the following podcast is produced or sponsored by a community member the content views and opinions expressed are those of the participants in do not reflect those of b m c or the town of belmont b m c welcomes your comments it call us oh everyone welcome to community conversations i'm your host roger colton the town of belmont is now deliberating how to reuse the old incinerator site  that's been closed for a number of years and one creative use that's been proposed is to use the site for a new bike in skate park an active recreation facility for the town of belmont i have with me today lucy a willie who is really the driving force behind that proposal and is the organizer of it we're going to learn today what what it means to have a bike in skate park and what the the implications are thanks for stopping over alysia thank you for having having me roger lucy before we really get started give us an introduction to yourself do you do you have kids are you about residents yes i'm of the month resident i'm the mother of two elementary school elementary school aged children and i'm an advocate for preserving open space for public use maintaining conservation lands that we already have and i am a frequent mountain biker on the western greenway which is which is one of the open trails conservation land here in belmont and other communities it connects a communit y your listeners are not familiar with the western greenway can you paint us a verbal picture of what the old incinerator site is because it's more than just a building right so it is twenty five acres and let me start by st because i think the context of the incinerator site is really the key let me start with the context so the incinerator site is surrounded by conservation land fully surrounded so it is in the middle of boat rock meadow and beaverbrook north and as i mentioned earlier rock meadow and beaverbrook north are home to part of the western greenway which is a very heavily used multi use network of trails so you'll see talk walkers you'll see runners walkers bikers and so as i mentioned the incinerator site itself has twenty five dollars acres eight acres of which are wetlands and seventeen of which could potentially be developed by the town so as roger mentioned incinerator site hasn't been hughes as an incinerator for decades and so what that means is that vegetation has grown up on the incinerator site and much of it now looks very much like the surrounding conservation land and the incinerator site is really the location of where where the town used to dump the ashes of what used to be burned so it's not just land there is potentially toxic material it's a fair to say that there's talks like material i think tests are being done currently to determine that so in order to eliminate any exposure of whatever was burned and dumped there the town is currently performing testing in order to determine what was dumped there and then the plan would  selectmen face is once they kept that site what do they do with it and there's a whole host of options son on how to use that site absolutely and you know i think what it comes down to is that this is really a once in a lifetime opportunity to add a significant amount of land to be used as public open space and for both active as well as passive recreation and so these are opportunities really for the entire community to benefit from and you know a sentiment i have recently heard frequently echoed is that as belmont becomes more densely populated as  larger apartment buildings are being built really the value of public spaces is really you know tremendous and so realistically the selectmen face a very tough decision of potentially weighing short term costs of capping and even longer term costs of development and maintenance of the site with lightly less tangible benefits of preserving open space for the entire community so you are you believe that this i should be used in part for a bike and skate park tell us what does that mean so what is a bike in skate park i think of skate parks and i think of these concrete but tell us what a bike can skate park yes you're absolutely right a skate park is generally a concrete surface and it has  many different obstacles berms re amps for the skaters to skate on and so what distinguishes so you can think of a skate park as a playground for skateboards so bike park is essentially like a skate park but for bikes and what makes it different is that it is natural surface terrain so it's dirt so unlike the concrete that you would have on a skate park a bike park would be on a dirt surface but really you know it would be loop up there would also be obstacles that you would have to come across and so it really is something for all ages and all skill levels and it seems like that's a logical question when when you think of all skill levels what do you mean what's a skill level i have on a bicycle right so you know a skate park is perfect for the youngest bikers that are i'm sure you've seen the little bikes without pedals the push bikes where as young as two and three years old the little kids are on them so bike parks are perfect for the youngest bikers whether they're on a push bike or whether it's their st time on a bike with pedals as well as an adult or a teenager who wants to hone his or her skills on the bike work on particular particularly difficult or challenging skills that the feel like they could or would like to improve on and so it really you know fit the those learning to those trying to hone their skills and everybody in between and it's really fun for the entire family all ages and when i'm hearing where the the m e j i'm building in my mind is there might be trails where parents and little kids would be there and then there would be other trails that would have jumps possibly a trail that would have some sort of obstacle on it yeah and even then you know most trails most well built mountain biking trails will have parallel courses way or first depending on your sense of you know what you're wanting to try that day or what you would you know you can have different choices and there's always going to be an easier or a more challenging option and it's a sort of a revolutionary idea it's this which is a pump track which there are several in the greater boston area the entire vision as i have it outlined there are many of about seven of them in new england and many many more around the country i think skate parks also are gaining in popularity cambridge recently built a very large one and several smaller ones there was a big one just opened in somerville and you know multiple communities surrounding us like sing to and watertown they have skate parks for the community and bike parks are really something that in the past decade has become very popular a very popular sport you mention cambridge do i remember correctly that cambridge actually used an old incinerator site for a bike park so dana he doesn't have a bike part per se dana he park is built on a former incinerator site however that is open space so it's meadows it's walk it's playground ok so the bike park in the skate park in cambridge which by the way most skate parks nowadays are all wheels so they will allow skateboards they will allow roller blades you know what bicycles whatever it is that you enjoy doing on you know one thing that strikes me is that the old incinerator site seems to be maybe not the hub of accessing the western greenway but there are any number of bike paths and other trails that could and would hook through there is that correct yes absolutely i mean i see this as a very synergistic place for putting a bike in skate park for the community in part because the surrounding land is already used by walkers and mountain so it would be a very natural place to put a bike park because you could hop off the western greenway visit the bike park and then hop back on the western greenway and likewise it would be you know one of the  difficulties of the western greenway is access points there are not many points in which you can park and access the western greenway so a bike and skate park could potentially provide additional access points for the the western  greenway and we did mention the western greenway let me not assume that our listeners know what the western greenway it's can you explain that yeah so the western greenway was an effort you know i i want to say about seven years back by many local community members i think roger rubel who's the director at mass audubon at habitat he was very instrumental and number of the new england mountain biking association and so what they did is they brought independent pieces of land by working with stakeholders and landowners they connected these seemingly independent pieces of conservation land and in time at times privately and via a multi hughes network of trails and so it really is a wonderful asset to the community and it spans so it goes through a lexington it goes through wall thing goes through  belmont so it really connects multiple communities together and this is just make sure that people understand that we're not talking about the community path here this is independent of the community that's exactly right but it does complement the community path so when i think of a community path i think of something where you can get from point a to point b it's a mode of transportation it allows bikes to become really a plausible way for families to see flee travel to a different destination a bike park is a little bit different in that it is it's like a playground you're going around in circles and you're trying different things and you're honing your skills better multi generational playground absolute i mean i could go if if i could get on a bicycle and i go over a job you know i would try that hopefully i wouldn't kill myself but i would try that absolutely and you know i enjoy mountain biking with my children were frequently at bike parks in new england as well as the western green with the kids and mountain biking is one of the one of the activities that i really enjoy doing with my father as well so often you'll see three generations together will be out there mountain biking and everybody's having a good time one of the things that strikes me and i use that term again but is that belmont really doesn't have a facility for active recreation for four teenagers or maybe even tweens maybe even somewhat younger th teenagers it have you thought through the the need for active recreation i think kids little kids can and can go to  playgrounds and we are renovating our playgrounds around town but the site for active recreation really doesn't exist in belmont that i can think of my absolutely you know bike and skate park philly would be a fantastic resource for also that demographic that teenage demographic and you know one of the things about the fact that it is twenty five acres of land so i can skate park even a world class bike and skate park would really occupy roughly five acres of that land and so you can see the land being used for other uses that bring in even greater parts of the community you know i think we have outlined the potential of a board walk and birdwatching and so it really becomes a community hub and one of the ways in which it's energizes with the community path is that via the western greenway and lone tree hill the community path would connect the bike park to the rest of town on off road trails so the community path when directly connected the bike park but the community path would connect to other trails and bike paths that would connect to the bike the bike and skate park that's right off of route sixty s so off of food sixty you can enter a lone tree hill and go through loon tree hill cross mill street and then you would be on the western greenway in rock meadow and that would connect to the bike and skate park i'd like to go back for a moment to something you said just a few minutes ago you said that a bike can skate park would take about five acres and we had started with twenty five acres you subtract out for as well lance which would be undeveloped mobile which would leave seventeen so really talking about a bike and skate park is talking about a relatively small part of the incinerator site and there's a question behind the question here but so what do you do with the rest of it doesn't preclude other uses does doesn't fit with other uses right so i can skate park which fit really wonderfully for example with a solar farm so belmont has a climate action plan where we want to reduce you know we have stepped up and said you know we're going to reduce our carbon emissions and so part of the goal of the incinerator site is also to help us reach our climate action goals and so you know certainly a bike and skate park is very low impact on the surrounding leanne's it's mainly dirt so runoff isn't an issue you have very few impermeable surfaces and similarly a solar farm creates very few impermeable surfaces and so the two really work well together and complement one another there as well you know as we bring our children there it's a wonderful opportunity also for parents to have a discussion on what it means to conserve energy to use renewable energies and really what the values of our community are is a bike and skate park is it lighted or or is it a daytime use i can i very low impact generally very much in keeping with the wetlands that surround the conservation land that's around yeah ok i want to remind our listeners that we're talking with lucy a welly lucy is the organizer of a group of belmont residents who are promoting the use of part of belmont's old incinerator site and as a bike can skate park or i  starting to think of it as an active recreation facility for the town of belmont let me ask about the the really non fun stuff is there if one were to use part of the site as a bike and skate park what kind of support facilities would later facilities would be very limited probably took parking lot at minimum bathrooms really generally aren't necessary for a bike and skate park similarly lighting would be necessary so really they're very minimal ancillary facilities that are needed similar maybe to the parking lot at rock meadow maybe slightly larger than the current parking lot at meadow and along those lines it seems like it's it would be easy to think of a bike can skate park sort of conceptually as an idea and it would be much more difficult to put pen to paper if you well and  this is how it would fit this is where it would go this is where other things would go at what point in the process are you in your thinking did that question make sense i think so we have worked with a volunteer a local architect who also is a parent of elementary school age children and now a middle school aged child in belmont and he has very graciously mike marotta he is very graciously volunteered to drop some plans to begin to address the question of is syria nuff space to fit a bike in skate park on to the land in addition to there are some assumptions that we made when we drew up the plans in terms of requirements for the d p w needs and and so forth and so we really have sketched out plausible ideas that is not to say that there might not be other ideas depending on the ideal location as the town determines for a bike and skate park and i think some of the assumptions i think at the moment it's still rather unclear in terms of the assumptions for the parcel of land so for example will the d p w be needing any leant in the long term for its salt and sand storage for leaf composting and d p w currently uses it uses that site for that's purposes that's exactly right ok in the short term it will likely be used for storing materials for the high school high school building project you know and so in the short term it will be used by d p w but in the long term the goal is to use this but when i'm hearing you say is this has proceeded beyond the point of a couple of people getting together and saying wind it be nice that  it's no longer simply an idea but you have a real proposal to say a bike and skate park could fit here somewhere fine could fit here on this land the p w could continue to its current uses and a specific place there are real designs and proposals absolutely and we have tried to engage the stakeholders within the community as well we've presented this plan to the selectmen we've presented this plan to the recreation commission we have spoken with different community community members about this plan so we have really tried to put this plan forward as a viable real alternative we've thought about the ongoing the development cost the ongoing maintenance maintenance costs how would something like this be in the long term maintained so we've really put a lot of thought into this yeah well let's talk about that because whenever we talk about a proposal for a new facility any sort to the extent there is a dollar tag associated with it and there has to be a dollar tag associated with it there is a concern because drama doesn't have many dollars laying around have you thought about the cost of this so one dollar cost is the capping costs and i think there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding that and how the potential post closure use will actually impact the capping costs so we have not had a chance to really think about that because that is more in the community development realm that is something we're ongoing studies will be  idating you know giving us more answers in terms of that but in terms of the development costs so building a bike and skate park if all of that were to be paid for with public funds it would be the total cost is right in line with for example the walking path we're building a grunt the grove street playground it's right in line with the costs of redeveloping the tennis courts or redeveloping any of the playground so it's not it's not greater than any of those and so generally around the country what you see is that many of these bike parks are being built with roughly half the costs being offset by grants donations volunteer work and i'll come back to the volunteer work in a minute but in terms of ongoing maintenance costs this would likely be maintained by a friends of group because the maintenance of the pike park as i mentioned it is at the new england mountain biking association how do they fit it how if at all maybe they don't have a role how do they fit in to something like this so the new england mountain biking association or number for short they are a very active community in a very active group of volunteers that are already active in the community so for example when you're walking along the western greenway in rock meadow crossing over to beaver book and worth even the long bridge in rock meadow you'll notice that many of those bridges are stamped with numbers so the number of volunteer crews build those bridges they maintain the trails largely in collaboration with the local stakeholders the landowners the local governments and so they they are already a very active presence in our community and they have certainly expressed an interest in a bike and skate park and i think they would be active participants both in the development and the maintenance of skipper and you had mentioned volunteers they would be a source of volunteers absolutely they would be yes yes and so this this all comes down to the board of selectmen making the decision do you have and ask  having merit that really goes beyond the potential short term costs of capping and really to think about preserving this land for recreation and future gen and current and future generations of belmont to indians in other words that we should take the long term view that recognizes that don't want is a very densely populated community the and public recreational species has value to the community and i think we mentioned that park in cambridge so and to recognise that meeting our climate action as well as preserving the species act different creation are really mutually forever about this but i do appreciate your taking time to come over to the media studios here today thank you for having me we've been talking today with lucio willie who is the organizer and proponent for the creation of a bicycle and skate park at the town's old incinerator site you've been listening to community conversations you can stream for the b m c podcast network i'd like to think lucy again for stopping over i would like to thank you the listeners for tuning in i'm your community conversations host roger colton i will talk to you again next week