The short yet productive life of the Stephen Palmer Development Review Committee ended July 21, when the Select Board voted to dissolve the committee. Established in early 2025, the committee was originally tasked with studying possible new uses for Palmer, a 28-unit apartment building with a 50-year history of providing seniors with low-cost housing.
The vote effectively stalls the process of determining a new use for the 1.5-acre property at 83 Pickering St. Instead, the School Committee and Select Board have agreed to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding detailing the wind down of the residential use at the site, and how the property will be managed once it returns to town control.
It’s possible a new use for the site may not be determined for several years.
The unanimous Select Board vote was an acknowledgment of the reality that the former school building will not be under the Select Board’s jurisdiction when the current lease expires and it officially returns to town control. Rather, it will revert to School Committee control — a circumstance that apparently was not widely understood until this past fall and only after the review committee had begun its work.
At the SPDRC’s final meeting July 27, former Select Board member and committee chair Marianne Cooley explained that dissolving the committee was due to “information that was newly understood or differently understood at some time over the process of the committee’s work after the committee had started.”
Cooley’s comment referenced a murky understanding of which town entity would have jurisdiction over the property after the lease with Crowninshield, the property management company, expires May 3, 2027.
It was originally thought the Select Board would have jurisdiction, since the property had been declared surplus before being leased to Crowninshield in 1977. There had also long been an assumption that the property management company was required to return an empty building, although that misconception was clarified well before 2025.
Feeling compelled to implement a program that would ensure the building would be empty when the lease expired, the town came to an agreement with Crowninshield that established Oct. 31 of this year as the termination date of all 28 leases — six months ahead of the long-planned return of the property to the town.
The wind down program was approved at Town Meeting in the fall of 2025 despite objections that it was an unnecessary burden on the tenants. Town officials countered that it was a necessity because the town had no capacity to act as a landlord. The plan included financial and other forms of relocation assistance intended to ease the burden on tenants.
Committee gets underway
Meanwhile, the SPDRC was beginning the work of identifying a new plan for the property. When it convened in October, its membership did not include a representative of the School Committee.
This oversight was the residue of an apparent communication breakdown in February 2025 between then Town Manager Kate Fitzpatrick and School Superintendent Dan Gutekanst.
During a Feb. 11, 2025, Select Board discussion on forming the Stephen Palmer committee and choosing its members, Fitzpatrick said, “I did ask the superintendent if the school committee wanted to participate as it does revert back to them.”
Gutekanst told the Observer he had countless discussions with Fitzpatrick across 20 years and does not recall that particular conversation, but acknowledged “if Kate said it happened, then it happened.”
“Kate Fitzpatrick was always good about dotting her I’s and crossing her T’s and sometimes I’m not. So, it’s certainly possible that I knew and I dropped the ball.”
“But it is true that it wasn’t until this fall that it became abundantly clear to the School Committee, and it got involved by asking [member] Matt Spengler to participate on the committee,” he added.
Spengler attended his first meeting in February. By that time, supported by a pair of consultants, the SPDRC had been at work narrowing options and had held a community meeting in January to seek public input. Its timeline called for two more community sessions and anticipated submitting a recommended plan by the end of June.
It met on Feb. 5, but had been dormant until the July 27 meeting when the only agenda item was to discuss its demise.
One last meeting
The committee’s fate was sealed by a July 13 School Committee vote to “retain jurisdiction of the Stephen Palmer property after the conclusion of the May 3, 1977, Ground Lease between the Town and Stephen Palmer Associates.”
The School Committee said it would defer to the Select Board on managing the building while it remains occupied. Once the building is vacated, the DPW’s building maintenance division will add Stephen Palmer to the list of school properties it maintains.
“In light of that vote, it changes the work that we’re doing — clearly it doesn’t need to be done,” Cooley told her committee colleagues. “At some point in the future, the town and the school committee will have a discussion.”
“The fact of the matter is that this parcel is coming back to the town, that the town is not in a position to be a landlord for the parcel, and that the school committee is in even less of a position.”
Town Manager Katie King, also a member of the SPDRC, said planning for Stephen Palmer’s future may not resume for quite some time and could occur in the context of overall town facilities planning. It may not start for years, and could take 12 to 18 months to complete.
She said funds could be requested in the town FY2028 budget for “a townwide facilities master plan overall.”
“We’d be looking to the school committee and if they want to include their full portfolio of assets in that. So, we’re taking a holistic look.”
“We have Hillside, we have the Nike site, we have some other parcels that aren’t actively in town or school use,” she added. “So how do we think about those over the long term.”
King thanked the committee members for their service, acknowledging, “This is not the volunteer experience that we want anyone to have.”
Save as PDF