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In a recent interview with Winchester News, Town Meeting member Pam Cort says she is rooting for Forest Ridge. She also says she will not vote to take it.
“I’m very much in favor of retaining this land for conservation,” said Cort, who has represented Precinct 5 for more than 10 years, over the phone.
But she weighs the vote the way she would a purchase of her own.
“It’s not a risk I would take personally,” she said. “It’s not a risk I’m willing to take on behalf of Precinct 5, or this community without more information.”
That is the choice she believes faces Winchester’s 192 elected Town Meeting members at Fall Town Meeting, which opens at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, at the Winchester High School auditorium, 80 Skillings Road.
Article 26, sponsored by the Conservation Commission, would authorize the town, if it passed, to take by eminent domain two parcels off Forest Circle, about 13.4 acres of woods and wetland between the Forest Circle neighborhood and the Middlesex Fells Reservation at the Stoneham line. It needs a two-thirds vote.
Six months ago, Town Meeting refused to buy the same land.
On May 4, members rejected Article 35, a voluntary purchase that would have borrowed $3 million in Community Preservation Act (CPA) money. Eminent domain was not on the table. The tally was 105 no to 59 yes, short of even a simple majority. The Finance Committee and Select Board had recommended against it.
“You can be pro-conservation and still vote unfavorable action if you think this is the wrong time at the wrong price for this particular project,” Finance Committee member Jerry Sheehan said that night.
What changed since May
“This land is valuable,” Tracy Olson, chair of the Conservation Commission, told the Winchester News. “The state Legislature said it is. The developer said it is, and the appraisal said it is.”
In a survey Oct. 27, 2025, botanist Walter Kittredge walked the site with Olson and recorded white pine-oak knolls along an old access road used to build Interstate 93, a deep cattail marsh and a strip of red maple swamp. He scored it 22.7 on a floristic quality index, inside the 20-to-35 range he classifies as high quality.
Supporters’ Oct. 6 fact sheet says the site is 93% native plants. Kittredge’s own appendix lists 51 species, seven of them introduced, including purple loosestrife and multiflora rose. That puts the native share at about 86%.
Olson calls the land a wildlife corridor between the Fells and the Aberjona River, and supporters say it helps protect the North Reservoir watershed. As private property, it is closed to the public.
“We can’t build trails through the marshes,” Olson said over the phone. “We can’t take school children there.”
The bigger change is a buyer. In June, the commission learned that the owner, the Shannon Investment Trust, had put the land under agreement.
Daniel Gorman, of Bell Point LLC, a Glastonbury, Conn. developer, wrote in a Sept. 29 memo that the company is the “buyer under agreement.”
Select Board member Michael Bettencourt, a co-proponent of Article 26, said his understanding is that no purchase-and-sale agreement has been signed. No contract has been made public.
With the owner bound to Bell Point, Olson said, the town cannot negotiate, which is why supporters now seek a taking.
Price of a taking
A February appraisal valued the tract at $3.275 million. A June appraisal, done to the federal “Yellow Book” standard a federal grant requires, came in at $2.85 million.
Bell Point notes the town assesses the Winchester parcels at about $4.9 million. An assessment is not an appraisal, and neither sets what a court would award. Under Chapter 79, the state’s eminent domain law, an owner can sue for more, plus interest.
Cort’s fear is a document no one in town has seen. If Bell Point’s agreement carries a higher price, she asked, would Winchester be on the hook?
“The amount of risk is huge based on the insufficiency of absolute hard numbers and hard evidence,” she said.
Bettencourt calls worries like that overstated, arguing that big awards follow lowball offers, not a federal-standard appraisal. The fear applies, he said, “where communities say, ‘Hey, this is appraised at $5 million. We’re going to give you $1 million. Sue us for it.’”
Outside money is real but uneven. A $250,000 earmark from state Rep. Michael Day is approved, and a $27,900 grant for acquisition costs has been awarded, according to the fact sheet. On Oct. 7, the Healey-Driscoll administration listed a $425,000 Local Acquisitions for Natural Diversity (LAND) grant for the project.
The largest piece, a federal Land and Water Conservation Fund grant of up to $1 million, is not in hand. Supporters call it likely, with a decision expected early next year; the state’s Oct. 22 list of federal park awards did not include Winchester. Federal program rules allow its use in an eminent domain acquisition only with the owner’s agreement.
“Right now, because of the agreement, the landowner can’t agree,” Olson said.
Without that money, the fact sheet projects a $2.175 million, 29-year bond at 4.25%, costing about $135,000 a year from CPA funds. That assumes the $2.85 million price holds.
The fact sheet calls the debt 6.6% of fiscal 2027 CPA revenue but does not state the revenue figure. The comptroller reported in August that last year’s CPA surcharge brought in about $1.8 million; against that, $135,000 is about 7.5%.
No operating-budget appropriation is not the same as no public cost. The CPA surcharge also pays for parks, historic buildings and housing; a separate fall article seeks $920,500 for eight such projects. In May, the Finance Committee estimated lost property taxes at $3 million to $4 million over 30 years.
“I think we need to be cautious in the early days [Winchester’s CPA program] that we don’t permanently tie up funds over a long period of time when we’re still figuring out how we want to prioritize the use of these funds,” Cort said.
Before the vote
Bell Point asks the Select Board and Finance Committee to recommend no action on the taking and to compare a purchase, a taking and a negotiated alternative. It floats the town’s Attached Residential Cluster Development Overlay District as a model for mixing homes and open space, and cites an Essex, Massachusetts, project it says preserves more than 50 of about 84 acres. It has committed to no unit count or access plan.
Access is the land’s old obstacle. In 2016, a different developer, Krebs Investor Group, sought state approval for 296 apartments, with emergency access on Forest Circle, a street officials said fire engines could not navigate. Officials in both towns opposed it.
By November 2016, Day and state Sen. Jason Lewis said the application was on indefinite hold; the developer said it was being revised. It never moved forward.
Now, Olson told the Select Board in August, Bell Point has contacted abutters about buying their homes, a possible road route. Cort, who backed the town’s Wright-Locke Farm purchase because that developer had concrete plans, wants proof before treating this one as imminent.
The endorsements are narrower than they sound. The Conservation Commission voted unanimously Sept. 8 to bring the article. On Sept. 17, the Winchester Committee on Community Preservation voted 8-1 for conditional support of CPA funding up to the appraisal, then 7-2 to take no action on the funding request.
As of Oct. 23, no Finance Committee recommendation had been published, and on Oct. 19, the Select Board put off taking a position.
Approval would let the Select Board carry out the taking, though Town Meeting must also authorize the borrowing. Rejection would leave the land with its owner and Bell Point.
Olson said she struggles to find a reason not to proceed.
Cort said that if the land is built on after a no vote, she would still believe she decided correctly with what she knew.
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.
