Amended OWP is Still A Bad Deal for Westfield

Here's the recording of last Tuesday's (5/13/25) Town Council Meeting. 

As always, if you know anyone who wants to be added to these Town updates, please send them this link. 

Updates From The Meeting:

There were two big votes at the meeting, one on first reading and one on second reading. 

1. Affordable Housing Plan -  (second reading) This was unanimously approved by the Council, and previously approved by the Zoning board. I wrote my detailed thoughts on this last week, but please reach out if you have any questions!

2. One Westfield Place - (first reading, the second reading/vote is on 5/27) There were two parts to this vote, one was for the amended project, and the second vote was for an amended bond, decreasing the amount of money the town needs to borrow for the scoped down project. 

   1.  Amended Project - This was approved 5-4, split across party lines. I voted no for this project, and so did the rest of the Republican Councilman. As I've detailed before, this is an extremely flawed project that in my opinion, puts the future of Westfield in unnecessary financial risk. 

      •  👉 👉 Please watch my explanation of my no vote at the meeting here.  

   2.  Amended Bond - After the amended project was approved, the lowered bond was approved unanimously across party lines. Once the amended project was unfortunately approved, it was my fiduciary duty to vote yes to decrease the bond to match the amended project. But I want to be clear, this was not a yes vote in favor of the project, instead more so my fiduciary duty to lower our debt service. 

      
      

This does not 100% mean that the One Westfield Place project is happening, and there are still a lot of hurdles to get through. What this does mean however is that the developers are on a strict timeline to meet certain requirements. In my opinion, this puts even more pressure on the developers to do a project I believe is financially unfeasible for them, and even worse for our town. 

I'll end with this. We gave our Southside train station to Streetworks Developers (a subsidiary of Saks Global) in a no bid, no RFP process. For comparison, we do more bids/RFPs for the Town Pool snack stand than our Council decided to do for selling off our most valuable piece of land. We are putting the future of our town in their hands. Is this the company we should be betting our future on?

Thank you again for all of your support. 

I promise to continue fighting for transparency and to never put arbitrary party lines ahead of important votes impacting our Town like this one. 

Together, we will help Westfield reach its fullest potential.