TL;DR: The committee voted down our request for more time for community input and will proceed as they had planned, against Paul Cohen's advice. We, as the constituents, should have brought this up to them sooner.
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Brian Creamer is the contact for Varney subcommittee. brian.f.creamer@gmail.com. He (or we, since I am willing to join and help in whatever way I can) needs all the help he can get.
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I'm having a lot of feelings right now. I'm going to try my best to deliver unbiased updates. Including some of the LOTS of stuff that was said about parents of Chelmsford.
-The current playground needs to come down because at twenty years, it's at the end of its life.
-Even if we hired Leather and Associates, the company who installed the current structure, to repair it, it wouldn't be ADA compliant. (There is a letter we are hoping to see about this.)
-There is a lot of erosion work that needs to be done. That takes up most of the $485K budget.
-The new equipment is from O'Brian and Sons. I'm trying to remember the cost. I want to say $100K (?) for equipment, $100K (?) for install.
-Committee concerns are that the prices are going up and it will continue to go up. So we have to use these plans to act quickly
-They decided not to do any fundraising because they felt it was insensitive to ask for funds in a pandemic.
-Paul Cohen, the town manager, said that we should pull the article and cancel the order to give a chance for community input.
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-In the photo, the green part is poured rubber (?) that's ADA compliant for wheelchair accessibility.
-The swings will be the same as it stands.
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> I wanted to share that I was extremely disappointed because we were shut down over and over and were told that it's our own fault for not getting involved sooner and for coming to them with a petition so late in the game.
We kept trying to tell them that we were NOT EVEN AWARE of this happening. But that was our fault as well.
> They kept insisting that they did a lot of community outreach, namely solicited feedback from Friends of the North Village- Vinal Square FB group. I hadn't heard of this group, so I just looked it up. Doing a search yielded no real outreach attempts (solicitation to join a general meeting in 2015 and again in 2020. The most pertinent would be the Master Plan for Varney Phase II in 2019, but no updates or surveys, etc). When I said I posted it to the local parenting groups, they interrupted me to ask me WHY would I post there???
> In addition, many parents have reached out to help look into where this solicitation of input happened. There wasn't anything in the last 5 years in any of the town FB groups or the parenting groups until I brought attention to it. The only other source was finding it mentioned in documentation of meeting agendas, where several are MISSING MINUTES.
> Furthermore, some parents who live close enough to Varney to see it from their house said there were no signs posted anywhere and they were not surveyed either. (At one point, one of the members interrupted a fellow mom to discredit her because she didn't live close enough to Varney and that she has only been here for two years.)
> They strongly implied MANY times that we (parents) aren't committed to doing things. One of the things they brought up more than once was that, "sure clicking a button to sign a petition is easy, but look how many bothered to show up tonight?" Also, where were we the last two years if there are so many of us who have an opinion?
> In response, I offered to share some of what was shared on these threads, since there were lots of concerns and thoughtful responses, but they shut that down before I could begin.
> There was a general sense that this is all our fault and that they know what they are doing and what's best for us.
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It's really late, and I'm really upset. I could go on and on. I get that they put a lot of work into it and it's upsetting that we are "disrupting" their plans at the 11th hour. But I feel like they have been completely unfair to not just us who attended the meeting, but ALL THE PARENTS.
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Last note - Brian was the only one acknowledging ANY of our points as legitimate, so he might be cool :)