Town Meeting Asked To OK $2 Million For Sea Camps Improvements

BREWSTER – Voters will be asked to approve more than $2 million for work at the Sea Camps bay property at the upcoming special town meeting, with none of the funds coming from property taxes.

Brewster’s capital plan for the property is driven by voters rejection of an $11 million bond covering more extensive work in 2024, so the Sea Camps advisory committee has broken the projects into small, digestible bites that can be funded without impacting the town’s tax rate,

“They asked us to slow down and unbundle it into manageable smaller bits and present it to the voters as individual projects,” advisory committee chair Karl Fryzel said.

The tennis courts, slated for completion this winter, are just one of the projects town meeting voters will be asked to approve at the Nov. 16 special town meeting as part of the separate capital projects article that, as Fryzel emphasized, includes no new taxes.

“This plan has an annual review and is updated,” he told the select board Monday. “The costs went up and the revenues went down. The free cash is less, from $1.3 million to $700,000 and cost grew by $1.5 million, a 30 percent increase, so we postponed a lot of projects and the plan now extends to fiscal year ‘31.”

Brewster has public tennis courts at the Stony Brook School, but those will be converted to pickleball use exclusively (12 courts) while the courts at the Sea Camp’s bay property, which was purchased for $20 million, will be refurbished and updated for roughly $785,000. Just last week Brewster received confirmation the town was awarded a $140,000 grant from the United States Tennis Association to aid in financing the work. The rest of the project, which includes improving the nearby athletic fields for soccer, will be funded by $50,000 in free cash and $785,000 in Community Preservation Act funds that also need to be approved at the town meeting.

Four full-size courts will be constructed at the Sea Camps. Town officials opened the bids for the work on Oct. 14. There were five bids ranging from $722,000 to $1,274,000 for the tennis courts with an additional $143,000 to complete the field work. Robert B. Our company was the low bidder. Any excess funding from the community preservation committee will be refunded at the end of the work.

The Sea Camps article at town meeting also includes progress on other fronts. Brewster will spend $462,400 on a new water main for the property, funded and installed by the department of public works and water department, which will save some money. 

The old water main for the camp runs through a coastal sand dune which is no longer environmentally acceptable. The dune restoration, costing $200,000, will be done next fall. The new main will run from Route 6A through Spruce Hill.

Consultants Weston and Sampson will also design some landscaping and a trail from Route 6A to the ocean for $25,000.

Twenty-one of the deteriorating buildings on the bay property are slated for demolition by next spring at a cost of $600,000 to be funded by free cash. That is part of a larger plan, eliminating 35 structures that will cost $1.4 million, up from an initial estimate of $800,000. The completion date for that is now 2030. 

“The bids [for the demolition] will be opened Nov. 5, so we will have an exact number by town meeting,” Assistant Town Administrator Donna Kalinick said. 

This spring Mass Audubon will be spending $453,600 to design a nature center, and the $1.5 million construction project will start in the fall. At that time Brewster will use $800,000 in free cash to build a parking lot for the center, the boathouse and beach.

Brewster has a $250,000 state grant for fiber optic work at the Camp. 

Including several smaller expenses Brewster will ask voters to approve $2,291,400 in work at the bay property this winter and spring and $503,600 for the fall. No work will be done at the pond property until the fall ($280,000 worth). None of this will be on the tax rate, with the $3 million in cash sourced from free cash ($755,000), grants ($488,000), Mass Audubon ($453,600), the Brewster Conservation Trust ($330,000), Community Preservation Act ($700,000 or so) and other ($348,000).

The select board voted 5-0 to place and recommend both articles on the town warrant.