Eminent Domain Battle In Brookline Heats Up With Pine Manor

BROOKLINE, MA — The President of Pine Manor College is not taking the the town's recent move to seize land from his 105 year old college lightly.

Tom O'Reilly came to Brookline to help turn around the school and he's proud of what he has accomplished growing revenue and graduation rates at the diverse college, which serves about 500 students.

This Tuesday he got a call from someone in Town Hall inviting him to a public meeting about a proposed land grab about three hours before the meeting started this week. When he showed up to the high school Tuesday he said he was shocked at what he was seeing he told Patch in an interview.

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Inside the Brookline High School auditorium on a screen architect Jonathan Levi walked the audience through design options on building a ninth school. He touched on ways the Baldwin Site could still be used, but became animated when discussing what the town could do with a portion of Pine Manor's land.

"It was so callus and cavalier that I just said 'this is outrageous.' It's like someone walking over to your front door and saying you have a lovely flower garden. I think I'll take it," said Tom O'Reilly, president of Pine Manor College.

This was the first time Pine Manor College had seen any of the schematics for the proposed taking of the land where he has just turned around a school after a little more than a year at the helm. And now, after hearing about proposal just the week before (like most Brookline residents), he was watching Levi slice up the front lawn of his campus.

“How wonderful would it be to have a school with a water view?” Levi asked those in attendance.

The school sits on Heath Street, near the corner of Hammond Street and close to Route 9. Its 52 acres include a recently renovated cafeteria, tennis courts a library and the historic mansion that was on the property before it became a school in the 1930s.

The town has been looking for a way to address the growing enrollment since 2006 when the number of K-8 in Brookline has grown from 4,059 students to 5,482. The School Committee expects the trajectory to continue and worry that time is running out to find a place for a ninth and eventually tenth school to accommodate children. After a years long process a team winnowed down a handful of sites to three then scrapped several after various pushback from the community members, and eventually voted on a property in South Brookline where there once was a school, the Baldwin site. After Patriot owner's son Jonathan Kraft and neighbors pushed back and the town discovered more complications with the land the boards entered into executive session and came out with the Pine Manor option.

It had previously been looked into, but the school had expressed that it was not interested in selling any more land. O’Reilly wrote letter to the town vigorously opposing the seizing of Pine Manor land the night he found out about the plan: “As our elected representatives, I ask you to press the stop button on this proposal.”

O'Reilly said that following the announcement a number of people in the town have approached him.

"The perspective I've gotten is that the town has options. They don't like the options. The town is weighing who is the easiest to knock over on the issue," he said.

The Brookline Board of Selectmen, for their part, say they still want to get the input from residents on what to do.

"The immediate effect of the Board of Selectmen’s and School Committee’s votes will be to initiate further study and obtain public input on the additional property prior to a final decision. This announcement about the expansion of focus to include privately owned land does not remove the Town-owned Baldwin site from consideration, and further study of the site is necessary," reads the statement by the Board of Selectmen.

O'Reilly, who is in the process of writing an open letter to the community says he doesn't think seizing the school's property is what Brookline residents are about.

He asked some students recently, one from Brockton and another from the Bronx what was most important to them about the college.

"They both, essentially said 'we feel totally loved and supported by the faculty and staff and it feels like family to us'," he said. The beauty of the campus was next on the list for them. One girl from the Bronx said she comes out to lay in the field and watch the stars at night - because she can't see the stars when she's in the Bronx.

"Basically these kids are saying the same thing that people who move to Brookline say. They want to find a community that offers up a good education and is beautiful peaceful and makes them feel good. And yet the town - elected officials - are saying 'well they don't count'."

Brookline residents have consistently messaged something else, he said.

"My sense is that those aren't the values of the people of Brookline. They are about equitable values. That's why we feel so comfortable opening our doors to the community, to use our fields, library, gallery, to walk their dogs (as long as they have poop bags) we're good with that because that's what good neighbors do. I think these officials are giving everybody a bad rap by the way they're operating," he said.

READ UP: Brookline Considers Taking Pine Manor By Eminent Domain

Photos by Jenna Fisher