NORTHAMPTON — After years of flooding damaged its roads and softball field, the city’s Parks & Recreation Department is planning a major renovation of Maines Field — and wants the community’s input on updating the century-old park.
Planning for the park’s remake off Riverside Drive in Florence took center stage over two days last week — first at an informal in-person gathering at the Maines Field Pavilion at which residents could comment on ideas in the works, followed the next night by a formal presentation of the plans at a Parks & Recreation Commission meeting.
Maines Field is one of the city’s larger recreation parks and is popular for softball, volleyball and community gatherings. Its pavilion is frequently rented for parties and special celebrations, and it is home to the city’s only lighted softball field.
At the in-person gathering, neighbors met at the pavilion with Parks & Recreation staff and engineers from Fuss & O’Neill, where posters displayed potential amenities including play equipment, gazebos, swing sets, bathrooms and shade structures.
Residents were given sheets of red and green stickers to place on the posters to signal approval or disapproval of each idea. While more natural designs, such as plots of flowers or wooden shade structures, received many green stickers, larger artificial structures generally received red stickers from those present.
“I think we need some kind of treatment for the road so there’s not so much dust. I come [to this park] for the trees, I don’t come for the recreation … I do enjoy seeing when people are here, but I don’t want to see many more people here,” said resident Wendy Foxman. “I really want them to keep this [renovation] as simple and natural as possible.”
PParks & Recreation received more than $90,000 in Community Preservation Act (CPA) funding in 2024 to begin planning flood mitigation and renovation efforts. Director Ann-Marie Moggio explained that the project focuses on both preventing flood damage and generally improving the park as a community resource.
“What we’re looking for is people’s ideas and opinions — what they like to do down here, what they might want to do down here that we don’t have available. Do they want to see nicer amenities? Do they want anything taken out or new things put in?” Moggio said. “When it floods down here, sometimes it does a lot of damage. The last one was a few years ago and it did some infrastructure damage to the road and the softball field … we’re also figuring out how can we build something to make it less prone to flooding and more resilient.”
At the formal meeting, Fuss & O’Neill engineers Ian Law, a senior landscape architect, and Jeff Dawson, an ecological designer, presented renderings of four potential renovation plans based on community feedback. The renderings were labeled A1, A2, B and C.
Plans A and A1 focus on creating a water channel through the park to guide and retain stormwater. All plans include some sort of water retention pool or stream, with Plan B including a centralized parking location and Plan C elevating the softball field by 4 feet to mitigate its flood risk.
Fuss & O’Neill water resources engineer Sarah Frisby presented findings from a LiDAR study — using drone-mounted lasers to map the Mill River’s depth — showing the flood risk facing the 40-acre site. A “hundred-year” storm, with a 1% annual chance of occurring, would bring about 8 inches of rain in 24 hours today, she said, but by 2070 that same storm could bring roughly 11 inches, raising the risk of property damage to nearby homes.
“This is where we start seeing more danger to the houses — it’s kind of reaching into the southern side of the road, and so this is where there might be more,” Frisby said. “There’s a ton of water coming through here and it’s got to go somewhere. We need to figure out where it’s going to go.”
Responding to the public’s questions about the timeline, Moggio explained that work on the park’s renovation would likely take years. She said that while she hopes to conclude preliminary planning this summer, more detailed plans and the start of construction would likely occur after future CPA funding rounds.
Moggio went on to explain that the project’s timeline and feasibility depend on her ability to secure state grant funds. Law added that by focusing the project on flood mitigation, with beautification as a secondary priority, the city is more likely to secure financial support from the state.
“If the niceties become a co-benefit, but the focus is on resilience, that’s going to unlock the funding the best,” Law said. “This process is a lot of fun for us, but we think it’s a win-win for everyone.”
