WESTFIELD – The Pioneer Valley Planning Commission has awarded the city a grant to initiate an environmental assessment of city-owned property along the Westfield River.
Community Development Director Peter J. Miller Jr., said last night at the Finance Committee budget review, that city officials “kicked off phase 1 this (Monday) morning with a site walk-through” along the south bank of the Westfield River west of the Great River Bridge, the area between Elm Street and the railroad right of way where the Columbia Greenway rail trail will be located.
The site includes the former Waltham property, taken for taxes after fire destroyed the building, as well as the former casket manufacturing building that was demolished as part of the Great River Bridge construction project.
Principal Planner Jay Vinskey said the city’s grant application for PVPC funding was ranked the highest.
“The PVPC wants to move this forward,” Vinskey said this morning.
Miller said that the PVPC “has expressed its support for funding Phase I environmental work upon completion of Phase 1” which is funded with a $2,000 service grant. The PVPC has hired a consultant, TRC Environmental of Lowell, to initiate the brownfield study.
“The goal of Phase I is to identify health risks on three parcels,” Miller said this morning. “We know that the Waltham property is (environmentally) clean because we did that 0ourselves when we took the property.”
Miller said the city’s long-term goal is to identify remediation needed to make the property safe for future uses. The next phase of that process will be an economic and market study to identify how the property could be redeveloped in the future.
Miller said that the Elm/Arnold streets project is now the primary goal of his department and the city, but that the city is assessing future downtown redevelopment projects and beginning the initial assessments of those locations.
The city has also been awarded an $8,000 PVPC grant “in order to develop a strategy to bring market-rate housing to the city’s downtown and near-downtown neighborhoods,” Miller said.
Those two grant efforts, the riverfront brownfield study and the market-rate housing effort, could result in overlap if the riverfront property is identified for future housing projects.
