There will be an administrative discussion on Tuesday July 1 at 9:30PM by the Planning Board held in the Public Meeting Room downstairs at Nevins Hall. The purpose of this is to discuss the possibility of an 81W Hearing.
The text of the 81W regulation is available here: http://www.state.ma.us/legis/laws/mgl/41-81w.htm Calling an 81W hearing is one of the bigger hammers available to the Planning Board. It is basically a hearing to decide to modify or rescind a permit for a subdivision. It is a very serious step and it's the second time that such a move has been filed against this developer. The previous time was an action filed by Paul Braverman who has since moved out of the neighborhood. The facts are as follows: The properties that are affected are 46 Carter owned by Jerry Harting, 48 Carter by Don Beers, and 50 Carter by Carl Goodman. There are no engineered approved erosion/drainage plans being followed of any sort above these three homes. When it rains, the water has no place to go except down. (That Newton guy was pretty clever.) At the beginning of the Spring when everything was melting, Jerry had a fast rushing high speed river going straight down and across his yard. Concomitant with the water is a lot of silt. Two rainfalls ago, the developer promised to fix the problem. The end result is that the some Mickey Mousing was done and a new baby swale has been implemented which now directs the water (and the associated silt) further to the side, so now it has shifted the problem to run between Jerry's place and Don's. Even before the swale was put in, the Goodman's started to experience massive flooding in their basement. We're talking about many thousands of gallons of water. At one point the groundwater pressure was so great that an unused (and capped) wellhead on Don Beers' property was spraying water out the top. The narrative of their problem is below. The basis for requesting the 81W is that, like The Great Wall Of Framingham, the developer is not implementing what he said he was going to do. What he's doing differs from the plans, but the goal here is not to shut him down. The goal is to end up with a properly engineered plan for drainage and erosion control; a plan that has proper accountability. It has only now become obvious that the development has progressed passed the point where the project could be steered back onto the plans that are submitted. The Planning Board Administrator, Jay Grande, recognizes that this situation is very serious and has been very helpful at providing constructive direction. He seemingly is prepared to recommend that we move forward with the 81W Hearing. So the goal here is to achieve: * a properly engineered drainage/erosion system that doesn't treat the abutters below like they are his personal toilet. * a 593 consultant to oversee the project to ensure that what gets submitted AND BUILT conforms to those plans. I am hoping that these modest goals can be achieved without having to push the 81W. The developer can short-circuit the entire proceedings by simply doing the work correctly and agreeing to allow the Planning Board to hire the necessary consultants. If he does not, I hope you will all support this effort. Support will be needed at multiple levels of Town Government and will include top-level management, Legal, Engineering, and the Building Department. In addition, I am hoping that by the Town taking the correct course, we can hope to avoid a costly lawsuit against the Town; Don has had his property appraised and was told that his property value is now lower than what he paid for it. This is a game of encouragement: * I would encourage you to come to this meeting on Tuesday. I promise you that the details of this case are more outrageous than what I have presented here. * I would encourage the various Town officials to take the correct steps. * I would encourage the developer to do the right thing and provide proper and accountable Engineering and oversight. There are some pictures of the disaster available at http://frambors.syslang.net/album/Harting-1Jun03_Runoff/ If you respond to this message, PLEASE reduce the text or cut it all out. Please see http://frambors.syslang.net/faq/about.html#C5 for details. We all appreciate your support in this. The Goodmans' letter is below. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Diary of events at 50 Carter Drive June 27,2003 We would like to share with you a brief history of the problems we have been dealing with for the last four months as a result of the lack of planning for proper drainage of water from the new construction on Carter Drive. We live at 50 Carter Drive and have been for 15 years. When we bought the house part of the basement had been finished as a recreation room. It had paneling, carpeting and insulation. There was no evidence of any moisture in the basement in the years we have lived here with the exception of some leaking from the back bulkhead. This was water that seeped through the bulkhead, down the stairs and under the door. Occasionally there would be a puddle of water. We remediated this problem with a new bulkhead door several years ago. On or about March 20th, after substantial rainfall, we entered the basement to find it filled with 2 inches of water across the entire floor. This occurred within a short period of time and after the actual rain event had slowed down. We called Service Master to have the water removed. They pumped out about 3,000 gallons (by their calculations), removed the rug, the bottom part of the paneling and insulation to help prevent mold. We called a plumber to check the house, we couldn't conceive that the amount of water in such a short time could have come from under the house when this had never happened before. The next day, the basement was filled again with 1 1/2 inches of water and we called A.T.A to remove the water and we set up three surface pumps to attempt to keep the basement dry. At this point we had spent over $3,000.00 for removal of water and cleanup. The pumps continued to pump until the amount of water level dropped below 1", one pump, on the corner of the house facing the construction, continued to pump for 3 - 4 weeks. The water flowed from this pump like an open faucet. We have no idea how much water was moved through this pump. At this time we also placed 3 dehumidifiers around the basement with fans to keep the air moving. All in an attempt to fight mold. We continue to empty these dehumidifiers twice a day ( approximately 240 pints of water a day) In May we again had 2" of water in the basement, after a heavy rainfall. We pumped this out ourselves and the pumps ran for several days. At this point we called a hydrologist connected with Action Environmental to see where the water was coming from and what we could do to remediate the problem. We also needed to know when we might be able to begin work without creating a bigger problem of water coming up from construction or digging. He identified that the water was coming from the direction of the construction. He also told us that our house was situated in a bowl so the remediating of this problem would be complicated. Our fourth flooding incident occurred last week, again the day after the heavy rains. We set the pumps up and made arrangements to empty our basement . This meant moving all storage to the garage, tearing down the wood storage shelves that we built and within the next two weeks Action Environmental will be taking down the remaining paneling and built areas and treating for mold. The dehumidifiers continue to pump out water. In looking at the topographical chart it is clear that we are situated in a bowl or low point in the natural topography. We were protected by trees above us that held the soil and held back the rain water. The increased water flow from the newly developed area flows directly to that bowl after depositing silt in our neighbors' yards. This is not a problem we have had in the past and feel it is a direct consequence of the changes that have occurred since the construction of homes without an adequate drainage plan on Carter Drive. Thank you for your time, Carl and Deanie Goodman -- steveo at syslang.net TMMP1 http://frambors.syslang.net/ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body "unsubscribe frambors" (the subject is ignored).
