By Christopher Haraden

Members of the Hull Redevelopment Authority are rarely in complete agreement when discussing the future of the 13-acre property, but at last week’s meeting, members consented to talk to the Wildlands Trust about preservation options and to draft a scope of services for a design consultant.

At the HRA’s next meeting on August 31, Technical Operations Manager Mark Hamin will share preliminary specifications for hiring a landscape designer to look at the property as a whole. And at the suggestion of member Charles Richardson, Wildlands Trust President Karen Grey will be invited to share ideas for preserving the property and how nonprofits like her organization can work with the HRA. Grey previously met with the authority in March.

“She’s done a lot of legwork over the past several years,” Richardson said. “I think she knows the place pretty darn well, and she will be an asset.”

One topic that members could not find common ground on was the recently conducted survey of residents by Market Street Research, which sought opinions on the future uses of the land. Some thought the questions were biased toward those who favored development, while others said the survey leaned in the direction keeping the property as open space. Richardson said he felt that the survey was biased toward action.

“I think the big question is, do we want something to get done?” Richardson asked. “The first takeaway that Market [Street] Research said, the number-one thing was that people want to get something done.”

Members debated whether to look at the property piecemeal or as a single unit. Several ideas have been discussed for different areas of the land, including the potential to keep the middle section open for events and building single-family housing on the northern end near Phipps Street. The town’s public safety building committee had the middle area on its list of potential sites for a combined police and fire station, although members this week ruled out the redevelopment authority property from further consideration.

HRA member C. Anne Murray said that the next step in the process should be to “hire a firm that has experience laying out public spaces” to frame the authority’s discussions on future uses.

“I’d rather have a professional designer lay it out,” she said. “Otherwise we will be going around in circles.”

“I don’t disagree with you. But I think we should figure out which areas we agree should be open space and which areas should be available for development,” Chair Bartley Kelly said. “We need to decide whether there is going to be some development or whether it’s going to be all park space and no development before we bring in a consultant and start spending money on design.”

The question of what to do with the property has existed since the redevelopment authority was formed in the 1960s under a federal program to revitalize urban and suburban neighborhoods. The HRA’s original footprint – designated Town Center No. 1 – encompasses the land between the beach and bay from Water Street to Phipps Street; at one time, the authority planned to expand its territory into three additional districts that stretched south toward Atlantic Hill.

Much of the HRA land has been vacant since the 1970s, when homes and businesses were taken by eminent domain by the authority and bulldozed, burned, or relocated in anticipation of development proposals that never materialized. The HRA has been working for the past several years to create a set of guidelines for the property’s future.

“I personally feel that the community has spoken that they do not want development there and they really want to see it as open space and community space, so I am not for housing,” Murray said. “I am concerned about parking... Bart and Charlie, you have mentioned housing on Phipps Street. If you take that lot away, where are you putting the parking?”

“The parking discussion has been going on for years and years, and we’re not a parking authority,” Kelly said. “I still feel personally… that we have a mission to bring some sort of development to the town. I’ve heard it loud and clear – [nobody wants] an overwhelming large condo project here; they don’t want to have 100% of the property used as housing development. We’ve got to come to a compromise.”

Member Dan Kernan said he favored a “high-level view” of options for the property by a consultant.

“There’s no need to go parcel by parcel. We need a high-level vision,” Kernan said. “If we decide we want some housing, then we tell the designer that we want some housing. We are getting the cart before the horse. I don’t want to put housing there. I’m going to vote no on putting housing anywhere.”

During the public comment section of the meeting, resident Dan Sullivan said he found the Market Street Research survey to be one-sided. According to the survey firm, 996 Hull residents responded, with the majority saying they are not interested in large development and are highly interested in open space. MSR was paid $22,000 to conduct the survey this past spring.

Click here for the results of the HRA’s survey

“I’ve heard so much about the survey, and I have to tell you, I think it was the most prejudicial survey I’ve ever done in my life,” said Sullivan, who added that he thought the HRA’s future should include some affordable housing. “I think that the survey was skewed toward making sure that everybody wanted open land, and I resented the fact that so many of the questions did not have the opportunity for a ‘no’ answer. I really thought it was a horrible, horrible survey and I do not want decisions made about the HRA land based on that survey.”

In contrast, Murray said she found that the survey “was prejudicial toward building.”

“I’m for open space, and I thought the opposite,” she replied to Sullivan. “It was weirdly worded, I grant you, but it was put out by two members who sat down and went with a company that is a well-respected company, and I answered the questions not really knowing if it was going to come out the way I hoped it would. So you can it was swayed one way or the other, but I heard a lot of people say the exact opposite.”

Kernan agreed that the survey questions did not present respondents with a clear choice.

“I had the same experience. I took the survey and I thought about it a lot and it seemed like, from my perspective, it was not a choice,” Kernan said. “It wasn’t in the survey ‘would you like to have a safe, large, beachfront park in the town of Hull?’ That wasn’t an option.”

Kelly said he shared Sullivan’s concerns.

“I happen to agree with Dan. I’ve talked to a lot of people about the survey and I actually know family members and friends who started to take the survey and they stopped taking it because it was too ambiguous,” he said. “I think everyone wants open space. I want open space. But the question is, as a redevelopment authority, how do we accomplish that goal, create a compromise, and get some of the things that we need to get?”

Hamin, who formulated the survey with Richardson and former HRA member Adrienne Paquin, defended the methodology and process.

“The survey was developed out of a solicitation of services that was developed, discussed, and approved by HRA,” Hamin said. “The survey questionnaire was presented to the entire HRA membership, was discussed and reviewed and approved. There was opportunity during the survey for people to indicate any issues they were having with the survey.

“Market Street Research won out of a competitive process [and] has a sterling reputation in terms of its methodology,” he added. “It’s designed precisely to avoid bias in the survey questions, so the fact that some people think it was biased toward open space and some people thought it was biased toward development is indicative of the bias of the people who were taking the survey and not the bias of the survey designers, and what I have indicated to everyone who expressed a point of view or frustration with the survey is, HRA has regular meetings, has an email platform for people to communicate whatever their preferences are, so if people felt that their views were not represented in the survey, it was not because of the survey design and was not because the survey did or did not work. It’s because people made choices about what they wanted to and how they wanted to express themselves.”

Richardson, who was elected to a full term on the authority in May, said the divide over the survey results – and among HRA members – is reflective of the opinions of the broader community.

“More people voted for me than actually filled out the survey in favor of open space,” said Richardson, who received 873 votes in the May 18 election. “I wish people would just understand that there is a split, which is why there is a split on our own board. We make up the town in a lot of ways. And we need to be able to listen to both sides and come to a compromise.”

The next HRA meeting is scheduled for August 31 at town hall. A replay of the August 10 meeting is available on demand on Hull Community Television’s website, www.hulltv.net.

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