Wellesley Country Club, which since 2010 has been trying to come up with a plan for a new maintenance facility/restrooms/lightning shelter that the town and neighbors will agree to, is back with new proposals that will receive a public hearing on Sept. 13 at 7:30pm at the police station (lots of documents/images to view here).
Neighbors, organized as the Friends of Brookside, and town environmental officials have had major issues with placement of such facilities along Brookside Road, an official scenic road. The Friends say the new proposal is for a facility in the same place as was originally proposed, and thus WCC is “seeking permission to alter an area subject to protection under the Wetlands Protection Act and/or Bylaw…. It is outside the Riverfront area, but WCC will need to disturb the Riverfront area to get electric/water/sewer access by Oakland St.”
The proposal being discussed next Thursday is specifically for a comfort station/lightning shelter that the town’s Wetlands Committee will ponder, with maintenance facilities presumably up for discussion at a later time.
Earlier this year, the club’s Paul DeYesso said that this has been a very complicated process involving architects, engineers, planners and contractors. He said the club was evaluating alternatives and their impacts on buffer zones. “We absolutely need to build a new maintenance facility since the one we have is terribly undersized and functionally obsolete. It’s just a matter of where.”
The Brookside group is urging neighbors and others to show up at the public hearing next week, where among other things it will again bring up the idea of using composting toilets (described in letter as potentially being “luxurious”) at the WCC facility in an effort to minimize environmental impact and reduce the need for sewer/electrical installations.
