A study by a group concerned about the drainage and water-level problems on the Nemasket River, which Rochester’s waterways connect to, is telling the town to enact a large, expensive action plan that no one in town had input on.
The Planning Board Tuesday night said the town won’t go willingly in on such a plan.
Local water-resources expert Fred Underhill said the group, which includes the Assawompsett Pond Complex board that controls the use of area ponds such as those in Rochester, along with the SRPEDD regional transportation agency, Nature Conservancy and Mass Audubon, “managed to get a couple $100,000 of grants to do a study that appears to me more concerned with climate change than the immediate (water level) problems facing the area.”
Underhill said the study details 89 specific recommendations. The problem is that most of them ask local towns to do the heavy lifting and the funding.
“Fifty-eight of these list local town staff as the funding source to initiate,” Underhill said. “Fifty-two of these list the local Conservation Commissions (as) the responsible party. Thirty-one list other local town boards to be the responsible party.”
Underhill noted, as an example, that the program recommendations include adopting the Community Preservation Act (which Rochester has already rejected by town-wide vote.) They would also establish a Uniform Water Resources Protection Overlay District” and provide “a larger annual budget for the APC ranger program.”
“The program does not determine what effects these changes can make on the groundwater levels in Rochester and the effects on private wells in the area,” Underhill complained.
He said this group has used the 100-year flood event in 2010 to create a new regional governmental district headed by nonelected persons without Rochester and Freetown having full voting rights. (The two towns do not have such voting rights on the APC board.)
Planning Board members agreed these recommendations would be good for Rochester and complained townspeople never had input in compiling this study.
Planning Board Chairman Arnold Johnson said these recommendations won’t be good for Rochester’s water resources but would actually strain those resources. “There is some common sense here,” Johnson said. “But they have to balance that with real life.”
Underhill said he just wanted the board to be aware of what proposals are coming the town’s way and to be ready to speak up about them at public hearing time.
Referring to the lack of Rochester’s input into the plan so far, Johnson said, “If these ideas are so great for the town, why didn’t they show them to us first rather than shove them down our throats?”
The board was also cool to the MBTA’s plan to require towns near new MBTA tracks to develop more housing close to those areas.
Town Planner Nancy Durfee said the MBTA has updated its rationale and its requirements under this proposed regulation. A town like Rochester will only be required to build 105 of such units, rather than the previously required 750 units.
An action plan on the new requirements, she said, will be due by January 31, 2023, and will have to be adopted by December 2025. Johnson was blunt in his reply, saying there was no chance the town would adopt such a regulation.
Durfee agreed. “This is a heavy, top-down approach,” she said. “We have to say, ‘You cannot force us.’”
Durfee recommended speaking to legislators about the issue and to do so before the November election because that’s when they will be more attentive to such demands.
The board also approved and signed the “Arch at the Meadow” site-plan-review decision and the “Buzzards Bay Scenic Highway” (Marion Road) decision.
The Rochester Planning Board will meet next on Tuesday, October 25, at 7:00 pm at Old Colony Regional Vocational-Technical High School library and will be accessible via Zoom.
Rochester Planning Board
by Michael J. DeCicco