The Community Preservation Committee this week planned to vote on $500,000 for a project to upgrade Reardon Park in Saxonville, expecting that to complement funding from Framingham’s capital budget. However, CPC members said they discovered just on the day of their meeting that money for Reardon Park was no longer in mayor’s recommended FY 2025 city budget.
Because of that, the CPC voted to appropriate Community Preservation Act funds for Reardon contingent on 2025 municipal funding – money that will not be allocated this year.
In a Facebook post Friday, the City of Framingham’s official account posted that the park is still in the design phase and not ready for funding. Instead, the city has gone back to the designer to try to reduce construction costs. The post quoted Parks & Recreation James Snyder as saying recent developments in the design require a lengthy permit from Eversource due to nearby powerlines, also causing a delay in final design. It added that Mayor Sisitsky did not cut the Reardon Park redesign project out of the FY 2025 capital budget, calling such accounts “inaccurate reports”.
What remains unclear is why the Community Preservation Committee believed that project would be funded by the city up until their meeting this week.
Although I was advised to check the Parks and Recreation website for latest information, as of Saturday afternoon, the Reardon Park project’s page didn’t appear to have been updated since 2022.
What’s certain: Reardon Park is marked “deferred” in a “Revised FY2025 Recommended Capital Budget (2023-103)” memo submitted to the City Council’s Finance Subcommittee. What’s less certain: Which “deferred” projects are newly deferred and which were taken out of the budget awhile ago. City Councilor Adam Steiner asked for such a list at the Finance Subommittee meeting on March 12, so hopefully that will be cleared up shortly.
In any case, it sounds like the city is still working on the project, but wants to lower the cost and there’s no current timetable for when it might get back in the budget.
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