One of the warrant articles may be passed over, depending on the construction bids for the community center, which will be opened on May 29. If the low bid is higher than the $24 million budget, the town will have to find more money for the project to go ahead — either through a funds transfer if the shortfall isn’t substantial, or a debt exclusion if more is needed. A debt exclusion measure would require a two-thirds majority at Town Meeting for approval as well as a simple majority at the ballot box at an election the next day.

There will be a hybrid joint meeting of the Select Board, Finance Committee, and Community Center Building Committee on Monday, June 2 starting at 6:00pm to discuss funding strategy if the bids come in over budget. The agenda has not yet been posted but the Zoom link is here.

Two other warrant articles pertain to the Farrington/Panetta proposal. The first will ask for two separate zoning changes: one to approve a cluster of 20 new starter homes and the other to allow Gerard’s farm stand and garden center to continue operating. The business is on land owned by the Frank Panetta Jr. Trust but operated by others. The second would allow a transfer of $950,000 already in the town’s Community Preservation Act fund to help purchase and then put a conservation restriction on the entire 77-acre parcel. 

Assuming all goes as planned, the town will purchase three lots — two from the Frank Panetta Jr. Trust and one from the Paul Panetta Trust — as well as all 74 acres of the Farrington Memorial property to the east. Developer Civico will pay $3.3 million of the $6.4 million purchase price and build the single-family condominium homes. Another $800,000 from the City of Cambridge and $1.35 million in private donations to the RLF will round out the amount. Most of the Farrington property will become publicly accessible conservation land. Farrington Nature Linc would remain as is, though with a new access from Page Road.

Other warrant articles

A fourth warrant article will seek approval to increase the town’s fiscal 2026 reserve fund “to address a couple of late-occurring budget challenges,” Town Administrator Tim Higgins said at the May 19 Select Board meeting. Those preliminary additional costs include $270,000 for remediating contaminated soil at the former Strat’s Place playground, which will be repurposed for Magic Garden; $172,000 for snow and ice mitigation; and about $100,000 for veterans’ benefits 

“These amounts are preliminary and we will have a better view of the potential recommendation on June 10,” Finance Committee chair Paul Blanchfield said. Voters OK’d an increase to the fund balance for FY26 to $849,000 in March. The reserve fund is part of the general fund and is intended to cover “extraordinary and unforeseen” needs of the town and schools.

The final Town Meeting article(s) will be a vote on at least one citizen’s petition. One has already been submitted and it’s at least possible there will be more, as the deadline for getting a petition with the required 10 signatures to the Town Clerk’s office isn’t until Tuesday, May 27 at noon.

The October 27 story headlined “My Turn: Community center and related projects are progressing” neglected to include an image of the detailed floor plan for the community center. The image has been added to the original story.

(Editor’s note: a more detailed floor plan image was added on October 29.)

By Alison Taunton-Rigby

The Community Center Building Committee (CCBC) has been very active in recent months with design development for the community center to meet the budget approved by voters at the March 2024 Town Meeting. We are excited with the progress and the improvements that have been incorporated into the design plans. The CCBC will provide a full update at the State of the Town meeting in December.

The community center design has evolved, based on decisions to improve the original concept design and still meet the $24.02 million budget approved at the March 2024 Annual Town Meeting. The current design is based on changes our architect, ICON Architecture, has proposed and is shown below. The building location has been moved slightly north to reduce the site work required and preserve the green open space. In addition, the southern end of the building, which houses the LEAP afterschool program, has been redesigned to reduce site work needed without losing any programming space.

The latest aerial renderings of the community center. See a slide show of interior images here.

The outdoor green space used by LEAP and Magic Garden has been improved with the location of play areas and a basketball court. Concurrently, the town administration is working to remove dead trees, assess the soil, and repair the fence in Strat’s Place in order to reopen this area for public use ASAP (costs were included in the CCBC budget). This will ensure campus stakeholders have ample play space during and after building construction. The parking areas have also been improved.

The CCBC is also preparing for the new school maintenance shop to be built in the Hartwell administration building (also included in the CCBC budget). Its current location is B Pod. The maintenance shop and the Strat’s project are both expected to be completed before other construction is started.

ICON is continuing to identify structural and cosmetic design changes that improve construction efficiency, reduce the amount of canopy space adjacent to the building, convert materials to cost-effective finishes, and develop a landscaping master plan that could be implemented in stages. None of the structural or cosmetic changes will impact the programs of the Council on Aging & Human Services, the Parks & Recreation Department or LEAP. The revisions include the following:

A detailed floor pan of the community center (click to enlarge).

• Reducing the overall height of the building by 24 inches, which reduces construction cost, as well as heating and air-conditioning operating expenses. This development will ensure that the interior will be energy-efficient and feel more intimate.
• Revising some of the exterior and interior finishes, including changing the metal roof to asphalt shingle, changing exterior slate cladding to terracotta tile, and changing porcelain tile flooring to linoleum.
• Redesigning the movable partitions within the program space.

Overall, the design progress is close to completion, with significant improvements. The design meets the budget approved by voters and the planned construction timeline.

The next CCBC meetings are tentatively scheduled for November 13 and December 11 in hybrid format. We welcome your comments, suggestions and questions. Please see the CCBC website for full information.

Taunton-Rigby is a member of the Community Center Building Committee.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Architects are working on alternatives to bring down the latest estimated construction cost of the community center, where the schematic design is nearly complete. 

ICON Architects’ estimator pegged the cost early this year at $24 million. More recently, ANSA Advisory, the owner’s project manager, took another look (along with ICON’s estimator), and their estimates are $1.9 million and $2.1 million above that figure.

Most of this is because the required subsurface earthwork will be more expensive than anticipated. The building itself is still on budget, so a set of “value-engineering” cuts in features won’t close the gap, explained ICON’s Ned Collier at the September 9 Select Board meeting. 

Reconciling the latest price with the budget “is not insignificant but not insurmountable,” Collier said. Some savings will come from moving the LEAP portion of the building slightly to the north, where less digging into the hillside close to the main Hartwell Building will be needed. “That’s going to be a meaningful chunk to get us back on budget,” he said. ICON will also identify some changes in the design or materials used for things like polycarbonate translucent panels for canopies that can be added back once construction starts, if the budget allows.

“Nothing is being removed from the building programmatically,” Collier said, adding that the contingency fund of about $1.6 million will not be trimmed at this point. 

Select Board member Kim Bodnar, who served on the School Building Committee, hoped to avoid any tradeoffs in replacement or maintenance value of certain components could be “kind of might be penny-wise and pound-foolish” — for example, replacing granite curbs at the school with asphalt, a tough decision that nevertheless had to be made.

When the $93 million school project was at this stage, the SBC made as many cuts as they could but ultimately decided to go back to the town for more money. In June 2020, voters approved moving an additional $829,000 from free cash to close that gap. Private donations also restored some items.

“Our goal is not to ask for more, but to keep things in reserve to add back if possible,” Collier said. 

One possible area for savings is landscaping. Rather than do everything at once, the Community Center Building Committee could treat it as a “master plan” for completion in stages over time, CCBC Chair Sarah Chester said. The CCBC will hash out exactly what reductions to target to reconcile the budget.

The future community center will have some familiar Lincoln names attached to it: Desai and Tingley.

After a fundraising campaign to help offset some of the construction cost, the Friends of the Council on Aging announced that a central meeting space in the new building will be named for the Desai family (Moha and her parents Samir and Milima), and the senior courtyard and terrace will be called the Tingley Terrace after Dilla Tingley and her late husband Fred. Dilla is a member of the Community Center Building Committee (CCBC) and chair of the Council on Aging & Human Services board.

“If there’s anyone who deserves [a naming honor], it’s Dilla for all her hard work on this over the years,” said Peter Von Mertens, a CCBC member who helped spearhead the fundraising drive.

“It isn’t meant to be an honor; it’s meant to be a footprint,” Tingley replied at the June 17 Select Board meeting, adding that it reflects her whole family who have lived in Lincoln for more than 60 years.

Von Mertens also lauded two others whose past donations to the FCOA are being used to help pay for the building. Thomas E. Pascoe’s estate gave a total of $535,611 in 2017 and Joseph L. Hurff and his wife Elizabeth gave approximately $300,000 in 1998. However, neither family has relatives in town, and Von Mertens welcomes any information from residents to help locate their families so they can be recognized.

Private donations to the community center raised a total of $351,000 from 103 donors. The FCOA contributed anoehr $1 million and the Ogden Codman Trust has pledged $500,000. The bulk of the $24 million cost will be funded by $15.77 million in bonding, which voters approved at Town Meeting and the ballot box in March.

The building will have a wall of recognition for everyone who has donated, as well as a “buy a brick” campaign in the fall, Von Mertens said. “And if we can work out plans with the landscape architects we would like to create a timeline with tiles or stones summarizing significant events in Lincoln’s history placed appropriately along the walkway.”

The CCBC had looked at including a weight/exercise space in the center, and architect ICON developed an design option for such a room but was not able to fit it into the approved project budget. “We’ll keep the option in mind if our budget capacity changes for some reason at a later time,” the CCBC said in May.

At their meeting, the Selects approved the choice of an owner’s project manager and design contract. A schematic design is now being developed, and construction documents will be prepared starting in December. Bidding is expected to take place in April and May 2025 with construction starting in June 2025.

Although the community center vote played second fiddle at the March 23 Town Meeting, voters approved design and construction of the $24.02 million facility on the Hartwell campus by a margin of 81%–19%, easily clearing the two-thirds threshold required. But the margin was much closer at the March 25 election, where a simple majority was required: 935–699 in favor (57%–43%).

To pay for the community center, the town will borrow $15.77 million. The balance will be funded with $4.75 million from the town’s Stabilization Fund, $2 million from free cash, and $1.5 million in donations — $1 million from the Friends of the Council on Aging and $500,000 from the Ogden Codman Trust. The project has also received another $340,000 in individual donations.

For the owner of a median-value home in Lincoln ($1.43 million), the borrowing will result in a fixed tax increase of $472–$500 each year for the life of the 30-year bond. The town has several property tax relief programs for qualifying residents — including the newly approved circuit-breaker relief program (see Article 10 below). Click here to see a gallery of conceptual designs by ICON architects.

Left: costs to fully renovate the pods and Bemis Hall. Right: a comparison with the csts and size of a similar community center project in Dover (“gsf” is gross squre feet and “nsf” is new square feet). Click image to enlarge.

If the project had been voted down, it would have cost $18.3 million in fiscal 2027 dollars to fully upgrade the Hartwell pods and Bemis Hall for the Parks and Recreation Department and the Council on Aging & Human Services, respectively, according to Community Center Building Committee member Jonathan Dwyer (see table at right). 

A few residents argued the project was too expensive and the money could be used for other projects on the horizon including new water mains. But residents including Gwyn Loud urged approval. Referring to previous capital projects like the Town Hall renovation, the Codman Pool, and the library extension, “we’re paying it forward by looking back,” she said. “We knew it was for the good of the future.”

A total of 541 residents voted on the measure, down from 814 votes cast on the previous article on HCA zoning.

Other Town Meeting results

After the high drama of the HCA zoning issue where 819 residents voted (and attendance at its peak was 914, according to the Town Clerk’s office), all the other warrant articles passed quickly and unanimously. Some highlights:

Bright Light Award (Article 6)

Presented to Karen Boyce, for her “devoted leadership of the Lincoln Food Pantry.”

Voting clickers (Article 6)

$35,000 approved for purchasing 1,200 clickers to speed up voting at Town Meetings. The clickers, which can instantly record and report yes/no, multiple choice, and ranked choice votes, are used by about 80 other towns in Massachusetts. Still to be determined: exactly under what circumstances to use them. For example, will it be for all votes or just those in which a floor vote is inconclusive? Will the record of how each person voted be public, as other votes at Town Meeting are? What changes in town bylaws will be necessary?

Town moderator Sarah Cannon Holden and Select Board Chair Jim Hutchinson will convene a forum later this spring to discuss these issues and the conduct of Town Meetings in general.

Property tax circuit breaker (Article 10)

Five years ago, the Property Tax Study Committee (PTSC) was formed to look at ways to ease the burden on limited-income residents and preserve economic diversity after the town raised property taxes by almost 15% to pay for the $93 million school project. Last week’s Town Meeting approval finally put in place a program to shift 1% of the tax levy away from qualified homeowners (those who demonstrate certain criteria around income, assets, age, and length of time they’ve lived in Lincoln) to owners of the most expensive properties.

In May 2021, voters finally approved a home-rule petition to the legislature that would allow the town to implement its own tax circuit breaker program in addition to those offered by the state. The legislature approved the bill only very recently, and (with a nudge from Town Moderator Sarah Cannon Holden, according to PTSC chair Jennifer Glass) Gov. Maura Healey signed it the night before Saturday’s Town Meeting.

The program must be reviewed and put to a vote for renewal every three years.

Water Department (Article 26)

Voters approved bouncing $2.2 million for the first of a five-phase project to replace the town water main running from Bedford Road to Codman Road. Aside from leaks, the insides of the old mains are so encrusted with mineral deposits that their diameter has narrowed to the point that not enough water can get through in a fire emergency. After water pressure testing for the school project, engineers found that an expensive booster pump had to be installed.