Feedback on Guild: Dam fine cup of pond

The Norwood Conservation Commission (ConCom) met last week in a hybrid format and voted on several conservation permit applications.

But the bigger news was that Conservation Agent Carly Rocklen relayed the nearly final results of the comments sought for the Guild Pond Dam feasibility study. She said respondents were fairly monolithic in their responses.

“The options are: repairing the dam, replacing the dam or removing the dam,” Rocklen said. “And if we were to repair or replace the dam, we would keep the pond there. If we were to remove the dam, the pond would revert back to a brook. As of the end of the work day, the vast majority – I think actually it’s been almost all of the respondents – prefer to maintain a pond and a dam there.”

If you haven’t been following the Guild Pond saga, basically, about two years ago now the Norwood Sportsman’s Association butted heads with the ConCom regarding vegetation management and sandbagging of the dam.

The land is conservation land owned by the Town of Norwood, but it was sold to the Town decades ago for a dollar from the club (the land was also previously slated for development). The current Guild Pond is public property and all residents, even those who don’t live in Norwood, are allowed to use it for water recreation – boating and fishing mostly – as allowed by law.

But it’s still conservation land, and that’s where the initial friction came in. The dam was built in the 1960s, and, save for the spillway, is mostly earthen. The earth part of the dam is overly vegetated, which generally means water gets through spaces the roots leave behind.

The spillway, the mechanical part of the dam, is a concrete construction and is falling apart. That’s the area that the Sportsman’s Association has been sandbagging.

The ConCom cited the association for cutting wetlands vegetation and sandbagging the dam. Basically, the State Wetlands Protection Act and the Norwood Conservation Bylaw have strict controls on work done in a wetland area, such as Guild Pond.

The result of this friction led to where we are today. The ConCom and the Sportsman’s Association pitched a feasibility study around the dam at the May 2025 Town Meeting, and this feedback collection mentioned above – when Rocklen said almost all the feedback was for keeping the dam – is part of that process.

On Oct. 8, the ConCom held a public listening session with the study’s hired consultant, Tighe & Bond, to share the options and get community feedback. As Rocklen said, the options were repair, replace or remove, and the feedback there was generally that the dam should stay – https://gvimes.link/gldpndmtg1

For the slides and presentation of that meeting, go to https://gvimes.link/cncmnws

“So we will have a followup meeting with the consultant Tighe & Bond, and in February and May there will be more presentations with design alternatives that Tighe & Bond comes up with,” she said. “These alternatives will also include cost estimates.”

ConCom Chair Catherine Walsh said these estimates will include both the initial construction cost and ongoing maintenance costs.

That was the sticking point on Oct. 8, in that the Town of Norwood is currently experiencing a near $7 million budget deficit every year, running out of free cash to plug the hole and will be pitching an operational budget override in the next two years. All that means is that taxes are going to go up further than usual to maintain level services, and funding for a new or repaired dam may be hard to come by.

“That’s going to be the challenge for us, right?” Walsh said. “But there was a lot of input and a lot of consensus as to what we want, which I think is good.”

Rocklen said the feedback and comments came from residents who both attended the meeting and those who did not. She said the outreach went through several mediums, including Facebook, Norwood Now, this newspaper and the ConCom webpage.

“I feel like it was a good process,” Walsh said.

In other news, Tashmoo Realty LLC presented plans for the property at 153, 159-163 Morse St., the former site of a catering company. Norwood Engineering’s Matt Smith represented the project – which also had DCD Realty and New England Subaru’s Michael Clemmey at the meeting – aimed at creating indoor car storage.

Smith said they are looking to build a new larger building on the site, which will result in more impermeable surface area, but they want to increase the greenery and reduce the asphalt, as well as install a lot of stormwater runoff protections.

“The site is surrounded by wetland resource areas,” Smith said.

Smith said currently, there is no stormwater management, and all the water that falls on the pavement goes into the resource areas untreated. He said the new plan will completely change that and result in no additional or any untreated runoff from the site for two-year, five-year, 10-year and 100-year storms, according to their presented calculations.

Smith said there will be a series of deep sump catch basins that will relay the water to an underground storage system, where it will be treated and infiltrated. Once treated, it will go through an outlet structure and stilling basin.

“What we’ve accomplished in this design is that we meet all of the current Massachusetts stormwater standards and all of the Norwood standards,” he said. “We are not asking for any waivers of stormwater requirements. We recharge two inches times the impervious area, as required by Norwood, and we’re treating one inch of the pollutants. We’ve also got 98 percent suspended solids removal and there will be no increase in stormwater volume.”

The ConCom voted unanimously, with relevant special conditions as provided by Rocklen, in favor.