Recreation panel recommends farm buy

By Owen Boss
Staff Writer

NORTHAMPTON - Before a standing-room-only crowd Monday, the Recreation Commission voted unanimously to recommend to the City Council that the city purchase the Bean family farm, and voted to seek Community Preservation Act funding before a formal agreement with the owner has been reached.

Although commissioners didn't discuss the ultimate use of the farmland, it reportedly has been eyed by the city as a site for a multi-use sports complex aimed at easing the current lack of available field space for sports leagues across the city.

The meeting drew more than 30 residents to the department's meeting room at Smith Vocational High School and featured a lengthy public comment session during which the overwhelming majority of speakers urged that the parcel, if purchased, be preserved as farmland.

"I'm here because I want to see this land preserved for agricultural purposes and the key word here is #prime farmland," Florence resident Darcy Sweeney said, before adding, "There is only so much prime farmland left in this city and our children can play on fields that are not made up of top-quality soil."

The 60-acre farm, located on both sides of Spring Street about a quarter-mile north of Meadow Street, currently belongs to the Bean family and has been on the market for the past two years with an asking price of $2.5 million. The farm has been in the Bean family for more than 100 years and is farmed today primarily for hay, although one speaker noted that the land has produced a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in the past.

Without predicting how the land would be used, Wayne Freiden, the city's director of planning and development, laid out some of the city's options in a PowerPoint presentation, and stressed the importance of acting quickly in acquiring the land.

One of the only residents speaking in favor of using the land for recreation was Jim Miller, the director of athletics for Northampton High School. He argued that the growth of the city's youth was just as important as the growth happening on its farmland.

"We're talking about agriculture here also, the growth of our youth," Miller said. "If we continue not having enough land for our youth sports, the land we have will continue to be beaten into the ground and in the long run it will become unsafe and hard to use at all."

Now that the purchase of the land has been recommended to the City Council, Freiden laid out a potential timeline that he called "optimistic," in which a public forum on the future use of the land would be held sometime in early December and at a venue capable of handing a much larger turnout.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com