HATFIELD – Five Colleges Inc. is dropping plans to build a library annex in Hadley, instead choosing to make Hatfield the new home for the building.
The consortium announced Thursday that it will construct the annex on 10 acres it will acquire in Hatfield, off Interstate 91 near Exit 22, and will end its efforts to gain approval for building the annex on a site off North Maple Street in Hadley. That plan was narrowly rejected by the Hadley Planning Board in October, and was the subject of an appeal, which will be dropped.
“This will be a 35,000-square-foot building, and we’re not going to be looking for any pre-permitting for any kind of expansion,” Five Colleges spokesman Kevin Kennedy said.
Kennedy said he would not identify the Hatfield site or its current owners, but said the property is in an industrial zone, and likely would not generate the same concerns as expressed by Hadley residents during a series of hearings last summer.
“We’re pleased to be working with the town of Hatfield to construct what will be an essential component in the Five College library system, with a goal of completing it by late spring 2017,” Neal Abraham, executive director of the consortium, said in a statement.
Kennedy said an administrative review by the Hatfield Planning Board is scheduled for April 12, with a Conservation Commission hearing April 14. People will be able to submit comments to the commission about wetlands and other site conditions through April 29.
Cutler & Associates of Worcester will be the design-build firm for the project.
The decision means that Five Colleges will end its appeal of the Hadley Planning Board decision, in which members rejected, by a 3-2 vote, a 74,000-square-foot library annex on 46 acres of vacant farmland between North Maple Street and Rocky Hill Road. The expected cost of that project had been $10 million to $12 million.
But officials with Five Colleges had said they were interested in eventually expanding to a building as large as 138,000 square feet.
Five Colleges contended the so-called Dover Amendment, which provides an exemption for educational uses, applied to the project, but Planning Board Clerk William Dwyer made the motion to reject it because the building was not for an educational purpose, but rather what he termed a “warehouse” to store 2.5 million rarely circulating books from its member institutions, Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts.
“Although we are confident of our legal right to build on the Hadley site under the Dover Amendment, we have decided that in order to meet our needs for a completed annex it would be best to devote our efforts at a different site,” Abraham said.
Dwyer said Thursday afternoon he had not been apprised of the decision by Five Colleges.
The Five College Consortium is based in Amherst and is in its 50th year of advancing the educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
