The Cambridge City Council’s discussion about rebuilding Gold Star Mothers Park also reflected the city’s new spirit of austerity.
The park has been closed since Sept. 10, after chemical contamination was found in soil beneath a basketball court. Further sampling showed elevated levels of metals, industrial chemicals and hydrocarbons in other parts of the park. At its Monday meeting, the City Council granted $1 million from free cash to clear a stockpile of contaminated soil and start design work.
But staff estimated that it could cost a total of $10 million to reopen the park, East Cambridge’s largest open space. And spending that money will mean “other projects will get rescoped or delayed or not be proceeded with,” deputy city manager Kathy Watkins told councillors.
City manager Yi-An Huang underlined the budget-conscious approach at bonding the project over years, adding debt while asking each municipal department to spend 2.1 percent less in the coming fiscal cycle: “We’ll ultimately be spending the same amount on capital year over year. Going forward, we’re just going to have to push some other things out.”
Construction on a new Gold Star Mothers Park isn’t likely to start until 2027, and much or all of the park will stay closed for the duration while contaminated soil is cleared, officials said on Monday. The good news is that testing did not yield contamination of groundwater, said John Nardone, the city’s Public Works commissioner, suggesting “there is no evidence that it actually spread off site.”
Still, contamination requires the removal of the soil – by law, “we are going to have to dig no matter what,” Nardone said.
“We are essentially going to be tearing apart this entire park, digging it down and putting it all back together,” he said. Construction will likely begin in the summer of 2027 after contaminated soil has been trucked off to a disposal site and regulators have signed off, Nardone said.
He added that the federal government shutdown made the city “really nervous about that timeline” of 2027, because of the time needed for the evaluation. “We were fortunate last week to actually get a Zoom meeting with both the DEP and EPA, and they have indicated to us that they’ll try to work with us on moving quickly,” Nardone said.
City staff said they are exploring whether installing protective measures over parts of the park could allow them to be reopened to the public before construction is finished.
In the meantime, Nardone offered assurances for parents worried their children could have been hurt by the contaminants in the park or other parks – or anywhere in Cambridge that saw long-ago industries dump or discard without concern for the environment or public health.
“We were driving leaded vehicle cars up into the 1980s, so the idea that lead is in the soil in Cambridge, I would say, yeah, it’s probably pretty likely in most places, including your backyard,” Nardone said.
But it remains safely buried “if we’re not disturbing that protective layer,” Nardone said. That’s why testing has been done at open spaces in addition to Gold Star Mothers Park as part of improvement projects, with all-clears granted at Clement Morgan and Sennott parks last year; at the Binney Street Dog and Triangle parks as recently as 2022; and at Timothy J. Toomey Jr. Park in 2021.
Lead levels for children in Cambridge are consistently below the state average, and testing shows consistently lower-than-average rates of elevated childhood blood lead levels – the lowest in the state, according to a report to councillors.
For the contamination to affect a person, “someone would actually have to dig down into that contaminated soil, if it is in fact contaminated, and then they actually have to eat that soil three times a week for up to 30 weeks,” Nardone said. “The likelihood of you breaking your arm in most of our parks is more likely than getting exposed to anything.”
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