By Owen Boss
Staff Writer
BELCHERTOWN - Town officials are hopeful a Pennsylvania firm will develop a portion of the former Belchertown State School into a desirable location for retailers, assisted living units, office space, housing and medical facilities.
The company, Weston Solutions Inc., specializes in rehabilitating and developing sites like the former state school.
"Their expertise for more than 50 years has been in the remediation of sites, where they've gone in and done a lot of clean up," said Jonathan Spiegel, of the Belchertown Economic Development and Industrial Corp.'s Board of Directors, which owns the property. "Over the last decade or so, they have brought that expertise to projects just like this, and it takes away some of the unknowns and concerns that other developers have had."
Last week, Weston Solutions, a redevelopment firm, and the EDIC signed a letter of intent, requiring Weston to spend the next 90 days studying a 3-acre parcel of the property on Route 202 near the intersection of Route 21.
Company representatives, Spiegel said, will analyze the structural integrity of the buildings, look for contaminants such asbestos in the surrounding soil and estimate what the project will cost to complete.
The document, hammered out over several weeks, requires the EDIC to wait three months before entering into negotiations with other contractors. It also gives the EDIC time to vet the corporation's credentials and financial standing.
"This gives them 90 days to look into the property and see exactly what it needs," said Spiegel. "It also means that we will be investigating them just to make sure that they are going to bring us the kind of project that we have been looking for."
Weston Solutions is no stranger to the remediation of old buildings and the cleanup of contaminated soil. In 2007, the corporation worked closely with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and cleaned up a 73-acre former chemical research facility in Austin, Texas, to make way for Crestview Station, a mixed-use development, similar to what Belchertown officials are hoping for.
Over a six-month period, according to the company's website, workers demolished all 60 buildings at the former chemical facility, tested and cleaned the soil of benzene contamination and managed to save money on the project by finishing ahead of schedule, the company says.
"Soil remediation is simply one of our strengths," said Valarie Ferro, Weston Solutions' senior technical director. "Weston's founder was a pioneer in stewardship, and this now serves as a foundation for our expanding Green Development Division."
Because the two sides have just recently entered into an agreement, Ferro said she didn't want to specify what kind of development Weston Solutions expects for the site but said officials at the corporation are looking into a number of possibilities.
"We are anxious to delve into the information being made available to us by the BEDIC to enable us to answer many technical questions, among them the environmental hurdles that may or may not be present," Ferro said. "This evaluation is a critical step, but just one of many, in determining whether Weston determines it can realistically redevelop on the site."
Michael Frew, who works on the Texas commission's remediation division, said work on the Crestview Station project was done quickly, and all parties involved were happy with the outcome.
"Other than benzene, there were a number of different chemicals there, and the cleanup went very smoothly," Frew said. "We had zero complaints."
Although the project in Texas was done on a much larger scale than what is projected in Belchertown, many of the old buildings on the former state school site and the soil that surrounds them are believed to be contaminated with asbestos and other pollutants - and soil testing and cleanup will likely be a large part of the remediation process.
Spiegel said Weston Solutions first approached the town about two months ago after one of the company's real estate consultants pitched the idea.
The key difference between Weston Solutions and interested parties of the past, Spiegel said, is that the company specializes in rehabilitating and developing similar sites.
"The agreement feels very good and, on the surface, they seem to have exactly what it takes for this project," Spiegel said.
Two years ago, the EDIC negotiated with Paul T. McDermott, a Chicago-based developer who planned on constructing a health resort at the site. However, the agreement fell through after McDermott missed deadlines and presented the board with a $100,000 check that bounced.
Although he expects to meet with representatives regularly over the next few weeks, Spiegel said work has begun on both sides of the equation.
"They were in the records room yesterday looking over our old records, and I'm sure they did a lot of homework before they came to us," Spiegel said. "This is a different approach than we've had in the past, and we've heard from engineers in different parts of the country that have said with a project like this, these are the folks to call."
Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.
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