AYER — Bonnet Realty, the new owner of the Fletcher Building or “Nutting Block” at 49 Main St., secured voter approval Monday night from Ayer Fall Town Meeting for a critical point of access to their building.
Town Meeting granted a permanent easement to Bonnet Realty, which will build, maintain and insure the sidewalk on Pleasant Street aside the building. Bonnet Realty needed the space to build a wheelchair-accessible ramp into the planned first floor retail space.
Bonnet Realty purchased the building in 2010. The plan is to divide the first floor into two separate retail stores. The upper three stories will each have two apartments each. All six apartments will be one-bedroom units. Four of the six apartments will have “affordable” rents fixed at $650 per month.
With the affordable housing pledge, Bonnet Realty is banking on housing tax credits. Bonnet Realty has also benefited by a $750,000 state grant from the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD), filed on the company’s behalf by the Ayer Economic Development Department.
Bonnet Realty also received $250,000 in Community Preservation Act funds from Annual Town Meeting voters in May for the historical ($100,000) and housing ($150,000) aspects of the project.
Bonnet Realty also attained a low-interest Ayer Industrial Development
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Financing Agency (IDFA) loan from the town’s Urban Development Action Grant fund over the summer for $200,000 in addition to private financing. Economic Development Director David Maher has called the DHCD, CPA and IDFA financing the “financial trinity” needed to get the $1.8 million project done.The historically-significant building will have an exterior face lift that will keep the bones of the building intact including the pushed out bay windows, which will ensure historic tax credits. There will be no elevators to access the upper floors, however.
Disability Access Chairman Tom Sylvester made a presentation to Town Meeting voters in favor of the project. Sylvester said the work will be an improvement to the sidewalk which will benefit “many walkers, not just for those in wheelchairs.” Sylvester said the present sidewalk is “in bad shape now.”
The sidewalk easement was an approach worked out with Ayer DPW Superintendent Dan Nason in conjunction with Bonnet Realty and in keeping with the requirements of wheelchair access as promulgated by the state’s Architectural Access Board.
The permanent easement encompasses a 94-square foot stretch of sidewalk aside the Fletcher Building on Pleasant Street. The sidewalk will be effectively divided in half. The half of the sidewalk closest to the building will be turned into a ramp which peaks at the side entrance to the building and gently slopes downward in both the northerly and southerly directions.
The other half of the sidewalk will remain a 4-foot wide ‘flat’ sidewalk. There would be tubular steel railing along the outer edge of the ramp to prevent users from falling off the ramp, which could double as a grab handle for those walking on the sidewalk.
All maintenance, shoveling and liability issues will flow to Bonnet Realty. On street parking along Pleasant Street aside the building will remain.
Bill Hamel, President and Chief Operating Officer of Senate Construction, made a presentation to the handful of people who gathered on the sidewalk last Thursday afternoon for a site walk in advance of Monday’s successful Town Meeting vote. Economic Development Director David Maher said the rehabilitation of the long- vacant Fletcher Building is a critical project in the downtown streetscape.
Work on the sidewalk may take as long as a year. Exterior work on the building – including roof work – should begin in late fall/early winter, according to Hamel.