Sudbury, MA

In brief:

• The Sudbury Housing Trust spent most of its July 9 meeting deciding what to tell the Liberty Ledge/Sewataro Advisory Committee on July 16: that the town should weigh the whole 44-acre property for housing, not for how best to preserve the camp.
• The effort has a throughline in Select Board member Janie Dretler, who defended the failed May study article on the Town Meeting floor and now sits on the Housing Trust as it takes the property’s future back up. Trust chair Carmine Gentile, the district’s state representative, will carry the message to the committee; Trust member Jeff Levine made the case.
• It runs against the town’s most recent readings. The committee’s June 24 input session ranked camp operations first by a landslide, and in May the town rejected even a $20,000 study of the property, 200 to 75.

The Sudbury Housing Trust met July 9 for nearly two hours and spent most of it building a single position: what its representative should say when the Trust addresses the Liberty Ledge/Sewataro Advisory Committee on July 16. The committee, gathering input on the future of the 44-acre property the town bought in 2019, had invited the Trust to speak. “We probably need to have a consensus on what our representative shall say to them,” Trust chair Carmine Gentile said (0:42:38).

The consensus they reached is that the town should reopen the question of the property’s use altogether, housing included. That position runs against the grain of what the committee has heard. At its June 24 public input session, residents ranked “Camp Sewataro operations” first by a landslide – a weighted priority score of 156 against 23 for the second-place theme – while affordable and senior housing drew only one or two priority votes. And it comes weeks after Town Meeting, in May, defeated Article 19, a Select Board request for a $20,000 consultant to study the property, by 200 to 75 – the second time in four years the town had turned down a consultant study of Sewataro, after a similar article was defeated in 2022.

That May debate is the one the Trust now proposes to reopen. Presenting the Select Board’s minority report against the study, board member Charlie Russo framed it as “Groundhog Day”: “Here we go again,” he told the meeting, arguing that the string of prior votes showed “the controversy doesn’t exist” (3:29:30). The housing question the Trust is now raising was in the room even then. A resident urging defeat said the town had bought the property in the first place “so that houses don’t go there,” noting that an appraisal had pegged its “highest and best use” at 34 houses (3:46:27).

Who is driving it. More than any one meeting, the effort has a throughline in Select Board member Janie Dretler. In January she was one of two board members named to the original subcommittee that first took up reviewing the Camp Sewataro agreement. In May, on the Town Meeting floor, she defended Article 19 against the minority report, pointing to the $7,400 the town spent on a Broad Acres planning charrette and the $9,999 Wayland paid for a visioning study as evidence the $20,000 was reasonable (4:07:45). The article lost anyway, 200 to 75. Now Dretler sits on the Housing Trust, and on July 9 she backed its push to carry the property’s uses, housing included, back to the advisory committee, sharing photographs of the property’s houses and arguing the town should look at the land “holistically” rather than fit housing “in around existing older structures” (1:05:47), before dropping off early. She is not carrying it alone. Gentile, the district’s state representative, chairs the Trust and will be its voice at the advisory committee, and Trust member Jeff Levine, who had made effectively the same pitch to the committee a week earlier, made the case on July 9.

The case. The town, Levine argued, never studied the property’s best use when it bought it; the camp arrangement was “an afterthought,” a way to maintain the houses because no money was appropriated to do so. Preserving the camp, he said, is “the wrong emphasis.” “The town subsidizes the private camp because the private camp operator has no skin in the game,” he said. “We purchased the land, the land came with all the infrastructure of the existing camp, and all he did was walk in and take over” (1:10:49). By the town’s own accounting, presented to the advisory committee on June 4 (0:23:37), the property ran about $731,000 in debt service against roughly $331,000 in camp revenue in fiscal 2026, and has returned about $1.9 million to the town since 2020.

By Levine’s own math, which he acknowledged was an estimate, devoting 15 to 25 of the 44 acres to age-restricted housing could raise $6 million to $10 million for the town in land sales, recover part of a purchase price he said the town “overpaid for by probably double,” and still leave a large share of the site for recreation (1:03:22). Gentile framed the demographics: with a quarter of residents over 60 and few options to downsize and stay in Sudbury, part of the property “could be used for senior housing.” Trust member Jessica Cerullo Merrill went further: “a very vocal minority in the town has beat the drum” about Sewataro, she said, and has “almost closed people’s minds” to the opportunities (1:13:02). The larger samples on the record cut the other way: the 2019 purchase passed Town Meeting with more than two-thirds of the vote, and the committee’s June 24 session, the most recent town-wide reading, put the camp first.

The parcels. Working from a member’s site diagram and Dretler’s photographs, the Trust landed on two candidates: a vacant house at 213 Haynes Road, historically used to house the camp’s summer workers – Gentile said the camp operator “had suggested that property to me as something the trust could use for affordable housing” (0:47:23), a single vacant house, not the larger idea of subdividing acreage – and two wooded lots off Graystone Lane, separate from the camp’s use. The remaining houses are embedded inside the camp and cannot be developed without disrupting its operation.

The reality check. The Trust’s own staff adviser, from the town’s Regional Housing Services Office, set the boundaries. The advisory committee is “required to wrap up their report recommendations to the select board by Halloween,” he noted, and no housing study could be done in that window (1:21:32). The realistic ask, he said, is that the Trust recommend a “more comprehensive planning study.” Such a study would cost “five or so zeros” after the number (1:23:30) – a notable figure given that the town had just declined to spend $20,000 on one. Any zoning change would face an open Town Meeting where, “depending on who can get the most folks there,” a proposal “can be defeated based on a perception” (1:24:04). Study, zoning, and a request for proposals together, he said, make it “a multi-year process.”

Chris Thompson, an affordable-housing builder and former Whitman selectman the Trust recommended for membership the same morning, offered the same caution from the floor. Housing could be added at the Haynes Road house, near the horse paddock, and off Graystone Lane “without changing the use of the camp at all,” he said, but “you can’t go in there with 40 units, you’ll meet so much opposition.” He was at both the sale that brought the property to the town and the Town Meeting that approved it, and recalled that “half of the town meeting voted on this as anti-housing and the other half of the town voted on it because they wanted to preserve the camp” (1:33:53).

The Trust reached its position by consensus rather than a vote, which keeps it advisory. Gentile will carry the message on July 16.

The result is that the study Town Meeting declined to fund in May is arriving at the advisory committee’s July 16 session by another route. The committee will weigh draft questions for a town-wide survey, built on a process that has so far found the camp first, against a Housing Trust, Dretler among its members, urging it to reopen the property’s use and, in time, to recommend the kind of comprehensive study the voters just turned down.

Background on the property – the purchase, the money, and the full timeline – lives on the Monitor’s standing Sewataro File.