Quechee
“QLLA is exercising its rights to retain all of the recreational improvements on the land,” QLLA board President Dave Duval wrote to Hartford’s interim Town Manager Pat MacQueen last month.
“The benches, the playground, all the permanent features in the walking areas and the fitness station now belong to them,” Tad Nunez, director of Hartford’s Parks and Recreation Department, said this week.
Until recently, Nunez’s department was responsible for maintaining the area.
Under the ownership switch, which became effective on April 21, the town continues to maintain the features on the town-owned portion of Quechee Green, including a gazebo, a water fountain, a circular drive around the gazebo and some benches.
Nunez said he was unsure of the monetary value of the playground equipment, but the town paid for it some time around the beginning of a 15-year contract that expired last year. Over the past year, the contract was extended twice, but it expired again on March 31, which triggered QLLA’s ownership.
“QLLA now fully owns and controls access to the QLLA Green, playground and walking path, and will be posting rules soon,” Duval wrote in an April email to the QLLA membership.
The playground equipment is one small component of a large and complex series of relationships between QLLA and Hartford, including public use of Lake Pinneo, the annual Quechee Balloon festival at the Quechee Green and the ability of Hartford schoolchildren to use QLLA’s polo fields, golf courses and ski hill.
The association includes about 1,400 members through 700 individually owned properties and 25 condo associations in the Quechee Lakes development; annual dues are about $5,000 per member.
In many cases, the terms of those relationships developed informally and were not codified in any written contract. Now those handshake arrangements are threatened by disagreements over which design to use for a proposed pocket park on a roughly quarter-acre property overlooking the Ottauquechee River by the Quechee Covered Bridge.
Soon after Tropical Storm Irene destroyed a building on the site, QLLA began actively lobbying for a solution — recently priced at $378,000 — that would enhance the community’s appeal to tourists. But some in the town balked at the price tag, instead favoring a simple stabilization plan, recently priced at $216,000, that would cover the area with grass, but not include walkways, ramps or benches.
In early 2015, QLLA sought to increase its leverage on the pocket park issue by bundling it into a single negotiated agreement that would spell out terms for the pocket parks, the existing informal agreements and use of Quechee Green. The grassy fields of the Green run behind a series of Quechee Main Street properties and extend to the Ottauquechee River, running for about a third of a mile north of Quechee’s post office.
In an April 2015 proposal to the town, which Duval recently released to QLLA members, the association sought a minimum of $35,000 in annual payments for the use of its facilities, with the majority of that money to be spent by QLLA on landscaping, other community improvements, and to defray the cost of the pocket park.
The money to be spent on the pocket park would be “subject to the right of QLLA to have significant involvement in selecting the final design.”
Last July and again in October, the parties agreed to short-term extensions of the existing 15-year agreement, which more or less maintained the status quo, while preserving QLLA’s ability to gain a more favorable outcome on the pocket park issue.
In a September 2015 split decision, the Selectboard voted to commit engineering funds to the $378,000 plan, which is referred to as “Plan B” in town documents.
But since that time, a number of questions have arisen about Plan B’s handicap access, possible contaminants and future flooding risk. In a letter to the town, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said the lowest level under Plan B would be too close to the Ottauquechee River; staff members have said they’ve since received verbal assurances from FEMA that the design passes muster, but the Selectboard has asked for FEMA to put those assurances in writing.
That still hasn’t happened, Hartford Selectboard Chairman Dick Grassi said Monday.
Grassi said that, without knowing what federal agencies will allow on the site, it’s impossible to know for sure whether Plan B can be implemented as currently proposed. And because that created uncertainty in the price tag, Grassi said, it’s created a bit of uncertainty as to the final disposition.
However, Grassi said, that shouldn’t leave Quechee residents feeling that the Selectboard is wavering in its commitment to create a nice park at the covered bridge.
The low-cost option to simply stabilize the site, called Plan A, is no longer a consideration, he said.
“We’ve never discussed Plan A again,” Grassi said. “We are still looking at Plan B. We would just like to know what Plan B costs.”
But Duval took the questions, and the slow pace of progress, to mean that the Selectboard wasn’t committed to making the pocket park happen.
“I’m concerned the Selectboard is playing ‘chicken’ with Mother Nature, while our primary access route and perhaps some vital services are at significant risk,” Duval wrote in the April email to the membership. “We have an approved plan that’s received community input and funding approved by the voters. It is time to let the professionals finish the job and resolve the inevitable regulatory, bidding and construction issues.”
Selectman Mike Morris said that the issue of negotiations between QLLA and the town hadn’t been formally raised since he took office in March, but that he is eager for the pocket parks issue to be resolved.
“I want to get this done and behind us in the best way possible and do it right, as far as meeting all the local state and federal requirements,” Morris said. “This has been going on way too long.”
It’s unclear what QLLA’s takeover of the playground will mean for the public, and what rules may be posted. On Monday, and again on Tuesday, the grass was neatly cut, though a receptacle for bags of dog waste was overflowing.
Nunez said the town used to remove that dog waste, but it stopped when QLLA took over the receptacle.
It’s unclear whether access to the playground for the general public will continue.
On Monday afternoon, Eridana Harder was pushing her 4-year-old daughter, Elanna, on a playground swing. She said that the park is important to her.
The two walk to it from their Quechee home multiple times a week, and work a plot in the community garden on the site.
Grassi said the loss of the playground might not be bad for the town — for the last few months, he’s been interested in the idea of trimming costs in Hartford by cutting possibly redundant offerings at the town’s various parks. Giving up portions of Quechee Green, he said, could be a small step toward easing cost pressures on the town.
In his April 21 letter to the town, Duval said QLLA continues to seek a resolution with Hartford.
“QLLA remains open to continuing discussions with the town over cost-sharing arrangements and cooperative ventures which might be mutually beneficial,” he wrote.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.