Name: Patrick Mehr
Address: 31 Woodcliffe Road
Office Sought: Select Board
e-mail address: patrick.mehr [at] gmail.com
phone number: 781-367-2229
Community Activities:
- Town Meeting member, Pct 3: 2000-2015
- Tree Committee: 1999-2005 or so; co-wrote Lexington’s Tree by-law, the first in Massachusetts to protect certain trees on private property
- Ad-hoc Electric Utility Committee: approximately 2001-2015 (main activity: http://massmunichoice.org)
The largest building project in Lexington is the proposed new Lexington High School. The School Building Committee, after holding many public meetings, supports the “Bloom” design to be built on the adjacent playing fields. A group of citizens has put forth an alternate plan which would be build on the grounds of the current school and leave the playing fields intact.
Which plan do you support and why?
The seriousness and quality of the work a Committee produces is never measured only, or mainly by the number of public meetings the Committee has held, especially since at SBC meetings I observed, the public asked questions but the questions were not answered (the questioner would be out of time to point out that her/his question was not answered), or no input was taken from the public, or when surveys were sent with a question like “Do you prefer design A, B, C, D or E?” I could not answer “none of the above” and more importantly “Here is why, and here is what I want the SBC to study instead of A, B, C, D and E.” because I could only tick a circle by A, B, C, D or E with no space to write any comment.
The SBC’s preferred design, Bloom, makes no sense: (1) Bloom will be too small on day 1 (sized for 2,395 students, fewer than the 2,405 we now have) yet must last us for 70 years (and MBTA developments may increase the Town’s population very significantly), (2) Bloom will take too long to build: LHS overcrowding can be addressed faster with a staged design, (3) at 2/3 of $1 billion, Bloom is too expensive, (4) Bloom destroys the continuity of the fields, and (5) the LPS and SBC have no plan B should the necessary debt exclusion for Bloom fail, or should the necessary Article 97 land swap be delayed or rules illegal by a court (since not all alternatives saving the fields, specifically the staged design described below, were considered by the SBC), just like Pay-As-You-Throw (PAYT) was killed by a court.
Instead of Bloom, the SBC should have our architects design a staged project, Phase 1 of which is what the Schools’ 2015 Master Plan outlined, replacing LHS’s foreign languages building with a multi-story rectangular new building, to be built faster than Bloom and at far lower cost. Then, 1-2-3 years after Phase 1 opens, based on how High School enrollments grow (or don’t: nobody can guess today) as a result of new MBTA dwellings, Phase 2 must be designed to the right size, possibly a full 2nd High School. Contrary to what the SBC wants the public to believe, no staged design has been professionally looked at.
In parallel, the Select Board and our legislative delegation must engage with the Governor to have the MSBA adapt its procedures so that Lexington, which did 10 times what the State asked of us regarding MBTA zoning, remains at the front of the queue of MSBA’s applicants when we are able to size Phase 2 of our new High School project.
The “group of citizens” your question refers to cannot act in lieu of architects and professional cost-estimators: that’s why we have a SBC, and an $11 million budget appropriated by Town Meeting for studies of our new High School design. Leaving any particular “group of citizens” aside, the key problems are that the SBC has (a) stubbornly refused to use the Schools’ own 2015 Master Plan to design and cost-estimate Phase 1 of a staged design, and (b) made a charade of its own “we want to listen to citizens” since the “group of citizens” you refer to has been asking that (a) be done for almost a year now, to no effect so far.
