Thank you for coming out tonight. We're going to get started in a couple of minutes. So, I just want to kind of go over some processes or the agenda that we have going on tonight. So, if anybody needs to use the restrooms, they are through that door, past the elevators to the right in case anybody needs the
restroom. Um, we are trying a new format tonight. So, we have lots of things going on in the Point of Pines and Riverside neighborhoods. So, we wanted to give sort of a quick update on all the projects all at once. And then it's up to you to decide if you want to learn more or less about them as we move
forward. And for three of them, Riverside Drainage, Gibson Park, and air quality sensors, we're going to have a deeper dive which will be held on a virtual call, which will happen in the
next coming month or two. But for now, we're just going to give a brief update of where we are at, what we've been working on just so that you kind of get a sense of what's happening and then um we'll we'll bring sort of a deeper dive at a later date that will be probably
like an hourong session specifically on one particular topic. But where we had so many things going on, we thought this would be a good opportunity to just let everybody know what's happening. Um we're really excited to have um five different consultant teams here with us today. So, I'm going to just give a
quick introduction and then they're all going to come up and present to you. So, some of you I guess maybe I haven't met, so I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Elle Baker and I'm in the planning department. I work on open space and environmental projects as well
as conservation commission. So, I want to welcome all of you and thank you for coming out and spending your time with us tonight so that we can let you know what's going on. Um, so our first team that we're going to have is going to be John Mallister from
Mallister Marine Engineering and Chris Stillman. Um, from Air Partners, we have Francesca who's going to be giving a presentation on where we're at with our air quality monitors from Quante Q. Um we also have
um Kristen Ho Homire and Justine Rooney um to talk about the Hoo sensors which are tide alerts um that you can learn more about and you know how you can find out what's happening and with the tides and then we have Scott Turner from river
and he's going to talk from FA O'Neal and he's going to talk about the riverside drainage. Um I'd like to thank our elected officials for joining us. Um, Angela, counselor Angela SA, thank you for being here and for bringing people out and helping us with the outreach and for bringing the
refreshments. So, thanks for being here and also for our state rep. Thank you so much for coming, Mr. Turo. And we love to have you here. Um, so that's what's going on for the night. Um, we're going to try to keep them brief. So, the
format here tonight is going to be everyone's going to come up and each person's going to give their presentation. We're going to ask you to hold your questions until the end. We have note cards which I'm happy to pass around. I can kind of pass the stack table to table. If you have questions,
you can either write them down if you're not comfortable talking or asking um at the tables or you can just go to the table. So, the reason we're setting up like this is so that we can have more of a dialogue if you want to talk to the project team oneonone. So, we're we have
some room to do that as we move forward. So, we're going to hold all the present. We're going to have all the presentations which will be here. Just so you know, they'll all be recorded. This is not a live stream. They will be recorded and they'll be posted on rever.org next week. So, you'll be able
to recap or share with anybody um that couldn't come. You can let them know that that will be available next week. Um, we also have all of this all of the presentations have been translated to Spanish. So, those will also be posted on the website and the presentations
should be posted from tonight. All of the slides will be posted by Friday on the website. So, try to think what else I'm supposed to tell all of you before I get going. But without further ado, I think we'll start
with the presentation. So, we're going to start with Gibson Park, which as you know has been a project that we've been all working on for so many years. Uh, we've taken this project in a phased approach, which John's going to allude to just we're going to talk about phase one here tonight. So, just a quick
overview is phase one is going to be Gibson Park itself. Phase two, obviously, we all have talked about 29th ARV, the former boatyard. That is the phase two project. We all know that once we started to dig in the dirt and do
some sampling and testing, we realized that that needs to be remediated before we can do anything on that property. So, the city has applied for multiple grants. Um, we're hoping to get a federal grant soon. Um, we should hear
back, I believe, June, July, but it's a federal grant, so that could, you know, could be skewed a little bit, but we're hoping to hear back soon and hopefully we'll get the funding for that and we'll be able to remediate that and then move forward for an extension of Gibson Park. So, with that said, I'm going to hand it
over to John and then we'll move on to our next slide deck. So, I think we're almost on time. 6:05. >> Pretty good. Yeah. >> Yeah. All right. Go. >> Thank you again for coming. >> Thank you, El. Uh, good evening everyone. John Mallister, Mallister Reen Engineering. See a lot of familiar faces. As El mentioned, we've been
working on Gibson Park for close to six years now, I think, uh, through different iterations. This, um, this project came out of the, um, Riverside and Point of Pines master plan that was developed back in 2020. We're all uh working from our computers, but we've
kind of honed it down through multiple processes, through permitting, through design, through some um community meetings and input. And uh this the core team here obviously is the city uh department of community planning development has been the lead on it this whole time. My team at Macau Marine
Engineering for our landscape architecture, we have Copley Wolf Design Group. uh environmental resources are led by LEC and over the fall we went out to public bid uh got a lot of good responses and we were able to uh settle
in contract with Heimlick Landscaping and Construction Corp. Uh so they have they'll get into the schedule in a little bit but we're starting with all these pre-construction submitts. We're working through them to get it started and uh we're actually bringing this project to life which is very exciting.
Um, so a lot of you all from the neighborhood probably very familiar with Gibson Park, but um, the existing park as it is, it's right along the Pines River. Uh, has that baseball softball field, passive recreational walking path. It has two sets of um stacked two
sets of stacked um, tennis courts, the community total half court uh, basketball court. Uh, so and we're the uh, golf infrastructure. There's a putting green and a driving range over there. So, that is our area of focus. Everything that is grayed out is not
part of the project, including the 29th, as L alluded to, that needs to be remediated. So, that'll be phase two of this uh project. So, what are we looking at now that's going to happen over the next coming months at Gibson Park? You're going to start seeing a lot of changes pretty soon. Uh I think we've
talked about this during multiple meetings, but the the existing field that's just really baseball and softball on a practice field. Uh we're going to try and make it more utilitarian. Uh used for different sports, soccer, lacrosse can be used for softball and baseball practices as well. So it's
going to be uh 220 foot by 360t multi-purpose natural grass field. So um we're going to have irrigation on it. It's going to be we got a um a turf expert that's working with us to make sure it's the right blend for this coastal environment that it'll last. So,
they're going to be helping this out and assisting for the implementation. Um we're going to have these field lighting that'll go around. We'll get into that a little bit more later. The existing basketball court will remain the half court as well as the the practice areas. This uh walking path is changed slightly
because we had to push the field a little bit this way. So, we are um having to modify that, but we will still keep that passive recreation area. And if you recall, there's four tennis courts out there. It's going to be a single stacked uh tennis court over here, two pickle ball courts in the
community garden, which is currently over here. It's going to be relocated inside here in this future connection from the roundabout. You know, they started this roundabout work. It's not part of our project, but they're starting about it and we are making accommodations that eventually they'll be able to access from that roundabout
structure. So, what are the big highlights of what we're doing? I had mentioned the soccer field, uh, multi-purpose field, soccer, lacrosse, uh, and practice for baseball and softball. Uh, it will be secured with a 4ft fence along the edges so we
don't have to worry about, um, balls going into the into the river. Um and that the walking paths will be paved and updated. Um tennis courts will still remain one tennis court and we'll have the two pickle ball courts. That again came out from feedback. We had a lot of
back and forth. We're going to do two stack tennis courts and eventually um based on the what we discussed with the community single tennis court with the two uh pickle ball courts and the community garden below that. There will be uh metal bleachers for because there
going to be a lot more games and activities happening around there and we wanted to have fixed places along it. So there'll be three tiered metal bleachers for the community to watch kids playing. We're going to have high mass lighting. Uh this is similar to what you have in other spots within the city. I think at the high school uh so that the city can
control it. High mass lighting so you have good good uh lighting without the glare that makes it tough to play so you can use it um more throughout the season. Certainly, you know, after we do the clock change in the fall, uh you want to have better lighting if you can still have practice because it still can
be warm. Uh we talked about what's going to remain the basketball court. We are not touching the playground of the tot lot. So that's going to be fenced off and not touched. Um but will be opened up afterwards. The pickle ball courts and uh one of the other things that we've pinned down as of this week, much
more uh precise, is there's three memorial benches that are going to be relocated within the park. They're within the passive recreation area um now and we're just relocating them further so they will be protected within this um passive recreation area as well.
So those will remain within the park as we have it. All right. So this is probably what you're most concerned about is the project timeline. Uh when are we going to get started? So, we are waiting on a NIPDES permit, which is not to get into too much dees, but anytime
you disturb more than one acre of land um for a construction project, you need to file with the EPA uh for coverage under it just to show how you're going to protect from storm water runoff and control groundwater, storm water on your construction site. So, the contractor
has applied for that. We are waiting on the finalization of that permit. We expect it within the next week or two. And once that's good, we kind of have the blessing to get started and actually start some demolition work and um get get ready to get into the construction. So hopefully by the end of the month,
you'll start seeing the contractor moving into the site. First thing we're going to do is put up all the erosion controls and some temporary fencing to protect it. So we can't have uh public access. It's an active construction site like you you're going to be used to. So, the park will be closed for that
activity uh for the duration of of the construction period and they'll start starting most likely around May 1, maybe April 27th. I think it's like that Monday or something like that. But they got to get in, install that those erosion controls, this security fencing.
Then that's when the actual construction activity will really begin. Um so in May they're going to start demolition and they can do some of the site work, get it ready. We have a lot of features. There's some storm water improvements that are happening on the site. So, there's some subsurface infiltration
that we're going to be um putting in, extending some other utilities. All that work will happen over the summer. And then uh timing actually works out pretty well with as they uh construct it. They'll be ready to start with some of the planting and the landscaping. And we can do that once we get into September with the cooler cooler evenings of the
fall. It's a really good time for planting and getting the grass to grow on the on the field. Uh and there's a lot of other vegetation that we planted as part of the park as well. So that all will happen uh September and October and then the we're planning to demobilize from the site and open it back up
sometime around November. Uh some of the key features as I mentioned the park will be closed during construction for public safety. Uh they're going to be fencing it off the site. So even from the riverside, you can't have people coming into the site because they're going to have uh equipment access. There'll be trenches uh and they have to
control their site liability wise. Um, we have notified the contractor. They don't have a lot of subcontractors working for them, but we've notified them that, you know, coming through the Riverside neighborhood, they need to respect speed limits. They can't be racing down Mills a that, you know, we
tal we had told them about the experience from the other project that we don't want a replication of that. We're more in control of that now than the other one. So, um, they need to respect the the speed limits coming down Millsav. They're going to be parking everything within the existing parking
lot at Gibson Park. That's another reason why we have to uh fence the whole area off so they can take it keep their equipment inside there in the crews. They're not going to have it's not the same type of construction works. You might have four or five trucks of workers a day coming in and out. Um the
biggest thing for truck traffic we're going to see is delivery of materials, stone, lom, items like that. Uh but again uh we've we've notified them about respecting those um speed limits and making being sure aware that it is a active residential neighborhood that
they're passing through. Um they're allowed to work from 7 to 4 during weekdays. Uh Sunday work will probably never happen, but if they do need it to catch up on schedule or something, they'd have to petition the city. We review it with the city and the city
will ultimately decide. But for now, the plan, and they're not planning on doing any of that, plan is Monday through Friday. If they get behind, need to make it up, they have the Saturday option, and then Sunday is really like the dead end. But we're just giving you a heads up that that is a very remote possibility, but I wouldn't plan on it.
Um, then when we come back in November, we take our victory lap because everyone's so happy with how great the park turned out. We can talk about what's going to happen after that. the 29th FAR L alluded to there's some contamination that needs to be remediated. Uh hopefully those grants come through uh
you know L and her team have been very active in applying for those and working with uh EPA D Brownfields to try and get it uh remediated. So hopefully once that's done we can move on. We've talked about phase two in past meetings. We're not going to get into it today but there
is a great idea time uh about what's going to happen. And then again, separate to that, the roundabout. I think the roundabout's also in two phases. So, they're going to do the first phase that's under construction now. And then the second part, they're going to do the tie-in so that access to Gibson Park will come off the new roundabout off of 1A and not through the
Riverside neighborhood. But again, that's for future, not part of this work, and that's where we're going. So, um, again, thank you all for your time. Really appreciate it. We'll be over there, Chris and I, afterwards to to discuss. But, uh, really looking forward
to getting getting some dirt moved around after talking about it for so many years with all of you. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you.