Mary Dennison Park is slated for a $43 million upgrade. What new things are planned

FRAMINGHAM — A project that has been before the City Council for four and a half years has finally been approved, bringing major renovation plans and a cleanup to Mary Dennison Park on Beaver Street.

The City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved appropriating $23.5 million to the project — which is in addition to $19.6 million appropriated by the council in December 2019 — to fund the Mary Dennison Park Renovation and Remediation Project.

The total of $43 million will not come entirely from the city, as $15.5 million will be paid by Avery Dennison Corp., an Ohio-based adhesive manufacturer that used the site as a dump when its factory was across the street through most of the 20th century. The company eventually turned the property over to the city, which then built a park there.

Environmental assessment: Framingham Town Meeting approves $60K for Mary Dennison Park

Jim Snyder, the city's parks and recreation director, said contamination on the site was discovered in 2014, which eventually led to the state Department of Environmental Protection getting involved in evaluating the park and setting parameters for its cleanup.

In 2014, 'it was determined pretty quickly that the contamination was vast'

“This is a project that started in 2014," Synder said during Tuesday's City Council meeting. "Originally, we were going to do some park work, and it was noticed there were some contaminants in the soil — primarily lead. We immediately went through the process to evaluate the soil and it was determined pretty quickly the contamination was pretty vast, encompassing the entire 15 acres of the park, as well as some surrounding properties."

As part of the project, the city has worked closely with Avery Dennison. Snyder said the company — the product of a 1990 merger between Dennison Manufacturing and Avery International Corp. — has agreed to pay 82% of the costs related to remediation of the area around the park, adding that the city did contribute some of the pollutants on the site.

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“It was a shared dump, it wasn’t Avery Dennison’s exclusively, it was also a town dump, with a lot of contamination from household products,” Snyder said.

Avery Dennison has also been splitting the cost evenly with the city regarding environmental research that has already been done on the site.

“We’ve been splitting the costs 50-50 on environmental research, DEP work and other things to determine the extent of the problem," Snyder told councilors. "During that time, we went through the four phases of working with the DEP, and finally got a determination from them. Essentially, what we are doing is providing a cap over some of the most contaminated areas, and the rest of the property will serve as play space, field space and activity space.”

New park will provide improvements to south side playground

The park is among the largest in Framingham. Once renovations are complete, it will include a multi-purpose turf field, softball field, two basketball courts, futsal court, volleyball court, skate park, new playground and splash pad.

City Councilor Tracey Bryant, whose District 9 includes Mary Dennison Park, said she's pleased the project is going to get cleaned up, but that she has been frustrated by its delays.

"We have been waiting for years and years for this project to be cleaned up, and I want to make sure that there are no longer any delays to the project," she said. "We need to clean the park up, and we needed to do it a long time ago."

Bryant said contamination is a major problem in her district, with its history of being used as industrial and commercial hubs for the city during a time period when environmental standards were virtually non-existent. Today, the district is densely populated with families, and areas like Mary Dennison Park need to be safe for them to use.

"It has to be habitable, it has to be a nice place for people to grow up," Bryant said. "It's not just a place anymore where people made money and then lived on the north side."

City Councilor Mike Cannon said he was proud to see the project come to fruition, saying this kind of development may not have happened if Framingham were still a town.

“I remember in the Town Meeting days this would be the kind of thing that would have rambled on eternally," he said. "I know in certain communities, you have a park that is serving a population that previously didn’t have a voice during the prior years. It says a lot that we have the community that makes this kind of investment."

This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Dennison Park improvement project will create new fields, playground