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Town Manager Chris Senior wanted the vote to stay small.
Seven applications to resurface tennis courts, fence a ball field and restore public buildings on town land needed only a letter from the Winchester Select Board before they could go forward, he told the board June 29 — it was not a verdict on whether any of the projects deserved to be built.
The letter — known as a care, custody and control approval — does not endorse a project or spend a dollar. It clears applicants to file with the Winchester Committee on Community Preservation, which reviews requests and decides what, if anything, to recommend to Town Meeting. Town Meeting holds the final vote on any money.
The applications draw on the Community Preservation Act, the funding source Winchester voters adopted for open space, recreation, affordable housing and historic preservation.
The board also kept the right to take a formal position on the projects later, according to the memo Senior read into the record.
“This is not, we love the project, we hate the project,” Senior said. “This is go forward and apply for the funding.”
Even that procedural step surfaced a question the board has not settled: how much the Select Board should judge projects before they reach WCCP, and how early.
Board member Paras Bhayani framed it as a choice between vetting applications for baseline merit and waving them through.
The board could weigh whether projects are “at least baseline meritorious,” he said, or it could simply tell the committee to “consider everything.” He warned the town may need a clearer rule before a divisive project arrives.
Anthea Brady, the board’s chair, resisted turning the Select Board into the lone gatekeeper.
“The CPA process as a whole is the Community Preservation Act,” Brady said. “It’s not the Select Board Preservation Act.
Brady said the process is built for community input, and suggested the town and WCCP rethink how applications for town land reach the board — earlier, she said, not at “the tail end of things.
Spotlight on proposed projects
Several of the requests would be hard for residents to miss.
Winchester Recreation is seeking $650,000 in CPA money for the third phase of the Packer-Ellis tennis court restoration: $400,000 for final design, permitting and construction readiness, plus a $250,000 reserve toward future work.
The clay courts date to about 1922, making them more than 103 years old, and rank among the largest municipal clay court facilities in the United States, the application says. It counts nearly 400 seasonal members a year, 800 to 1,000 day-pass users, about 900 recreation program registrations, tournaments, adult teams and Winchester High School practices and matches.
At Leonard Field, the Friends of Winchester Recreation want $300,000 to finish the Leonard Playground Master Plan by tearing down the last bathhouse and building a community pavilion. The budget covers demolition and site preparation, a prefabricated pavilion, foundation work, restroom screening, engineering and landscape architecture.
At Nutile Field, Winchester Youth Baseball and Softball is asking for $125,000 toward a $150,000 fencing project and would cover the remaining $25,000 through fundraising and its own money. CPA funds would pay for fencing, backstops, dugout structures, site work and related costs, the application says.
The smaller requests still land in places residents use.
The Permanent Tree Committee wants $60,000 toward a $70,000 plan to plant up to 50 trees at Ginn Field, McDonald Field, Elliot Park and Davidson Park.
Walk and Roll Winchester’s “Six Fixes” list for the Tri-Community Greenway totals $15,500 and includes crosswalk work, guide-post plowing, a Mill Pond Dam viewing area and bollard removal.
The Department of Public Works wants to restore permanent and balcony seating in Town Hall’s Maurer Auditorium, and Winchester Recreation is seeking to resurface the McDonald basketball and tennis courts through crack repair, acrylic resurfacing, restriping and new nets and posts.
Program funding and capital requests
Winchester pays for the CPA program through a 1.5% surcharge on property tax bills. The surcharge is figured as a share of each bill; a dollar total for what it raises townwide was not available.
In its pilot round, WCCP expected to make up to $800,000 available for eligible projects, with selections due in August and recommendations heading to the fall Town Meeting.
The application vote ran alongside a much larger accounting. The same night, the board reviewed the town’s capital improvement request for fiscal year 2028 through 2032, a list totaling about $77.6 million — roughly $6.7 million in the first year, then $29.8 million, $19.6 million, $10.6 million and $11 million.
School buildings account for about $17.5 million of that and other town buildings $14.4 million. Individual lines run large: $4 million for Everett Avenue culvert construction; $3.9 million for Packer-Ellis restoration; $2.5 million for 1 mile of water main replacement; $2.25 million for Manchester Field turf conversion; and $1.75 million and $1.1 million to replace the Fire Department’s Ladder 1 and Engine 4.
Two McDonald court projects appear separately, at $180,000 and $35,000.
Financial pressures and committee appointments
The timing is not incidental. On March 21, voters rejected an $11.5 million Proposition 2½ override by 293 votes, 2,558 to 2,265; the question had paired $9 million for operations with $2.5 million for capital stabilization.
Since then, officials have studied surveys and focus groups before deciding whether to go back to voters.
The Capital Planning Committee has separately pegged the five-year need at $85.6 million against $31.7 million in available funding.
The board also added a member to the group that will sift all of it. Earlier in the meeting, it appointed Olga Lane to the Capital Planning Committee for a term expiring Jan. 1, 2027, choosing her financial and modeling background over Sarah Jones Girotti’s earlier service on the committee and the School Committee.
“I heard all five of us say that these are both qualified and excellent applicants,” Bill McGonigle said before moving to appoint Lane. “I think I heard three people put an emphasis on getting new perspective into the Capital Planning Committee.”
Senior said the town has begun reshaping its own side of the process, meeting with every department and building a ranking of projects to hand the Capital Planning Committee by mid-July.
That leaves several hands on the same work: staff ranking needs; the Capital Planning Committee vetting the formal list; WCCP deciding which preservation applications advance; the Select Board deciding how early to weigh in; and Town Meeting casting the only binding vote.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
