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Date: 5/17/2022
EASTHAMPTON – A second community workshop for the New City Infrastructure Planning Study will take place on May 21 from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
The New City Infrastructure Planning Study is a study to comprehensively evaluate and plan for the infrastructure needs in the New City neighborhood. The study area is bounded by Ferry Street at the north, Parsons Street to the east, Everett Street to the south and Lower Mill Pond to the west.
The study will include evaluations of public water, sewer and drainage systems, sidewalk and walking surfaces, roadway services, street trees, potential opportunities for green infrastructure and redesign of public parks around the former Parsons Street School.
This upcoming community workshop will feature town consultant on the project Fuss & O’Neill, who will be presenting their findings to the community and listen for feedback on the proposed concept plans for the neighborhood improvements and infrastructure needs.
Easthampton Assistant Planner Jamie Webb said the Planning Department and Department of Public Works will also be in attendance. She added there will be a table-top discussion of the infrastructure findings and proposed concepts following the presentation.
Webb said the neighborhood was originally built in the early 1900s and is one of the oldest in the city. Much of the public infrastructure installed at that time has now aged and has not been improved outside of emergencies.
“We’ve known that the infrastructure is sort of reaching the end of its intended usable life and we did not have a good sense of what exactly and where the problems where,” Webb said. “If you can imagine, infrastructure projects when you get to construction can be quite expensive so we’re looking at multiple projects over the next 10 years to address the findings in this report.”
Webb said a major point of this project is attempting to make changes to the city that will help them be better prepared for climate change. The city has seen more intense storms from rain and snow events than ever in the last 100 years which causes deterioration of the drainage system at a quicker rate.
“Our drainage system was designed for a typical rain event of 100 years ago, and now when that typical rain event is giving more rain on average, it overwhelms those systems,” Webb said. “The engineering practices of 100 years ago are not the best practices of today. The idea of just conveying stormwater via pipes to water bodies, such as Lower Mill Pond, it has a lot of environmental impacts and damages so we are trying to install green infrastructure.”
Webb said the town has already received a Community Development Block Grant to fund the infrastructure study and hired a consulting team to do assessments of the underground infrastructure to identify what needs to be replaced, what’s useable and for how much longer.
Last year the town also hosted a community “walk-shop” at which town officials walked the neighborhood with residents and consultants and listened to them to understand what their concerns were.
“It’s one thing to know that the sewer line is undersized and causing backups and it’s another thing entirely to know if that is impacting people. Or their concerns are more along the lines of people speeding in the neighborhood and the streets feel unsafe to walk on,” Webb said.
Webb says an advantage of doing a large infrastructure project like this is when the underground infrastructure is replaced, you need to replace the road surfaces or sidewalks and feels there’s an opportunity to do something better than what they have now.
“This is really where the residents of that area, its important to understand what they want to see,” Webb said.
The workshop on May 21 will be primarily to engage the public perception of what the town has done to this point after listening to residents, assessing the infrastructure and now coming up with conceptual ideas and plans for residents to weigh in on.