Tina Gorman, Director, Westfield Council On Aging
WESTFIELD – The Hampden Probate Court will make the final decision of the suitability of using the estate of Mary Noble as the site for construction of a new 20,000-square foot senior center.
The city and Council on Aging established a Senior Citizen Center Building Committee which evaluated a number of locations, some with buildings and some just raw land, throughout the city. The committee selected the Noble Estate on Noble Street as the preferred location for the center, which will service not only senior citizens, but veterans as well, under a plan to move the city’s veterans service office out of the basement of city hall.
The city’s Law Department was preparing an appeal to Probate Court to determine if the language of the will, as written, can be extended to include the benefit to senior citizens of a senior center, which would allow the city to increase programs and services offered to senior residents, and contacted the Attorney General’s office to petition support before appealing to the Probate Court for a decision.
The issue raised by Attorney General Martha Coakley’s staff is that the property, adjacent to the Westfield Housing Authority’s Ely-Dolan Apartments, was left in Noble’s will to the housing authority to be used for the residential benefit of senior citizens. Construction, or even the concept, of senior centers was not en vogue when Mary Noble wrote her will, so the language of the will neither specifically allows, nor prohibits, that use. That will was created in the era before senior centers became the community focal point of social, cultural and medical services for seniors.
The Noble Estate defaults to the Noble Hospital Board of Directors if it is not used by the Westfield Housing Authority for senior housing. The city, as part of the Probate Court appeal documentation, requested the Westfield Housing Authority Board of Directors and the Noble Hospital Board to vote to support the use of the property for a new senior center.
The Attorney General’s staff recently questioned if the property would ever be needed for new senior housing and what benefit the senior center would provide to the city’s senior citizens. The COA provided details of the social services provided to seniors through the senior center, while the Housing Authority, which has not constructed new senior housing in 40 years, voted to surplus that land.
The COA and the Housing Authority have provided the Attorney General’s office with a “complaint,” or petition document, addressing those concerns in October.
COA Executive Director Tina Gorman said that the city was informed that the Attorney General’s office will respond directly to the Probate Court.
“It’s in the hands of the court,” Gorman said to the COA members. “We submitted the complaint to the Attorney General’s office which responds directly to the court, not to the city which was what we originally thought.”
COA Chairman Jack Leary said the complaint process has been modified to yield quicker decisions.
“The process is expedited so it goes much faster,” Leary said. “The key to that faster process is the Probate judge assigned to the case.”
Gorman said that the city recently met with the project managers and the architectural teams to continue to refine the design of the $6 million facility.
The city hired Diversified Project Management Inc., of Newton, to serve as the Owner Project Manager (OPM). The OPM is selected earlier in the design process to assist the city in selecting a design architect, and eventually a building contractor. The city selected a proposal submitted by two firms working in collaboration. Dietz & Company Architects of Springfield is teaming up with Courtstreet Architects of Newton, which has designed several senior centers constructed recently in the state.
“It’s getting very exciting,” Gorman said yesterday. “We’re starting to get into the nitty gritty of the layout, the number and type of rooms, sizes and locations of those rooms based on function. We’ve talked about companion bathrooms, two with showers. We’ve talked about privacy for the staff when they are meeting with members, that a big concern of mine because now we don’t have that (at the Senior Center located at 40 Main Street.) We’ve talked about storage for equipment and emergency response capability.”
“We’re not designing the physical building because we don’t have the property yet,” Gorman said.
