I attended the public meeting at Salem's Bentley School last Thursday convened to discuss the future of the Dominion power plant site.
Conducted by Mayor Kim Driscoll and the four consultants who have been hired to study options for the waterfront property, the meeting was attended by about 110 people who spoke almost unanimously for an ambitious and "visionary" redevelopment project.
Although no specific plan has been proposed — it's too early in the study for that — the audience requested the mayor and consultants to think long-term and perhaps unconventionally. During a lengthy question-and-answer period, conducted after the consultants had done a good job briefly summarizing some of the features and constraints of the site, the very progressive and environmentally conscious audience challenged them to come up with proposals that are thoroughly green, non-polluting, and that reflect both what we have learned is wrong with our old energy paradigms and what we now know is needed for the 21st century and beyond.
Under any financial circumstances, and on any site, that would be a tall order indeed; but on the power plant site this may be especially difficult — a reality that the participating citizens readily acknowledged.
The plant buildings themselves would need to be demolished and removed, and then the site's soil would need to be cleaned or replaced. The cost to do those two things alone may be between $80 million and $120 million. That's before adding the cost of building anything new.
Two physical features must be kept in mind also. Adjacent to the site is the South Essex Sewerage District plant; and necessary in perpetuity after the power plant is gone is a nine-acre transmission substation. This reduces the usable area of the site to 53 acres (still large, however, the equivalent of nine Salem Commons).
But the biggest obstacle — and one that didn't get mentioned at the meeting — to any large-scale, high-density, mixed-use (residential, retail, office, commercial, industrial) project may be the existing road network around the site.
Derby, Essex and Webb streets, which would serve as the primary access routes to a redeveloped site, are already narrow and slow. Widening them would be a very difficult, if not impossible, process.
The plant site is just far enough from the downtown area to render it unwalkable for many. Thus the amount of traffic that a successful, dense, mixed-use project would generate might overwhelm the capacity of the surrounding streets. That's the principal uncertainty with the otherwise excellent plan proposed by the "Vision for Salem" group.
Although their city-reinforcing, "new urbanism" plan could perhaps be reconciled with an amended "Designated Port Area" (an existing set of restrictions on permissible uses of the site), no planner has yet addressed how the new mixed-use district would be accessed. Perhaps a remote parking lot, with shuttle service for residents, commuters and workers, to both downtown and the site, could reduce regular traffic volumes.
It may well be that traffic and site constraints will ultimately push us toward a lower-density, manufacturing or industrial use if we can attract one given the global competition for such projects. A fishery, product assembly, marine manufacturer, wind turbine repair facility or other warehouse-sized business would be a great fit, utilizing the site's unsurpassed proximity to deep water.
Some people look at the site issues and the high cleanup costs and call for some sort of natural-gas-burning facility. But there is no compelling need for the additional power, and this old-technology, partial solution has the feel of a proposal made because no other alternative is so easily imagined and defended.
I do think that the meeting's audience and the "Vision for Salem" proposals are on the right track though. And now that legislation has been passed that will have Massachusetts compensate the city until 2016 for any lost power plant tax revenue, we can better manage the city budget adjustments that are inevitably going to be necessary with any redevelopment plan.
The city does not own the parcel, Dominion does until it gives or sells it to a developer (and that decision may depend upon who agrees to do the cleanup). In the meantime, the city's study could describe suitable, feasible plan concepts and thereby help whet the private sector's appetite to take on what will almost surely be a long and formidable project.
In this struggling economy, and faced with the unlikelihood of duplicating Dominion's tax payments, Salem must nonetheless attempt to facilitate a green master plan at the site.
The one theme that most of the meeting attendees implicitly expressed was that we simply know too much now about our impact on the environment to reach for old solutions.
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Brian T. Watson, an architect and Swampscott resident, is a regular Salem News columnist. Contact him at watson@nii.net.
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