Subcommittee tours potential Wilbraham senior center sites

Date: 1/22/2015

WILBRAHAM – The Senior Center Feasibility Subcommittee toured three potential sites for a new senior center, including acreage behind Christ the King Lutheran Church at 758 Main St., another at the Mile Tree Elementary School baseball field, and a third located on the former Bennett Turkey Farm property. 


The first site the subcommittee toured consisted of 7.26 wooded acres behind Christ the King Lutheran Church at 758 Main St., which is advertised for $139,000.

“The main issue here is that it is undeveloped land,” John Catlin of Catlin and Petrovick Architects said. “There would be clearing costs but that’s not a big deal. The one drawback is that it has a very low profile; it’s not very visible. One of the real successes of good centers is when they’re on an area where you can clearly see [them].”

The property also doesn’t have sewer, which would cost about $55,000, he noted.

Director of Elder Affairs Paula Dubord said Christ the King Lutheran Church does not own the property. The property is listed by Keller Williams Realty and it is privately owned.

The Rice Nature Preserve is located behind the site, which could allow for hiking trails if the location is chosen as the building site, she noted.

With the town’s population of about 4,000 seniors in mind, Catlin said the new proposed new senior center could consist of 15,000 square feet with two stories. A senior center that size would also need to have 100 to 120 parking spaces. However, the exact specifications of a proposed senior center have yet to be determined.

The second site, located on roughly 3.5 acres at the Mile Tree Elementary School baseball field. The site includes sewer, water, gas, and electricity.

Thomas Sullivan, interim town administrator and a member of the subcommittee, said the site is town-owned property currently being utilized by the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District.

“If it’s school-owned, you have an issue of getting it out of the hands of the School Committee,” Caitlin said. “If it’s town-owned, it’s a whole ‘nother story.”

Dubord said the site is currently used by Minnechaug Regional High School as a practice field.

“I think because it is an active field, that’s the only that thing you’re going to have to work with, with the town and user groups and the politics of it,” Catlin said. “It’s a lovely site for you. It’s very high visibility on Main Street. You’ve got the activity of the road. You could have a real presence.”

Dubord addressed an issue of traffic during school hours near the site, which often sees heavy amounts when students enter school in the morning and leave in the mid-afternoon.

“You don’t want to have to have your elders driving off of Main Street and driving on Main Street, off a driveway,” Catlin added. “You like to have it off a controlled road with a stop sign and maybe even at this time you might end up with a yellow flashing light there to bring attention.”

It takes the average 65-year-old adult or older roughly 15 to 30 more seconds to take a left-hand turn off a main road, he noted.

The third site is located on 6 acres behind the former Bennett Turkey Farm at 601 Main St., which is accessible via a driveway off Main Street and near Minnechaug Regional High School.

Catlin said this site is probably the most complex of the three to develop because about half of the acreage would not be useable due to wetlands. Additionally, the site would need to be surveyed; costing about $1,000 per acre and it would need to be approved for development by the Conservation Commission.

There also issues of access to the site, he noted

“The developer [and property owner Anthony Carnevale of AC Homebuilding] is apparently saying, ‘I will gift you the back part of our site if the town will allow me to build two more houses [by allowing a zone change],” Catlin said.

Sullivan said if a zone change where to occur it would be exclusive to that site.

Currently, Carnevale is allowed to construct eight houses on the other side of the property, Catlin noted.

“I would say that the Bennett Turkey Farm property, that access, to me, if you would have to cross one off my list that would be the one that would be most difficult,” Dubord said. “The other two are both good sites.”

 Each subcommittee member will be filling out a matrix form of the three sites with ratings in   nine categories from negative three points to positive three points, with a zero representing a neutral ranking, Catlin explained.

“We add up those and consolidate them and then we rank the sites,” he added. “That’ll take a couple weeks.”