HADLEY — A committee has rejected a request for $700,000 from the Community Preservation Act account to help build seven affordable apartments at a 55-and-over housing development.
The CPA Committee, which reviews applications for funding for affordable housing, recreation, open space and historical preservation projects, at its Sept. 14 meeting voted 7-0, with one abstention, to reject the request from the Pioneer Valley Hotel Group.
The hotel company asked for the money to offset the cost of providing the affordable two-bedroom units in a building it intends to build at the Village Barn Shops along Route 9.
Committee members said they were concerned about whether enough affordable units would be provided in the project and whether the request, which came from hotel owner Shardool Parmar, would be in compliance with state law.
Because the seven affordable units would only represent 14% of the 49 total units, committee member Mark Dunn said the committee should be asking the Parmar family to exceed the town mandate for affordable housing, which is 15%. In addition, Dunn said getting to 25% of the units affordable would allow all of them to be counted toward the town’s subsidized housing inventory.
“As much as I support the project and I support the family, I don’t support this application,” Dunn said.
Committee member Rise Smythe-Freed said she would have liked to see the hotel owner work with a housing specialist who could offer advice on how to bring the request into compliance, though typically she would support any type of affordable housing.
“Anything we can do to get more housing would be a good thing, it’s just we have to do this properly or it turns into the wild, wild west,” Smythe-Freed said.
Other members had concerns, too. Ray Mieczkowski said he felt like it was a flawed application and that Parmar could apply again, while Chairwoman Mary Thayer said not being at 15% of the total units was problematic.
If the application is pushed to annual Town Meeting next May, that would likely be too late to support the project, though. Thayer received information from the Mass Housing Partnership that the committee can’t provide money for affordable housing once a project has broken ground.
Committee member Andy Morris-Friedman, though, said the application should be tabled since Parmar wasn’t present at the meeting, and he should invited back after changes were made. He abstained from the vote.
Parmar had described his application as a “prescriptive way” for the town to handle such requests. With seven two-bedroom units, he was seeking $50,000 per bedroom. Parmar said it will cost thousands of dollars to maintain the affordable apartments at 80% of area median income, and $300,000 per unit to bring those online. Parmar said the money would be used directly for constructing the units.
Other applications
The committee is supporting the other applications that will be decided by voters next month, including:
- $180,000 for designing a multiuse path that would run along and between Middle and East streets and getting cost estimates for its construction. Committee members cautioned that they don’t want to see the completed study put on a shelf.
- $30,000 to update the town’s open space and recreation plan, last updated in 2013.
- $40,000 to digitize the town’s cemetery maps. The Cemetery Committee is asking that the maps be scanned and digitized for the five town cemeteries. Alan Weinberg, who chairs the committee, said he would like to get this information online, though there are questions about what information would be available. The digitizing is supposed to assist the Department of Public Works with burials.
