Photo: Select Board Chair Matt Taylor

The phones of Belmont Town Meeting Members began pinging a notification from the Town Clerk’s Office less than two hours from the start of the last week of the annual Town Meeting on June 8. 

“Urgent Update” – ATM (annual town meeting) and STM” read the 5:14 p.m. message. And many – if not most – members knew what was being revised, having been told that last-minute appraisal amounts would be coming in for a pair of articles authorizing payment for easement rights or the taking of property the meeting had voted to authorize the week before.

What was unexpected was how much the price tag attached to one of them would be.

Crossing out an earlier estimate of $200,000 in Article 3 found in a Special Town Meeting, town officials would be asking members in just a few hours to appropriate $1.3 million to gain control of the right of way over a pair of narrow parcels making up a spur of Alexander Avenue from Channing Road to the commuter rail tracks.

Apologizing for “the whiplash” the news had on the meeting, Select Board Chair Matt Taylor told the assembly it was facing an almost impossible hard and fast early August deadline from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to do anything but vote Wednesday.

“The consequenses of voting this down [is] it is extremely unlikely that we will have the funds to acquire the property rights needed for the community path,” said Taylor, thus missing out on the millions of funding, while seeing the thousands of volunteer hours and $2.2 of town and Community Preservation Committee recommended funding spent on design and acquistion of right of way would be wasted.

“And then it would be back to the drawing board,” said Taylor, with the real likelihood that a Community Path in Belmont would never be realized.

In many ways, members were presented with a scenario straight from the silent films: the Community Path was tied to the tracks with the funding deadline barreling down on it with only that Town Meeting vote able to come to the rescue.

And while many Town Meeting Members were critical of feeling “jammed” by the appraisal results and the lateness of its delivery, the loss of the path as this late junction was too great for the majority of the Meeting to tolerate.

Also favoring a ‘yes’ vote was having a source of the $1.3 million in one-time funds from this fiscal year’s Investment Income account, as well as recent precedent when almost two years ago to the day Town Meeting approved an additional $1.5 million to help cover a $4 million shortfall to construct the Belmont Sports Complex. 

“I think many people talk about this being shocking; unexpected things happen,” said Emily Peterson (Precinct 1). “To vote ‘no’ on this because it was unanticipated is biting your nose off to spite your face.” 

And many who were hesitant to be pushed to vote on the measure by the deadline constraints followed the example of the venerable Town Meeting member Robert McLaughlin (Precinct 2), who explained that while he had difficulty squaring the circle of the appraisal, “I’m going to hold my nose and vote for it.” 

The article – which required a Special Meeting format as it required current fiscal year funding – passed 212 in favor, 24 opposed, and two abstained. 

The importance of the unpaved path, principally used by MBTA crews to maintain the Fitchburg commuter line running through Belmont, is what it represents: the final pieces of the parcel puzzle needed to open the purse strings to release $48 million in construction funding to build the first half of the Belmont Community Path.

The project – a bike lane from Brighton Street through Belmont Center to the Clark Street bridge and pedestrian tunnel under the tracks – has taken the better part of a decade to envision, plan, garner support, and obtain state and federal funding commitments to arrive at a point that all the parts would come together to receive MassDOT’s final OK by the early weeks of August.

But to keep to the deadline, the vote to approve the allocation needed to occur at Town Meeting. And the new eye-opening cost had many believing reaching the two-thirds approval benchmark would be at risk. 

The appraisal spike in the assessed value was likely due to “new development opportunities.” But even with the possibility of new development in Belmont Center and the construction of Cambridge Point, the $4.5 billion “mini-city” a quarter mile from the east Belmont line with more than 2,000 apartments and 2.5 million square feet of lab and office space, a doubling of the initial $200,000 value, was seen by many as a stretch.

To explain the ramping up of the cost, McLaughlin – an attorney with extensive experience in real estate – said appraising plots of land that measure just a few feet “are about as difficult as they come” due to the concept of “residual damage.” If taking that small parcel is critical to the value of the entire parcel, the owner is entitled to be compensated for the full amount of the damage the path caused.

“My guess is that these appraisers first saw how little square footage was being taken and came up with the initial $200,000. When you drilled down on the job, the owner told them, “Oh, now I’ve lost my view, now I’ve lost my privacy, now the fair market value of my whole property is a lot less,” said McLaughlin. It was only then the appraisers by $1.1 million. 

Complicating the request was a narrowing timeline to the deadline. With the timer ticking down to zero, Town Meeting had little leeway but to take the vote on a plan that was more than a fivefold increase in the estimated cost. 

Conspiring in compressing the deadline were an insistent MassDOT that Belmont seek funding in this year’s funding cycle squeezing the permitting process and not riding the appraisers to complete their task well before Town Meeting. Town Counsel Mina Makarious, whose firm Anderson & Kreiger hired the appraisal team, acknowledged he could have pushed the analysts more than he did but said the review was delayed due to the lateness in state documents and just the ability to visit the site. 

After 90 minutes of debate, Town Meeting Members voted emphatically – if with some grumbling – to stay the course.