1.25.2023 Redevelopment Authority

yep okay we're gonna call to order meeting of the Fall River Redevelopment Authority Wednesday January 25th uh recording of the Open Session can be viewed at Fall River government television www.frgtv.us went to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting through any medium attendees are and therefore advised that such

recording or transmission are being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible do a roll call John Erickson Joan Medeiros Ron rousin also participating or Sarah page our executive director John Coughlin our Council Kenny foyola administrative services consultant and Sarah sharest our temporary executive assistant we want to um we want to talk to talk to the uh

resignation I guess of Joe Marshall our former chairman who are going to miss so early and we have a little token of our appreciation to present to Joe which I think you're gonna understand right okay

um I just wanna I just want to tell everybody who's watching us in uh the TV land that uh what a great job this boy does week and week out I couldn't be more proud of them their efforts um I I know that um John and Joan Louis and Anne that are here the other two that I'm with us are going to be joined by our new member Ron Wilson and I can't

imagine how far they can take this board but with that being said they're going to have some big shoes to fill because I want to acknowledge the work done while Joe and Marshall was chairman of this board and he did a lot of great things for the city whether it was the Industrial Park whether it was the City Pier whether it was any project in and out he tried to see it through to the

end and make sure all he was focused on was making Fall River a better place to live I like to call them up right now to give them a citation from the city that um I hope you make it jealous my commission of your many years of dedicated service and commitment to the city of Fall River and the Redevelopment Authority I count you as a friend and I wish you nothing but the best thank you

very much and I want to see just a couple of words it's really been a pleasure I think my back here my pleasure working with everybody here and um it's one of the better boards I've ever served on everybody had something to offer and going forward city of Fall River can only benefit from from this group there's still been a lot of work to do I'll be watching you anyway thank you appreciate it yeah

so on behalf of the board we have a little bit of something to commemorate your time with us that's nice so we put some photos together from the groundbreaking at City Pier that we did during the summer and you know it's been a pleasure working with you as we've been Stewarts for development in Fall River I appreciate it appreciate it was a pleasure thank you

uh thank you guys thank you thank you thank you very much I'll be right

guys uh we want to introduce our newest board member Ron Ruskin and uh we're really excited about Ron especially his background in real estate development that thing's gonna be a great a great addition to the Ford here and we're all really looking forward to working with you good thank you I look forward to be on the sport too thank you welcome the next item on our agenda is uh

approval of the open mini excuse me open session minutes from December 13th um are there any comments on the minutes yeah no okay I need a motion to approve these minutes motion to approve the minutes of the December 13th 2022 meeting a second I can't that's abstain because I wasn't here correct yeah and the rule is you can approve minutes even if you weren't here okay yeah then I second second okay so

uh roll call generation yes Joan Medeiros yes Ron Russian yes you guys have the warrant

photos seventy thousand three hundred eight thousand sixty three cents any questions or comments on the warrant and in that case I need a motion to approve the January warrant motion to approve the drawing as submit submission second second John Erickson yes John Maderos yesen yes um Sarah do you want to do the um the update on the recruitment for a project coordinator slash executive assistant yes

um I want to let you know we I've done quite a bit of interviewing and advertising and we expect to have two but probably three second interviews next week and Johnny and Joan are participating so we're going to find dates that work and um I really encouraged about the candidates that we have did you say three there's three well I I definitely know we want to interview two and we may want to interview with her

Innovation Way so as anticipated we just wanted to confirm that we closed on a large tract of land that we've been cheating for for quite a while and we've received the funds as negotiated City Pier phase four update on installing the docks you guys may have seen that the piles went in Sarah do you know what the timetable is on the actual docks and the ram yeah I'm um

so I want to say a couple of things about the piles so um you may notice that there are two caps on the piles and they were we used the absolutely most durable wood that's called green heart wood and it comes from Guyana and it um isn't uniform because it isn't um uh you know it is then put through a Mill and so um so when they were putting the caps on the piles they're they're not

um symmetrical and so the capsule looked odd to me and so after seeing two I said stop we want to rethink the design Johnny agreed that that was a good idea and I purposely had them leave them on there so that you know as we think about a better design we can see what they look like and really figure out a better um a better solution and there's a question whether we want them white I

think that's typical of all the local marinas I understand or most of them and but I'm not sure that for our peer we want them white so we're um you know if we weren't putting docks in in a few months it might have been a different decision but given that we're going to have equipment out there anyway for the docks there's no reason there was no reason to put in caps that seem to not

look great and and we're going to come up with a better solution and so the docs um we're having a meeting next week to work through design issues and finalize the schedule but the goal is to get them out to bid in February and um you know have them installed in the spring and where the design issues we're looking at or whether they were originally indigenous would but as we've

been talking with people who bid on the pile project they've been encouraging us to think about aluminum because it holds up better so um and we're also needing to um do more work on what exactly kind of gang way we want we need an 80-foot game way to make it Ada uh compliant and uh we have some work to do to decide exactly what kind of gangway we want so that's a big next project to really

focus on so that we can get that out to bid quickly and so we have two funding sources um one is an earmark uh in the state budget that um it funds most of the cost of the pile project and then we recently got a Seaport Economic Council grant that will fund most of the cost of the docs and so I am proposing a vote to authorize the chair to sign all the contract documents

related to the state funding and the seaport Economic Council funding so that we can just proceed with all that contract people working do we have a motion to uh authorize the change discussion the only question I have is are you going to need the sign before the next meeting because we don't have a chair until the end of next February's meeting yeah I John Coughlin and I talked about that and

um Johnny as the vice chair can sign in lieu of the chair because uh he fills in for the chair okay good okay so I make sure the quick question those conical caps we're talking about I imagine they're pointed so that like birds yeah is that the only like option that shape um well you can get other shapes but we have such a problem with birds out there that I think we want that conical shape

so they're not nesting and sitting on those and keeping them off as much as we can do you not like the comments well maybe if they're a different color but they kind of yeah the color the color on marinas a white is it specifically because it hides a lot of the the seagull oh is that what it is looks like the conehead family from Saturday night well I know but if you look at all marinas they're

all white because the seagull excrement if you have a darker color then it shows more you have to be graphic but yeah you're probably going to get dirty anyway well in obsessing about the cones I got online and found that um they do jump out as you at you when you try to buy I know so you can get different colors you can order different colors so you could conceivably order a gray that

kind of matches the um the pile and wooden shows seagull stuff too much but um there's not a great solution and you know my issue with the white is I I don't the white doesn't offend me that's I don't know whatever you want but that's what Marina's have is white caps but we're Fountain of information yeah I didn't give it any thoughts fresh about white okay why not yeah did you

see them yeah I guess I right I could buy there at least once a week and it didn't really stand out honestly yeah so

well if you did there wasn't when with the Caps were on there were you know a few days where you could see it without the cats um so we do need a um yes so emotion to authorize the vice chair to sign all contract documents related to the state funding for the piles and the seaport Economic Council grant for the docs second second um you need a bow for you don't have to have a local

you need all in favor of all the phones so all in favor so uh Sarah do you want to talk about Pleasant Street yes so did we both okay okay opposed abstained tired thank you uh yeah so Pleasant Street uh road map so the road map is almost done we're going to get a final draft in the next week or so um and we got a lot of feedback from City staff

we had a meeting Ken and I with um our colleagues in the city and got a lot more comments and got those to Emily and she's made changes so we're really close thankfully to having the road map finished and certainly a lot of work has been done on the urban renewal plan and so um that's moving along what's really hung us up as you know is a confusion about mepa regulations which were

promulgated at the beginning of 2022 after our country after we entered into this contract within us Associates and um it's been really hard to get to the bottom of what mipa is requiring because we're really the first organization that's gone through an urban renewal plan under these new requirements and so we think that we've um gotten close to a decision of exactly how we're going to approach it we've

simplified The Proposal that tie and bond who are involved in working on this and doing a number of the pieces for example they have to do an analysis of climate change implications on of our urban renewal plan and um so so one of the issues that we're dealing with is because we're adding a significant amount of work after we already entered into the contract we're going to need to amend the contract and

increase the amount of money now the good news about that is that um Mass housing deciding to amend and increase all of the people all of the organizations involved in this Hub neighborhood Hub grant program and so um the city is going to implement a amendment to our original contract which was a hundred thousand and it will become two hundred thousand so our Mass housing program officer has been working

with me to figure out how much Mass housing is willing to see us increase the contract within us Associates because it's coming out of that new 200 000 which is really unfortunate because that money is dedicated to starting to implement the plan and so we're trying to get that um additional cost for the plan uh down as far as we can and I'll be bringing that to you at the next meeting

um so once we have the road map you know we'll have a meeting with our um team that that has a zoom call to kind of think about where we are in the process and that's next Wednesday my assumption is that we'll have the road map and we can talk about it we can talk about our new time frames for the urban renewal plan because she's Emily has figured out time frames and I think that

we should talk about having another citizens Advisory Group meeting and it may be that we do it without Emily because she has a limit on the number of meetings that are in her contract and we need to save a couple for later on in the process so it may be that we should send the road map out to our group call a meeting and just you know find out what they're thinking but I'm getting in

emails from people saying hey what happened where are you and so um I think we need to get everybody back together sometime soon so I need I need a motion to authorize the vice chair to sign a memorandum of understanding with a city to allow the Redevelopment authority to be reimbursed under the neighborhood of Hub Grant I didn't really speak to that so let me cover that so originally we had a rich

so there's an original contract done in 2021 between Mass Housing and the city of Fall River and in that contract it specifically says that the Redevelopment Authority is going to do work under this contract and it includes our bank information for funds to be um uh put into our account by Mass Housing and it envisions that we will Bill Mass housing directly we have a new contract

officer and we're doing this new amend the city is doing a new Amendment and our new contract officer kind of understandably feels that there should be a memorandum of understanding between the Redevelopment Authority and the city explaining that we're doing this work and will be directly billing Mass housing for this work and so we've been working on it it's probably a two-paragraph document that

says that and I'm going to run it by John run it by Mass housing run it by the city and you know one or two of you and then my hope is that we can sign it and um you know not wait until the next meeting because I want to just get that in place so we can um do some more billing okay I make a motion to authorize the vice chair to sign a member of

understanding with the city to allow Redevelopment authority to be reimbursed on the neighborhood Hub Grant yes

thanks yeah downtown historic yes so I got an update from Andy robley um and he is working on Section seven of the um uh the plan that um will go to the mass historic and he expects to have that done for us to review next week and um then he'll work on the next section and um and give it to mass historic and after that we'll have a public meeting and um he's making good progress he's

working on the most difficult parts of the uh proposal or yeah proposal and um he's pretty confident that we're going to be able to get massive store to agree to our having one new one historic district and not requiring better expansion creates a second downtown historic district so um that's what he's working on his proposal will propose why it makes sense for it to be one historic district he was

really happy when he was here to be at the library and find a document that mass historic had written itself quite a long time ago that said that there should be one big historic district which is exactly what we're proposing so he was thrilled when he found that because he thought that that would really budge us our case nice um Vice chair makes a finding that an open session would have a detrimental effect on the

litigating position of the public body the purpose of the exact executive session is to approve the executive session minutes from December 13 2022 and discuss strategy with respect to potential litigation regarding the City Pier project I need a roll call to enter into executive session and not to return to open session John Erickson yes John Medeiros yes