City moves forward $8.5 million in loans for next stage of Fernald renovations

The City Council on Monday voted to begin approving a $6,420,000 loan for exterior renovations to the Howe and Administration Buildings located at 200 Trapelo Road, at the site of the former Fernald State School. 

According to Mayor Jeannette A. McCarthy, the two buildings will house new city administrative offices and indoor recreation facilities, including a pool. 

The council in January approved more than $1 million in renovations to the buildings, but that expenditure did not involve any restoration to the inside of the buildings or their grounds.

At the Aug. 4 meeting, Councilor-at-Large Carlos A. Vidal questioned the high cost of these renovations, especially given they don’t involve any work on the inside of the buildings.

Multiple other councilors asked to put off the decision until the city can obtain an accurate estimate of how much future phases of the restoration, including interior renovations, will cost.

Councilor-at-Large Colleen Bradley-MacArthur expressed worries about the council’s willingness to go through with the costs of fixing the property. “My fear all along [has been] that we would essentially buy this land … make these promises that we were going to do things to these buildings, only to balk at the costs,” she said.

McCarthy asked the council’s Long Term Debt and Capital Planning Committee to start the approval process for the loan so the city could continue negotiating with winning bidder Northern Contracting. 

She agreed to bring city officials involved in the planning process to the council’s next meeting in the fall, so councilors can question them in more detail about the project before deciding whether to finalize the loan.

Also at Monday night’s meeting, the council finalized its approval for an additional loan for abatement and demolition of older Waltham buildings, two of which are the Fernald School’s Withington and Farrell Halls, which will cost $2,088,000 to demolish. 

The mayor emphasized that although the city is demolishing some Fernald School buildings, many are on state and federal historic building registries and the city will face regulatory issues for new construction on the property. So she wants to preserve and make use of historic buildings on the property that can bring value to the city. 

The Fernald State School was founded in 1848 as the country’s first publicly funded school for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. The school moved from South Boston to Waltham in 1890, where it has since come to national attention for experiments conducted on students without their knowledge by MIT and Quaker Oats researchers and other accusations of abusive and harmful practices from former residents and their families.

According to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, the school underwent major reforms in the 1990s, but it continued to be a subject of controversy until the state shut it down in 2014. The City of Waltham bought the property for $3.73 million in 2014. 

The buildings have sat vacant for years, and over the past decade the property has come under scrutiny by multiple news organizations, including radio station WGBH, for improper storage of former patient records and by The Boston Globe for its usage as a storage site by state police. It also sustained damage from trespassing incidents, vandalism and multiple building fires that the Waltham Fire Department determined to be arson.

The deterioration of the buildings over time has been documented by the Fernald State School and Hospital Recordation Project.