A Bind of Our Own Making: The Fernald Property & the Agreements We've Made

In 2014, the City of Waltham purchased the Walter E. Fernald Historic District for $3.7 million. In order to get the massive property for so little money, the city made two agreements. In the first, we agreed to use Community Preservation Act (CPA) funds to restore wetlands and maintain the historic buildings on two-thirds of the site.

In the second agreement, we went a step further, committing to ensure historic preservation across the entire site. As part of the second agreement, we even signed off on a list identifying each building that was in good condition for preservation, which included many of the buildings on the site.

Then we did absolutely nothing.

The problem with this approach is now coming to light as the city’s various officials, boards, commissions, and departments consider asking the Commonwealth to allow them to alter or void these two agreements, then demolish much of the site, and build a high school. Yet the only reason they think they can back out of our agreements is because the city has spent years pretending they don’t exist.

Here’s how:

When a city uses Community Preservation funds to buy a property, they have to say what they intend to use it for. They can choose to designate it open space, recreation, historic, or affordable housing. If you buy a farm, for example, you would designate it open space. If you buy a historic building, you designate it historic. This approach is simple and clear, so cities know exactly how to use their funds and re-use the properties they acquire.

For instance, nobody uses CPA funds to buy historic buildings that are on the National Register of Historic Places—like the ones at the Fernald—and then tear them all down.

After they buy a property, cities are required to create deed restrictions. Deed restrictions ensure that a property will be maintained in perpetuity. A benefit of the restrictions is that they ensure that city officials don’t misuse public funds by telling taxpayers they will spend money one way and then do something else entirely.

All towns and cities that use the CPA end up drafting deed restrictions with regularity. Except Waltham. Here, the city has actively resisted placing deed restrictions on municipal properties purchased with CPA funds, even when the commission in charge of the fund has advocated that it be done. The Fernald is no exception.

Nearly three years after the city used Community Preservation Act funds to purchase the property for preservation and re-use, there are no deed restrictions on the Fernald. As a result, people now claim that the Community Preservation Act purchase of the property is incomplete, and they believe that we have the right to try to void our agreements and start over.

What this really means, however, is that we are asking the state to allow us to break our agreements because we didn’t adhere to them in the first place. Moreover, since we are asking the state to financially support our high school project, we’re asking them to then help pay for the demolition of the very same site we told them we would not demolish.

This is disheartening. The need for a new high school is indisputable, and might have been possible at Fernald if the city had spent these years planning and working with stakeholders to meet our obligations.

Instead, city boards rarely took up the substantive regulatory issues of the Fernald, committees remained uniformed and ill-informed, elected officials made public statements supporting the destruction of the site, and those of us who encouraged compliance were treated with suspicion at best. A policy process was turned into politics.

Now, many claim that the city has exhausted its options and needs a reprieve from these supposedly-onerous agreements. But we eagerly entered into them only three years ago, helping to craft them, using boundary lines that the current mayor drew up and our city council approved.

If this gamble actually succeeds, it won’t just be bad for Waltham, it could have catastrophic ramifications well beyond city limits.

Across the Commonwealth, municipalities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars responsibly using the CPA. What Waltham proposes is a poison pill. It would allow officials to buy properties with the CPA, hold them in limbo, and then release them back out of the CPA for a different use when it is convenient. This would reduce the CPA to a slush fund vulnerable to corrupt politicians and savvy developers.

Here in Waltham, we may wish to view all of this in light of the worthy cause of building a high school, but if we do, then we must acknowledge that our approach puts valuable projects like this at risk through-and-through, and will continue to unless we fix the root causes. Given how little has been done, the use of the Fernald will face unexpected hurdles for years because of our lack of planning and coordination, even if the state does give its blessing to this reckless demand. We should hope, instead, that they do not.

Alex Green is a journalist and historian. He is former chairperson of the City of Waltham Historical Commission.

*Image, Interior of the Howe Library, Walter E. Fernald Historic District, Waltham, Mass.