SOUTHWICK — Just when it appeared the project to remove several trees from the North Pond Conservation Area where visitors hang illegal rope swings would move forward, the Finance Committee shot down a request to fund it at its meeting Tuesday.
“The saga continues,” Finance Committee Chair Joseph Deedy said the day after he asked for a motion to transfer $6,000 from one of the town’s reserve accounts to fund the project and was met with silence.
With no motion from any of the committee members who attended the meeting — Paul Connolly, Karen DeMaio, David Methe, and Richard Zalowski — the motion failed.
When Deedy opened the discussion on the funding request, DeMaio asked: “Where is the tree removal project?”
The other members, laughing, indicated it was at the North Pond Conservation Area.
“OK, if we cut these trees down, are they just going to move it to another tree?” DeMaio asked, referring to North Pond visitors who continue to hang illegal rope swings on branches over the pond.
Deedy quickly jumped in.
“We’re the Finance Committee, we’re in charge of numbers. What do you think is going to happen?” Deedy said.
“What are these kids going to do? They’re going to move it to another tree,” DeMaio said, adding, “You got my answer,” referring to how she would vote on the request.
On Wednesday, after learning the Finance Committee hadn’t approved the funding, the town’s new Chief Administrative Officer Nicole Parker said she was working on a solution that would be included on the agenda for the Select Board’s meeting on Monday, July 1.
For nearly a year, town officials have been struggling with how to remove two trees along the shoreline of North Pond where visitors to the conservation area have hung two rope swings, and another tree that is used to jump into the shallow water.
Last week, the Conservation Commission ruled that removing the trees would not be a violation of the state Wetlands Protection Act, essentially greenlighting the project. It was acting on a request from Southwick Police acting on behalf of the Select Board.
However, during the meeting, Conservation Commission Coordinator Sabrina Pooler announced there was no money budgeted for the project.
Before the commission met last week, Pooler had gotten two quotes for the work. Both are under $6,000, and one of the quotes said that because of the extreme slope of the shoreline where the trees are located, only a small skid loader would be driven into the conservation area and parked on the ridge above it.
The plan proposed to leave the felled trees where they are, to provide a buffer that will allow native vegetation to naturally reestablish itself on the shore, which is vulnerable to erosion.
While the potential liability the town might face if someone were injured in a fall was one factor in the effort to remove the trees, another consideration was the heavy amount of foot traffic that the rope swings attract. Heavy use of the area along the shoreline, known as King’s Beach, has left it severely eroded.
“The foot traffic won’t let anything grow. It’s completely bare,” Pooler said during the Conservation Commission meeting last week.
When the town bought the 61-acre property in 2019 with the help of the state’s Division of Fisheries and Wildlife and the Franklin Land Trust, there were restrictions placed on the property. The primary restriction is that the land is to be used for “passive recreation,” which includes “hiking, cross-country skiing, hunting, fishing, wildlife observation, and similar non-motorized outdoor recreational activities.”
Town officials determined in 2023 that removing these trees is the most cost-effective way to ensure public safety on the publicly owned shoreline. The town has removed illegal rope swings from these trees several times, only to have individuals hang new ones soon after.
