How the Framingham Community Center Project Ran Aground
The Mayor and COO ran a planning effort for 15 months which produced no plans. All the ARPA money has been exhausted on exterior repairs.
SUMMARY
The Community Center project was poorly run by the Mayor and Chief Operating Officer (COO), as the following will show:
In 15 months since the planning effort started in January 2024, the Community Center Advisory Committee talked multiple times about a community survey but only launched one finally on April 1, 2025. That survey will, amazingly, remain open for 6 months, so no results will be produced till the Fall.
In that same time period, just one member of the committee visited just one community center in Randolph. The committee put virtually no effort into visiting and gathering information on other community centers.
In the complete absence of planning guidance from the committee, all of the $11 million in ARPA funding, which had to be committed by December 31, 2024, or be lost, was spent on exterior repairs for the former Marian High School building, and nothing was spent on interior work specific to creating a viable community center.
Federal funding for further work is unlikely to appear, given the current crises in Washington.
There is no city estimate for the final project cost, as that depends on the missing plans.
The project could be rescued by identifying information which needs to be gathered from other community centers, carrying out visits to those community centers, expanding the current online survey to include a much larger section where respondents could provide extensive free form feedback, closing the survey in 2 months, then integrating all of the visit and survey information into a written plan with development options, for which the architect could provide dollar estimates.
Community feedback could then be obtained on the draft plan.
Most likely, to complete the project, a bond will have to be financed to cover the remaining expenses, which promise to be significantly more than $17 million.
[Note: ARPA = American Rescue Plan Act – the COVID-19 Federal stimulus money]
Back in January 2024, the Mayor announced the formation of a 25 member Community Center Advisory Committee in a press release:
These Are The 25 Members Of Framingham's Community Center Advisory Committee
which explained how Framingham was planning to redevelop the former Marian High School property. From that press release:
“… In September, the City of Framingham used federal ARPA funds to purchase the former Marian High School property and its contents for $3.35 million from Invictus Forever Inc. The former high school has a 750-seat theatre, a gymnasium, cafeteria, and multiple meeting spaces. The City of Framingham is planning to redevelop the property for theatre, art, sports, and other intergenerational activities.
The Advisory Committee will report to the Mayor, who will provide goals and assignments to the Committee.”
Details of the Community Center Advisory Committee may be found here. It is the largest committee in the city’s history.
Hope ran high that this committee would swing into action to rapidly create a well written plan to guide the development of the Community Center. Expectations were that other community centers would be visited, and the community would be engaged with a survey, much as was done with the Charter Review Committee, to develop information for the plan. Most of all, it seemed that the Mayor would be a strong guiding force, setting goals and assignments.
Time was of the essence, as after $3.35 million in ARPA funds were invested to buy the former Marian High School, about $11 million in ARPA funding remained, but had to be encumbered, that is committed by signed contracts, prior to December 31, 2024, or risk being lost.
To manage the cumbersome size of the advisory committee, subcommittees could have been spun off to handle:
Community engagement, including a survey.
Visits to other community centers and related information gathering.
Production of a written report detailing requirements the Community Center should meet for the Framingham community, based on the community engagement and site visits.
Further, if best practices from other community center development projects had been followed, a video tour of the current building could have been produced, and all meetings live streamed and recorded on video, so the community could have been engaged.
Nothing like this happened.
No goals were set. No timeline with milestones was produced. The committee could not even come up with a Clerk to produce minutes. The idea of having working subcommittees was floated but never came to anything.
The Mayor also seemed to play no role in setting goals and providing assignments.
It is a challenge to find out what happened in 2024, as the agendas and minutes for meetings in 2024 are not available on the city website, but were obtained by a public records request, and they show that an architect was hired by the city and made a presentation to the committee showing the current condition of the building. One committee member visited one other community center at Randolph. A community survey was mentioned in the very first January 15, 2024, meeting, was dropped, resurfaced in the September 26, 2024 meeting, and was further discussed in the November 20, 2024 meeting, but no action was taken.
For 2024 meeting details, see the Appendix at the end.
Because there was no guidance developed by the committee, the $11 million in ARPA funds had to be spent on everything except community center specific improvements.
The work those funds covered included:
Demolition of a convent building to increase parking. ($1.7 million)
Hiring an architect: BH+A , a firm which appears to be very well qualified for handling a community center project ($2.8 million); work so far included a presentation of the building current condition and suggestions for questions for the community survey; most of the architect’s work will be done once it is clear what the community expects from a community center.
New windows, new roof, masonry repair ($6.5 million)
It is hard to understand how after 12 months, no planning progress was made.
Progress in 2025 promises to continue at the same slow pace. Monthly meetings have been held so far and contrary to 2024, the agendas are posted in the city meeting portal, but there are no minutes. See the Appendix for meeting details.
The upshot from these meetings was that a sign announcing the project was approved and installed on the site and the survey, floated on 9/26/24, was finalized and released to the public on 4/1/25, with the intent to keep the survey open until September.
Even the survey is flawed, as it does not encourage respondents to provide substantial free form input. The input box in the survey where that can be entered is just one line in size so that a survey respondent cannot easily see what they have written. That should be fixed immediately by making the input box much bigger.
The upshot is that no progress on design plans for the project will occur till the Fall.
One cannot help but notice that in the very first project press release, a key feature of the project management was that:
“The Advisory Committee will report to the Mayor, who will provide goals and assignments to the Committee.”
It seems that it would have been possible to make much faster progress with suitable direction from the Mayor.
It is remarkable that in the 15 months since the Community Center Advisory Committee was formed, there was no serious effort to visit other community centers, including projects carried out by BH+A, and develop a working set of documents laying out an overview and a detailed vision of what the Community Center would deliver for the Framingham community and how that would be implemented.
Coming into the election cycle in the Fall, the community will still have little idea of how this project is going to work out, including how much it will cost.
How can the community have any confidence in the management capability of its government when a project of great possible value to that community has already absorbed more that $14 million in Federal ARPA funds, has no tangible plans after 16 months of government controlled effort, and has no further prospect of progress until a further 6 months have passed?
All of the members of the Community Center Advisory Committee signed up with the expectation of good progress being made on a very promising project, but the lack of direction from the Mayor and the Chief Operating Officer who is Chair of the committee has been astounding.
The financial picture is also getting somewhat more disturbing as it now seems certain that the total project cost will be more than $30 million and could approach $40 million.
The reasoning behind that estimate is that further applications have been made for Federal funding: one through Congresswoman Katherine Clark’s office for $5 million to install two ADA compliant elevators, and another through the offices of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey for $12 million to install a new HVAC system and do plumbing and electrical upgrades. And again, these projects are also aimed at simply bringing the building into a sound state with no account taken of upgrades needed to support specific community center use by the public.
Together with the $14 million already committed, these ADA and other upgrades bring the total to $31 million, and still there has to be further money invested in actually outfitting the community center, based on the input which will come back from community center visits and the survey.
Further, the prospects of finding Federal funding for further work seem dim, given the chaos in Washington, so taxpayers could be on the hook for significantly more than $17 million, financed by a city bond.
There seems to be nothing worse than having a Mayor with a pot of Federal ARPA money, with no City Council or community control, launching a project with it, having no plans after more than a year after launch, having no estimate of the final cost, and no time frame for completion.
How can the community be happy with this?
It certainly seems like a project which ran aground quite a while ago, and only a change in city leadership will rescue the project from failure.
Appendix
In 2024, there were 4 meetings of the committee, for which there is currently no posted record in the meetings section of the city website, but the following information was obtained by a public records request: 2025-0152. Details can be found at:
The 2024 meetings were:
1/15/24 Agenda NO MINUTES
11/20/24 Agenda NO MINUTES
The 2025 meetings were:
1/15/25 Agenda NO MINUTES
2/19/25 Agenda NO MINUTES
3/19/25 Agenda NO MINUTES