BUCKLAND — With roughly $40,000 left from fiscal year 2020’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), the town held a public hearing this week to get input from residents regarding how the remaining money should be appropriated.
The plan, which the Selectboard laid out on Tuesday, is to use $6,250 to shore up the West County Emergency Food Pantry and then apply the remaining money toward an engineering design study for the freight yard parking lot, which Linda Overing, a grant consultant with Breezeway Farms Inc., said could benefit from the town looking at it.
“It’s an opportunity for the town to find out how they’d like to see how the parking lot could be improved,” Overing said. “What I’m proposing is an engineering study that could explore all those options … and the town could decide from that if they wanted to pursue construction funding.”
Overing said the West County Emergency Food Pantry can use the $6,250 to support its “new cycle of enrollment.” Approximately one-third of the people using the pantry are from Buckland.
The town has approximately $40,000 leftover from the Ashfield Street reconstruction project, which was funded with FY20’s CDBG grant of roughly $750,000.
Several residents in the neighborhood of the freight yard parking lot expressed concerns about any large development designs that could potentially be brought forward because they want to preserve the quiet nature of the area.
“It’s really a quiet neighborhood,” said resident Deborah Yaffee. “It would be really great to clean it up and pave it. … It’s a nice big flat open space … and the town itself needs more parking.”
Fellow resident Sarah Brown said she was concerned about “pollution of any kind” and that any large development could “really change the tone of the neighborhood.”
The Selectboard said there is still plenty of time for residents to provide their input and there will be other public hearings at other steps throughout this process.
“At this point right now, a lot of the ideas that are coming forward, they’re kind of spitball ideas. They’re concerns that have been brought to the board,” noted Selectboard member Clint Phillips. “We’re not looking at anything set in stone.”
Phillips added that the freight yard is “mainly a parking lot,” but the point of an engineering design study is to explore what options are available for development.
“One of the biggest concerns in town is parking,” he continued. “We want to get an idea and piece together what will work best in that space.”
As the town moves through the design and — if desired — construction process of the freight yard lot, residents will be invited to voice comments and concerns in public hearings at Town Hall.
“Stay tuned,” said Selectboard member Barry Del Castilho.
Chris Larabee can be reached at clarabee@recorder.com or 413-930-4081.