Senior Center Committee
Meeting Minutes – October 18, 2007
Councillor Veno calls the meeting to order, and counts all members of the Committee present.
Mark Meche of Winter Street architects presents his overhead presentation (see attached), and spreadsheet decision matrix
Mayor Driscoll: Thank you for all this work, I never imaged it would look like this. It’s more than I expected.
Matt Veno makes brief comments on the presentation to the City Council the week prior, and passes out complete copies of the report that was submitted that night.
Paul Lanzikos reports for the public input work group. There are 540-550 responses to the survey now. I’ll put those into the tabulation and update the report that’s in the binder.
Teasie Riley-Goggin: I attended a recent meeting of the COA which had invited John Boris, Janie Weiner, to talk about programs they worked with, and we spoke about possibility of doing adult day care. They also spoke about the Care in the Family program which was featured in an article in the Boston Glove, as well as Home in the Heart. As insurance coverage changes for seniors, there will be more demand for these types of programs in cities and towns. Perhaps we can do a hotline her, and we could add to it. There are people out there and alone that need these services.
Old/New Business
John Walsh: This committee is at a difficult crossroads. We need to whittle down the list further. Let’s take a look at it again, and see what we can remove from the list, keeping these in a reserve list for possible future revisiting. The Church Street lot probably should come off.
Tony Salvo: I think park land should come off too.
Pat Curtin: Yes, the park sites are difficult, but not impossible. In terms of funding, revenue from functions, from a site like Memorial Drive, it’ll get more than Ft. Lee given its waterfront location. This is a large revenue factor. Not that it’ll be a 7-day facility, but just a few days a month it will bring in a lot. We need to look at how it could work on this site with Camp Naumkeag.
Tony Salvo: Have we seen the records on playground on Memorial Drive, on who owns it?
Pat Curtin: We need to pull material on deeds. It could be part of the Willows.
John Walsh: That’s the number one issue I think. We need to find out if the City owns it and if there are any restrictions that we should know about.
Pat Curtin: There’s a tradeoff on the Willows sites. Ft. Lee appears to be the easiest to build, but other has better revenue potential. If you’re taking park land you have to replace it. It’s not impossible….we could do a switch for Camp Naumkeag, which is not park land.
John Walsh: Ft Lee is not part of the Willows, right?
Pat Curtin: No, when the veterans wanted to do the memorial there, we looked into it.
Pat Curtin: The difficulty is with city property, and deeds.
Tony Salvo: On the Ft. Lee site, if we have the possibility of future expansion, we could blast off ledge, when/if we have money.
Pat Curtin: We could still get rental/revenue on the Ft Lee site. It’s just not quite as desirable as looking over water.
John Walsh: I move that we take Gallows Hill, Church Street and Mack Park off the list. The presentation showed tonight that these two sites are not desirable.
Matt Veno: It would not be elimination of them for consideration, just moving them to a reserve list, so that we can focus a tighter list with future deliberations.
Paul Lanzikos: I can support the Gallows Hill and Church Street suggestions, but Mark Park. There was no support for Church St or Gallows Hill in focus groups, which lines up with Mark’s presentation. I feel there’s less to support characterizing Mack Park that way. It should at least remain at the top of the secondary list. There are three sites that we’re primary looking at. If the Mack Park’s potential status as park land is the issue, you’d have to treat it like the Memorial Drive site. In the focus groups, there was some interest in Mack Park.
John Walsh moves that we move Mack Park to the first site on secondary list, seconded by Teasie Riley-Goggin. The motion carries unanimously.
Paul Lanzikos: Picking up where Pat Curtin was talking about revenue sources. We could focus on t his in the next few meetings. We could undertake a mini market study that would have two parts. The first would be a survey of comparable public function facilities in reasonably comparable locations, like Glenn magna, new Willowdale (Bradley palmer), and gather some market data, what they gross in revenue, etc. The second part would be to interview 2 or 3 leading caterers on North Shore to get a good feel for the desirability of different venues that we’re looking at, and identify the pluses and minuses of different sites. This wouldn’t be a definitive, professional market study, but would give us a feeling of what the demand might be. We could include this data as part
of a financing model for different sites.
Pat Curtin: Many of those sorts of facilities depend on tenting, but we wouldn’t have to do this.
Paul Lanzikos: This mini market study will give us an order of magnitude of what we’re talking about on the revenue front. The process is already underway in Beverly, Lynch Park carriage house.
Pat Curtin: We should visit all these sites.
Teasie Riley-Goggin: I tried to get a notice of this meeting in the Salem News, but they didn’t include it.
Pam Greaves: It does get into the gazette, I noticed.
Paul Lanzikos: I will have this mini market study information by next the meeting. (Pam, Teasie, Pat and Paul agreed to work on this)
John Walsh: I’m confused on the deeds issues. We have to resolve this key issue.
Matt Veno: I’d love to work on this
Mayor Driscoll: Why don’t you hand it off to the city solicitor to do a deeds search on all four sites, including Broad Street?
Barbara Cleary: In regards to finances, depending on the sites, there might be other funding you could ask for.
Mayor Driscoll: We’ll work on that and get a memo to the committee. Can we get additional cost information on the sites?
Barbara Cleary: Mark Meche did some work on costs of sites. He’s in the $5.5m range, and less if the plan is to renovate the existing Broad Street building.
Paul Lanzikos: I’ll try to get info from Emmit (?) on last 6-10 towns that did last senior centers, what were the funding sources where, etc.
Joan Lovely: We should also keep in mind funds from the sale of the Szetela Lane parcel, which was going to go to budget gap but wasn’t. Maybe that can dedicated to the new building, as well as proceeds of this building, unless city offices come in here.
Denis Coleman: A number of centers are renting out space (Winchester). Peabody hired a consultant do a survey of other communities and what they were doing. But we didn’t go forward with it, out of concern about wear and tear on the building.
Teasie Riley-Goggin: Frank and I went to Carleton school to see about their “Green Building” elements. We’re looking for a green building for this too.
Paul Lanzikos: Site visits would be great.
Matt Veno: I’ll check with Mark about dates and run them by the group….we should invite members of the public as well.
Joan Lovely: Under new business, I’d like to ask directly to the Mayor. We received a call last night from what appeared to be a college student asking what we thought about the St. Joseph’s site. They asked others questions too, specific down the ballot, but also targeted St. Joseph’s.
Mayor: I don’t know anything about it.
Joan Lovely: I’ll give Salem State College a call and find out what I can.
Barbara Cleary: I want to give a quick reminder that if you have comments on Mark Meche’s presentation, let me know and I’ll send it to all electronically.
Paul Lanzikos: It might be good to put in the work in a little perspective, and agree on a broad parameter or time frame.
Pat Curtin: We’re not the body to fund this, that’s the administration and the City Council. Our recommendation should be on the site. Again, we are not tasked with coming up with funding mechanisms for this facility.
Mayor Driscoll: I thought we had a helpful discussion at last meeting, and there was general agreement that we don’t want to present a report for wonderful site that the City cannot afford. If we don’t consider financing as part of final report, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.
MV: I agree. I think it’s critically for us to include that as part of our work. We’ve accepted the responsibility to address all the issues that are relevant to moving this project forward. I think some thoughtful discussion of financing is important.
Paul Lanzikos: If it’s not us, who will do it? The City Council and Mayor can’t carve out time and attention to do this. I think there has to be something in report that addresses a reasonable scope of financing. I’d like to propose this timetable. There will likely be little or no prime working time starting about a month from now. Let’s look toward making a full presentation to the City in February of 2008. That gives us a few weeks to do more work. In January we can gather the documents together, and present in February.
John Walsh: I think we should be looking at a March delivery. I think we’ll need a little more time than that.
Joan Lovely: We can task two City Councillors to work with the Mayor once the report is done.
Teasie Riley-Goggin: It would be nice if we have input from a grant writer.
Mayor Driscoll: There are not a lot of senior center grants there. Most communities bond for things like this. Programs that were around in the past don’t exist now.
Tony Salvo: We should also talk to Congressman Tierney and our Senators on this.
Mayor Driscoll: We will do this, but I don’t want everyone to get their hopes up in regards to special sources of funding, which are very hard to come by.
Barbara Cleary: I have a timing question. We said we’d do a big public meeting. We need to think when that should be scheduled. Earlier January?
Paul Lanzikos: I like John Walsh’s idea of a March deliverable, expect that this public meeting would help inform the final recommendation.
John Walsh: We need more conversation with Mark Meche on finances, affordability.
Barbara Cleary: Okay, so perhaps a late January public meeting.
Public Input
Councillor Tom Furey: I think we should think ahead about asking the neighborhood near these sites whether they want two priorities in one ward. We don’t want a firestorm of neighborhood opposition. The committee should be proactive and positive, maybe survey them.
Joan Zabcar: There was tremendous opposition to the one at the Point, there was no survey. When you say park land, does it matter that it’s run by park and rec?
Pat Curtin: Not necessarily, but it opens up usability of parcel for this use, and makes it a little less of a problem.
Joan Zabcar: When we were talking about using CDBG, you said that it could be used for this if the building was for use by seniors alone, that it’s easier.
Paul Lanzikos: I think this discussion will be most productive after we have the finance discussions.
Yelena Cirbrik: I want to make a few comments about the architect’s presentation. I am very impressed by how he breaks up space for parking, that it’s not all one big pie. On all sites he did good job of breaking it up, following the undulations of the terrain, maybe we will also be looking to build 60 parking spaces, with room for more. These two sites are excellent, especially Memorial drive, close to Camp Naumkeag, close to Willows and all that activity. I have another question. The Fort Lee site is a flat lot, but behind that is a steep mountainous site. I worry that site will have problems with underground water, and surface water. The third thing I want to say is that I support TRG when she talked about adult day care being one of the very important things we
need for seniors.
Teasie Riley-Goggin moves for adjournment, seconded by Frank Clocher, which carries unanimously.
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