Selectmen approve Cofsky and housing committees

The Norwood Board of Selectmen met at Town Hall on Tuesday and voted to create two new committees around land and housing.

The first big one was the creation of a Cofsky Farm Advisory Committee, on the recommendation of Town Manager Tony Mazzucco. The committee, to be made up of about 11 members of the community, would be tasked with, essentially, figuring out what can be done with the property to help improve the Town.

Town Meeting voted overwhelmingly to approve the purchase of the farm – and some adjacent properties – at the 2025 Fall Special Town Meeting – https://gvimes.link/cofskypurchase

The Town hasn’t actually purchased the property yet, and the Board voted unanimously to give Mazzucco the ability to close on the property with the advice of Town Counsel, which he said would take about a year.

In the meantime, Mazzucco said the Town should try to figure out what it can do with it. He said it’s a somewhat unique case and that the Town Government isn’t necessarily equipped to know the highest and best possible use of the property, which was originally acquired for open space preservation per the Town’s +20-year-old Open Space and Recreation Plan.

“[We should] really go through all the different options of what we could do there and come up with a small strategic plan or small master plan for the property,” he said. “One very small example is somebody asked me if we could do a butterfly garden there. I don’t know the first thing about butterfly gardens, but I think that would be among the many many items folks would look at and figure out, what do they cost, how do they work, how does it fit into stuff, and come up with a map of what the property might look like.”

In a similar vein, the Board approved a request from Mazzucco to form an Advisory Housing Committee to work on building affordable homeownership in the Town. He said that idea also doesn’t have a specific road map at this point, but he gave an example of the Town using Community Preservation Act (CPA) funds and grant funding to have affordable condos or units in a triple-decker house where the residents purchase at an “affordable” price, build some equity, and when they sell, they sell for an affordable price to help other residents build the wealth that can come with homeownership.

“There are a lot of rental units in Town with a lot of different programs you could do with that, but our focus should be on homeownership,” he said.

Mazzucco said he’s already had interest from several residents about both committees and will be collecting resumes and applications from residents in the coming weeks to form the committees.

Also at the meeting, Norwood Police Chief Christopher Padden and Norwood Fire Chief Timothy Bailey gave their monthly updates to the Board. The big ticket item for the Norwood Police Department (NPD) – quite literally – was the coming World Cup games at Patriot Place in Foxboro starting in June.

Padden said they are expecting an influx of patrons to stay in Norwood and are preparing for that, but he said there were some other concerns that might not be as obvious as you would think.

Advertisement

“I went to the Joint Terrorism Task Force meeting up at Gillette Stadium – I think it was about two weeks ago. There was a lot of discussion there in regard to possible terrorism threats, generalized criminal threats, and human trafficking that potentially could be a big thing,” he said, adding the meeting was centered around World Cup strategies. “There are a lot of hotels here in Norwood, and there was a thought that with a lot of people traveling and with people bringing people along, there is the possibility of human trafficking. We’re preparing for that. We’re going to have an increased volume of folks and we have to deal with that. It’s a worldwide event, and everybody is going to be looking at Massachusetts and Foxboro. They’re looking for 600 police officers per game, which requires community cooperation.”

Padden said they are looking at a busier time for the NPD in general, and said there have been some regional issues that have come up recently. He said there have been a series of criminal incidents in Norwood that reflect a trend of criminals coming to the Town from outside. He pointed to a recent drug bust in Boston that NPD worked on through the Norfolk County Anti-Crime Task Force (NORPAC) in which 80 grams of cocaine and $8,000 in cash were recovered. He also pointed to a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) case NPD worked on in which packages were coming in from California through the United Parcel Service (UPS) in which they recovered 12 kilograms of cocaine – that’s 26.45 pounds for those who use Imperial units – and one kilogram of fentanyl, along with four vehicles and $50,000 in cash.

“That’s why we work with these task force groups, because without the manpower that we can supply, they can’t operate,” he said. “It’s important that we don’t have that insular mindset and understand that we’re part of a region. Norwood’s a small town in a large region – it’s a very populous area, the Greater Boston area.”

Chief Bailey also gave the Board an update on the Norwood Fire Department’s ladder truck, Ladder 1, which, readers may have noticed, has been replaced with a Walpole truck for the last week or so because of an equipment failure. The truck is due for replacement after Town Meeting voted to spend $3 million on a new one due to issues like this. But because of the backlog from only having about three companies in the country being able to build fire apparatus and, allegedly, using that oligopoly to increase prices, increase wait times and institute proprietary repair policies – https://gvimes.link/firebacklog – it’s going to be at least a few years until the new truck comes to the Town.

“You’ve probably seen the Walpole ladder truck floating around Town – our ladder truck is out of service again,” Bailey said. “It had a major failure of one of the electrical cables in the ladder itself that goes up through the rails on the different ladder sections. That will be out of service for the next four-to-six weeks. I heard from them this morning, it’s going to be three-to-four weeks to get the parts, and it’s very labor intensive, so another couple of weeks to take that apart and fish it through. That will be out for a while, and thank you to our neighbors for letting us use their truck.”