LYNN ― The Planning Board unanimously approved the Housing Production Plan while the City Council moved ahead with several highly-anticipated projects on a busy Tuesday evening at City Hall.
The Housing Production Plan, dubbed Housing Lynn, can now be submitted to the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development, after it was passed by the City Council, 8-2, on Sept. 2, and the Planning Board, 5-0, on Tuesday, said Jeff Weeden, planning and development specialist at Lynn Housing Authority & Neighborhood Development (LHAND).
The plan contains such measures as inclusive zoning, creation of a housing stability office, and establishment of an affordable trust fund that are aimed at improving the city’s housing situation. Developers investing into new construction will be encouraged to contribute to the trust fund, in lieu of creating affordable housing in their developments, so that various neighborhoods can use the money for their existing needs.
The City Council unanimously approved appropriating almost $14.2 million for the replacement of windows and doors at the Lynn Vocational Technical Institute at 80 Neptune Blvd.; sending out the new Request for Proposals for a new senior center drafted by the legal department; and applying for a conservation restriction for Lynn Woods.
The Public Property and Parks Committee of the City Council was also updated on the cleanup at the former Whyte’s Laundry site at 83 Willow St. by Project Coordinator Bill Bochnak from Economic Development & Industrial Corporation of Lynn (EDIC/Lynn). Ransom Engineering has been carrying out the cleanup.
Bochnak said that the city took over the site in 2016 as a tax taking. Back then, EDIC was able to apply for financial assistance at the state level. EDIC was able to leverage almost $200,000 to conduct an assessment of the site to understand what they needed to do to clean up the site. Another $200,000 was spent on an edge-scale treatment study and modeling the technique that later was used on site to begin the cleanup.
The actual cleanup that cost $250,000 took place in July 2021. Right around that time Tropical Storm Elsa made its landfall, which caused some issues on site. Remedial injections that were done in July consisted of on-site chemical oxidation. It is a subsurface technique that is used to try to control and treat the chemicals that are at that location.
Because of the location of the property downtown and its small size, contaminating chemicals migrated to other properties prior to the cleanup.
The team will go to the site in the next few months to determine how successful the cleanup was, to see if it needs any additional cleaning, and look at the adjacent lots. The agency will then look at potential reuse of these properties.
EDIC is applying for additional $500,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address off-site migration.
Ward 2 Councilor Richard Starbard, who chairs the Public Property and Parks Committee, said that the technique of treating the contamination was quite impressive.
“Hopefully, that site, which is a blight in that downtown area, can someday be repurposed,” said Starbard.
According to EDIC, Whyte’s laundry, located next door to the Willow Street Post Office, was incorporated in the early 1930s but dates back to 1898.The land has been vacant for almost 30 years. Former owners wanted to develop it but a study concluded that chemicals from Whyte’s seeped into the lot.
