Industrial Development Planned For Mashpee’s Corner Of Base

     The Massachusetts Military Reservation has asked to designate much of the portion of the military base within Mashpee’s borders as an “industrial trade area,” indicating an intention to attract military contractors and other development to the southeastern portion of the vast base.
     But the Mashpee Planning Board last week declined a request from MMR and the Cape Cod Commission to deem the area a focus of industrial development in town.
     The request came as part of the commission’s overall Land Use Vision Map for Mashpee, which sets out in broad strokes different land uses in town and designated industrial areas in the Mashpee Industrial Park, off Route 28 south of the rotary, and the former Augat site, on Route 28 near the Barnstable border.
     Lynda E. Wadsworth, a spokesman for the community outreach arm of the MMR, said the push to attract new tenants to the base is in part in response to changes there brought on by the Base Realignment and Closure process in 2005, and the ensuing need to generate revenue by leasing some of the property.
     Ms. Wadsworth said it is still too early to say what types of contractors might be brought in, and whether they would be private, public, or both.
     But she said a comparable example is the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a laboratory that researches exotic and invasive pests that might threaten the country’s agriculture and natural resources.
     Whoever the tenant, they would have to be “compatible with the military mission,” Ms. Wadsworth said.
     In their unanimous vote last week, planning board members echoed concerns expressed by Town Planner F. Thomas Fudala that Mashpee would not benefit from the development.
     Mr. Fudala said the town would see environmental and other impacts “downstream” from the development, but it would compete with the town’s own efforts to attract industrial businesses and would not increase the town’s property tax base.
     The 1,160-acre section of the base in Mashpee, which already includes a large airplane runway, administrative offices, vehicle maintenance facilities, and other “mission support” uses, according to Ms. Wadsworth, is zoned for industrial use under the town’s bylaws. The airstrip was not included in the industrial trade area proposed by MMR and the commission.
     The town has no direct say over development on the military base, but Ms. Wadsworth said MMR officials try to include community input whenever a large-scale development is planned.
     The approximately 30-square-mile Massachusetts Military Reservation is owned in large part by the state, along with the federal Department of Veterans Affairs and the US Air Force. The state land is leased to the US Coast Guard, the Massachusetts Army National Guard, and the Massachusetts Air National Guard.
     About 23.5 square miles of the base, in the northwestern portion in Sandwich and Bourne, is set aside and protected as a primarily undeveloped training area, meant to preserve the fresh water aquifer underneath, which supplies much of the Upper Cape’s drinking water.
     The southeastern portion, including the entire section within Mashpee’s town boundaries, is known as the “cantonment” area and is the focus of the industrial and other development there.
     Heather L. McElroy, a natural resource and open space specialist with the Cape Cod Commission, said the commission’s land-use map is meant to serve as a guide to development in town, “a planning tool,” indicating what areas should be targeted for what types of development and vice versa. It is a “visual growth policy for Cape Cod,” according to information provided by Ms. McElroy.
     She said the commission is considering using the maps to allow towns to customize the thresholds for what the commission decides are Developments of Regional Impact, so the towns could allow larger developments in industrial and economic growth areas to avoid the commission’s jurisdiction.
     The custom thresholds are meant to allow towns more power to direct growth.
     Mr. Fudala said the commission originally met with the planning board about the map last year, but came back with a different version that included the base as an industrial area and more of the Mashpee Commons Trout Pond property, a wooded and wetland area to the southeast of the rotary, as an economic area.
     Most of the property owned by Mashpee Commons around the rotary is marked as an “economic center,” and the area around Mashpee Town Hall and Popponesset Marketplace are deemed “village” areas. The rest of town is considered a “resource protection area,” where more increased development will not be encouraged.
     The planning board approved the map with the military base as a “resource protection area.” The map is now final, but it can be changed in the future, Ms. McElroy said.
     Ms. Wadsworth said the MMR in 2005 completed a Site Consolidation Plan, a sort of master plan for the base, that designated about a third of the Mashpee section as “mission support,” which is defined as “logistics and land set aside for future missions.” The rest of the land is set aside for the airfield and “environmental management,” or conservation land.
     MMR is set up based on a 1941 planning organization, she said, so the revised land use districts are meant to make the design and location of uses more efficient.
     Ms. Wadsworth said the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency, a semi-public, economic development firm known as MassDevelopment, is conducting a $1 million study funded by the state Legislature in part to determine how and where a US Department of Homeland Security installation could be built on the base.
     Like the effort to attract other contractors, the homeland security installation is hoped to provide a boost to the base’s revenue.
     “After [the Base Realignment and Closure process] things were a little in flux. But now we feel like we have a clear path,” she said. “The more military uses we can have here, the better it is for everyone.”
     She said MassDevelopment is also working on establishing clear delineation of what entities own what land. “It is like a puzzle patchwork of land that has been set aside,” she said.
     MassDevelopment is the entity behind the redevelopment of the former Fort Devens, in the towns of Harvard and Ayer, which since being decommissioned as a military base has been successfully redeveloped.
     MassDevelopment officials will be at a meeting held by an MMR public outreach group, on August 7, at 5:30 PM in a conference room at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility in Bourne, to provide a public update on the project’s goals and progress, she said.
     “There are not a lot of details right now. They are just at the beginning of their project,” she said.