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Date: 10/30/2023
BELCHERTOWN — The long-awaited Carriage Grove project looked to finally be getting underway with a public hearing set for Sept. 12. However, residents will have to wait a little longer — again.
The redevelopment of the Belchertown State School, dubbed the Carriage Grove project by MassDevelopment, is intended to bring new mixed-use developments to the former site of the infamous institution for the disabled.
The project is expected to consist of five phases with phase one creating a 108 unit, multi-family apartment complex and the reuse of two existing administration buildings.
Brisa Development LLC was originally supposed to present its proposed site plan for the Belchertown State School property at a public hearing on Sept. 12, but when the meeting began, Planning Board member Justin Rosienski broke the news that the firm had informed the board only the day prior that it needed to reschedule the public hearing for Oct. 24.
For the second time in as many months, Belchertown residents gathered in the Planning Board room and online on Oct. 24 to hear the proposed redevelopment plan for the property.
The only problem was that the public hearing was pushed back again until the Planning Board meeting on Nov. 28.
Brisa Development LLC representative Hammad Graham was online for the meeting and wanted to provide an explanation of why his company needed to ask for another continuation of the public hearing.
“As it relates to ask for continuation, that is more putting together the right kind of responses to the questions that we are getting from the multiple parties within Belchertown. As the developer of this project, we have put in a lot of time and effort and resources to get the project to where it needs to be,” Graham said.
He added, “Unfortunately when you are doing projects like this, especially with town-owned sites, there are a lot of questions, there are a lot of clarity that is needed versus a private site where you don’t have this level of input. Therefore, it is taking us a little longer to retrieve this information and we need to go through it make sure we have the proper response.”
The Planning Board members expressed that they were frustrated with being asked for a second time to continue the public hearing and wanted to make sure that Graham would be ready to present at one of the next Planning Board meetings.
Even though Graham said he could be ready by the Nov. 14 Planning Board meeting, the board agreed to continue the Public Hearing on Tuesday, Nov. 28, at 7 p.m. to give Brisa Development LLC an extra couple of weeks.
Planning Board Chair Dan Beaudette said he knows this is an important project to the town and even though he and the board are upset with the process, he wants to continuing working with them.
Beaudette said, “It has been our custom to allow applicants to continue as long as there is evidence that they are making forward progress and I think we have heard enough indication that forward progress is being made. People spent a lot of money to get to this point and we are not going to short circuit the process.”
In terms of making sure the next meeting will take place, Beaudette said he tried his best to communicate to the town about the change to the Oct. 24 agenda.
He said, “Once we realized we had a request for continuation we did file an amended agenda for tonight to try and get the public at least a couple of days notice that a continuance request did come in. I am sorry we don’t have any better communication system than that.”
Beaudette said the deadline for a submission of the project will be due on Tuesday, Nov. 21, so residents can keep checking the agenda after that to make sure the public hearing will still take place.