Carey Prouty:
Audio One
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time = 00:37.1 size - 6,400 KB
So that there was a strong family connection, and the Proutys go back I think to 1850 and uh it my was my brother-in-law, Roger, who is a bachelor, he’s 85 now, and he owned the house with me, I mean with Don and me,and when Don died he helped decide what to do with it and so on and so it was his idea to just - I mean he said he felt so grateful to his parents for just making so much available to them when they were growing up.
Audio Two
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time = 1:28.5 size = 15,247 KB
And then we'd hear about this one or that one that wanted to buy it, and oooh, we'd think well what do they want it for, you know right and we just knew that somebody was going to make a ah just saw it as a place to develop. And of course they made a lot of tests in figuring out how to charge for this and you know how much we could get out of it because of what we could have made if we sold it for houselots and there would have been a ton of them and it would have been a very lucrative sort of thing, but this just seemed the perfect answer, going to something, you know, we had a bargain price but gosh we just felt that it was a wonderful way to use the place , and they just seemed - everybody that we met - we went to their annual meeting - they kept inviting us to things - and as you know they had two places, the one that was in Groton that they leased - the other one was in Orange so I don't think - they really wanted to be nearer Boston, and what better place than where route two and 495 come together , and its that much closer to Boston and so it seemed as if it were meant to be, almost.
Audio Three
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time = 00:19.6 size = 3,377 KB
It's been just marvelous for us living there; our girls were brought up there and so on, so, it was a - it was just a marvelous place and had so much - such a natural setting, and the fact that there was the lake and the house on the hill which came with the property.
Audio Four
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time = 00:51.0 size = 8,788 KB
.when you knew that their reason for being really was to preserve these places and they seemed to have the know-how - I mean we were always members of The Trustees of Reservations, my husband was very interested in that, and the Nature Conservancy, those two things, and we went to a lot of their places, you know, we'd go and visit and so on - very aware of what could be done but we - I don't think we ever thought of that in relation - if NEFF hadn't come in out of the blue looking for a place, I don't think we would have gone looking for that sort of thing - maybe we would have, I just don't know but it just seemed as if it were very early on that that all kind of meshed - they came on the scene and then they were persistent.
Jennifer Soper
Audio Five
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time = 00:28.2 size = 4,869 KB
The two good things that my agency, the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, the two things that we're looking to do is one: make that land legally protected open space, make it as bureaucratically difficult as possible to change its use - to put a school on it or sell it outright - it is supposed to stay open space - and the other thing we get is public access.
Audio Six
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time = 00:56.3 size = 9,708 KB
We've been - I've been seeing applications number say 20 to 25 - you have to remember that Self Help does not give anybody 100% of what they asked for, and so sometimes even a large grant - our largest typically are $500,000 - and sometimes even that can be just a small portion of the overall project. And communities are awarded a percentage based on its relative wealth, so communities who are poorer will get our maximum of 70 percent and communities that are wealthier will get only 52 percent , and it goes in increments of two percent - it's a sliding scale, and again there is a $500,000 cap.
Audio Seven
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time = 1:43.5 size = 17,834 KB
So there are certain aspects of a project that make it a particularly ideal candidate for Self-Help - primarily its projects that protect habitat , that protect water resources, that are fairly large - they tend to be more competitive - projects that - large in acreage - projects that are contiguous , that abut other protected open space - the ownership is not important, what's important is if its legally protected open space - if it has a conservation restriction on it - yeah we can get into the minutia of - ah, what else oh archaeological resources, cultural, historical stuff, and public outdoor passive recreation. Passive recreation has got nothing to do with sweat equity - it's nothing - passive doesn't refer to what you're doing so for example trails - hiking trails - that's passive recreation because it doesn't require a huge change to the actual property to accommodate that activity . so you can be out hiking all day and it sure really doesn't feel like passive activity, but I say to people in my workshop the minute you paint a line , so if you're doing a soccer field , the minute you paint a line, you cross the line between passive into active recreation.
Audio Eight
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time = 1:00.01 size = 10,359 KB
Were there aspects of Prouty Woods that made it stand out along the rating system? The lake? The shorefront - the lake, that was big. The view from the summit, the size of the parcel and the fact that it was within 495 - that large a parcel in a more suburbanized area. The multiple uses proposed was another good aspect , so you can do passive recreation, water resource protection at the lakeshore, wildlife habitat, continuing forestry management; multiple uses that's another thing that folks get points for - the project gets points for these multiple uses ; sometimes I get people writing down I can hike, I can picnic, I can do some birdwatching . I'm like no no no, that's all recreation, that's one category here - so, that's what made Prouty Woods stand out.
Audio Nine
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time = 00:42.0 size = 7,249 KB
The project itself had a lot of different puzzle pieces, so that's why it was important to contact us, and you know, get information on how to make everything work - how to make the - there was agricultural components of this project that I can't pay for but I can complement, you know, so we had to subdivide out the 6 acres of the field - I think it was 6 acres - and that was set aside so that a different program could help with that acquisition and then our program money would be spent on a more appropriate portion of the parcel.
Audio Ten
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time = 00:48.7 size = 8,406 KB
The Self-Help program was started - it's a state program, and conservation commissions are eligible to apply, and it's a strictly municipal grant program, and specifically conservation commissions, they were begat in 1957 and Self-Help came along in the mid 60s - so here's this new, relatively new town agency, whose charge is protection of the town's natural resources, and sometimes they can not do that without acquiring the property and so a few years later along comes a state grant program modeled after a federal program that helps conservation commissions do some of that natural resource protection work.
Audio Eleven
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time = 00:35.8 size = 6,178 KB
We try to incorporate smartgrowth attributes into each project, and actually I had a case in Groton, where the town had the opportunity to look at several parcels of land, and they had different municipal purposes in mind: school, conservation, recreation - well, you know, if you have a large property downtown, maybe that's where you want your school, you know, and maybe the thing on the outskirts is where you want your conservation area - you don't want to run utilities way out there.
Audio Twelve
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time = 00:49.6 size = 8,553 KB
Yeah, , the actual - you know - application to closing and reimbursement time has to happen within a given fiscal year and the sad thing is that we are not able to carry money over from one fiscal year into the next - we have to - our agency has to operate within the guidelines of what's called a bond fund - our program is funded through bonds spending cap, and we are given so much cap, so it's kind of like having a credit card with a limit - and so the limit is not only dollars, the limit is time, so if they close, if they were to close by June 30, and the closing slipped over into July that's a cost we can't pay for because it didn't happen within that given fiscal year.
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