Thanks to your incredible support, our campaign has caught the attention of over 4300 people. What happens next....We're glad you asked...
- Contact 2 people in your network (or more) and ask them to sign and share the petition Save the NEMT Wakefield Forest
- Tell them why we are fighting for this forest and a better, cheaper alternative location for the school-recommended sites C-2 or C-1
- Explain how we got here....
How did we end up fighting for a forest that many assumed was already protected? The answer is that the elected and appointed officials that ran the process of selecting a site for a new Metro Tech care about getting money from the state, playing fields, and access roads, but not a scintilla about the natural environment. They see our forest as a piece of real estate covered by replaceable trees. They know nothing about the beauty and functions of a forest or the reverence that a mature forest deserves, or the increasing rarity of areas not contaminated by urban development.
When people voted for the school, did they vote to destroy the forest? Of course, they didn’t, as over 4,300 signatures on change.org demonstrate. The site information was carefully hidden behind the popular question of whether we should build a new school. Now that they have the go-ahead to build the school, they are trying to control the growing protests against its location. Time to line up the contracts and move forward!
The pre-feasibility study, however, rejected site C-3 (the forest) as too costly and difficult to develop and recommended sites C-2 or C-1, each of which has an area equal to C-3 and is in already developed land. Somewhere along the line, the building committee decided to favor site C-3. (See the strong reaction of Wakefield architect Brian Thomson to this decision on the “Save the Forest and Build the Voke” Facebook page.) It appears that the committee kept the change of site close to their vests because they knew there would be resistance to destroying the forest.
A strategy emerged of keeping protest to a gentle murmur until the public process was over, the votes counted, and they could declare that "it's too late to complain." But these “complaints” are actually pleas to listen to reason. Why would we spend millions of additional dollars on a site that is difficult to develop, requires months of blasting and rock-crushing, and that will result in a school with severe accessibility and safety issues (steep and long stairways, high ledges) loss of endangered-species habitat and vernal pools, and potentially destroy Native American sites when there are two alternative sites available?
The rising costs of blasting and preparing site C-3 alone should give project proponents pause, but apparently not. Are we sacrificing a forest so that students will not have to use available temporary playing fields while the new school is being built? Is it too much to wait until the old school is razed and a new playing field built at that location?
When we have a public process where a bad decision cannot be revisited, we have a fundamentally broken system. In this case, the process is working only for the developers and Town leadership who have their eye on a large pot of money and no interest in environmental protection. If this decision holds, citizens of 12 towns will be paying for this mistake for decades to come.