Last updated August 8, 2026
Approved 7 to 0
On July 23 the Board closed the public hearing and approved the Winn Phase II decision.
What the record shows
Unanimously approved
The public hearing closed and the Order of Conditions passed.
The red line below is a public footpath from Loring Avenue to the Forest River trailhead, drawn on the plans both City boards approved in July. On May 19 the developer called that connection “not feasible.” Residents disagreed, in writing, out loud, for nearly six months. It took seventeen public hearings, and it worked.
One promise is still unkept, and it does not belong to the developer. Salem awarded $66,148.66 to repair the Volunteers Bridge in June 2022. Four years later, the bridge is still closed.
Dear Salem ConCom Agent,
I am writing as a Salem resident
about DEP File #064-0825…
+ your name here
Let ’em know.
Already written. Just add you.
The university campus is being replaced by up to 485 private apartments across two phases. After the developers refiled with the trail commitments carried forward, the Conservation Commission closed the public hearing and unanimously approved the Order of Conditions, and the Planning Board approved its own decision 7 to 0. The approved plans carry the trail and public-access commitments residents fought for. Separately, $50,000 is held in escrow as security on the landscape plantings, so there is money to fall back on if the planting work is not put in.
Thank you to every neighbor who wrote, testified, and stayed engaged.
What it took
Public access was not a favor anyone asked for. It was required and scored in the state’s bid for this land, and the developer drew the trails to win it. This is the plan they drew.
Here is what it took to hold them to any of it.
10
Planning Board hearing dates
7
Conservation Commission hearing dates
6
Months, filing to approval
1
Withdrawal and refiling
2022 · The bid
Public access is required and scored in the state’s request for proposals. The winning team maps switchback trails and overlooks across the hillsides.
Feb 4 to Feb 24 · Filed
The application goes to the Planning Board on February 4. The Conservation Commission opens its public hearing on February 24. Between them the two boards will hold seventeen hearing dates on this project.
May 19 · The reversal
At the Conservation Commission, the development team calls the trails it drew “not feasible.”
May 21 · The pushback
Planning Board members refuse the premise. The chair calls a hillside path “challenging, but doable” and says pedestrian access sits squarely within the Board’s authority.
June 9 · The turn
The developer reverses. It commits to a five-foot public footpath from Loring Avenue to the trailhead, with access “in perpetuity,” calls it “likely the largest improvement,” and concedes the regulations it had blamed “originally appeared to be a barrier.” The terrain never changed. The pressure did.
June 16 · Named out loud
The Conservation Commission chair calls the pattern what it was: a “bait and switch.”
June 24 to 30 · Reset
The application is withdrawn and refiled under a new file number. This time the trail is on the plans, with a standalone Trailhead Improvements Package.
July 21 and 23 · Approved
The Conservation Commission issues a unanimous Order of Conditions. The Planning Board closes its hearing and approves 7 to 0. The trail is on the approved plans.
At that final Planning Board hearing on July 23, the minutes record public comment in a single word: “None.”
The room was quiet because the work had already been done, months earlier, by people writing letters and showing up on weeknights. That is what it costs to make a promise stick. Residents spent nearly six months restoring something that was in the winning bid from the start.
Which raises the obvious question about the one piece nobody has fixed. Salem awarded $66,148.66 to repair the Volunteers Bridge in June 2022. That was the City’s own money and the City’s own decision. Four years on, the bridge is still closed.
The bridge Salem already paid forWhat we are watching now
Thank you
To every resident who wrote a letter, spoke at a hearing, walked the site, signed the petition, or simply kept paying attention on a weeknight when it would have been easier not to: the trail connection is on the approved plans because of you. That is not a figure of speech. The developer called it “not feasible” on May 19 and committed to building it on June 9. Nothing changed in between except public pressure.
To the Conservation Commissioners who spoke up: you held the hearing open rather than vote on incomplete plans, you ordered a site walk, and you said plainly what the record showed. When the chair called the pattern a “bait and switch,” that took candor, and it mattered.
To the Planning Board members who pushed for more: you raised the missing trails on your own initiative, without being asked. One member pointed out that part of the trail network sat outside the wetlands entirely, so the constraints being cited did not explain dropping it. The vice chair called the upper-campus pedestrian experience isolated and undercooked and asked how the public was meant to walk up from Loring Avenue. The chair said a hillside path was “challenging, but doable” and that pedestrian access was squarely within the Board’s authority. Those questions are why the answers changed.
And a plainer note about City Hall
Every improvement described on this page came from the same two places: residents, and the volunteer board members who listened to them. It is worth saying plainly that it did not come from the City’s leadership or from the state agency selling the land.
Residents wrote to the Mayor’s office throughout this process asking for the promised trails, the overlooks, and the bridge. We are aware of no public response to those letters proposing a single improvement to the plan. The Mayor’s one public intervention in the permitting record was a letter submitted on the day of the June 16 hearing, and as set out in its own words further down this page, each of its points moved a commitment somewhere it would be harder to enforce.
There is also no record that the City ever asked this developer to contribute toward repairing the Volunteers Bridge its residents will cross. Salem had leverage during a public land sale and a zoning approval, and chose not to use it. That is the City’s decision to own, and it is why the remaining ask on this site is pointed at City Hall.
The moral of the story
Public land in Massachusetts is sold through a state agency called DCAMM, the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. DCAMM writes the request for proposals, decides what the public should get in return for the land, scores the bids, and picks the winner. For the Salem State South Campus, DCAMM made public access a required and scored part of the bid. The team that won drew trails and overlooks across the hillsides to satisfy it.
Once the winner is chosen, DCAMM largely steps back. The plans then move to local boards, which review them against wetlands and zoning rules, not against the promises in the bid. That gap, between what was promised to win public land and what any local board has the power to enforce, is where public benefits quietly disappear.
Residents wrote and called DCAMM for months about the trails vanishing from those plans. As far as we are aware, the agency made one public statement in the entire process. It came during public comment at the June 16 hearing, from a DCAMM representative who said he helped write the solicitation and sat on the selection committee.
What DCAMM told the Commission, June 16, 2026
“I was involved with the RFP for the solicitation… And I was involved in the selection committee as well for reviewing the proposals that came in.”
“I have never had any previous working relationship with Avalon Bay. My first encounter was this process.”
“I think from the RFP and a selection criteria perspective, they have remained true to it… the big pieces have not fallen to the wayside.”
“I have truly enjoyed working with the team because they do what they say they’re going to do.”
What the record showed on that date
The agency that set the public-benefit terms, and was best placed to say whether they had been met, told the Commission the big pieces had not fallen away. Residents in that same room had spent months documenting that several of them had.
That is the moral of the story. The promises that win public land are made to an agency that does not stay to enforce them, and reviewed by local boards never given the authority to. The only thing that reliably closes that gap is residents who read the filings and keep showing up. It should not have to be, but on this project it was.
Quotations transcribed from the recording of the June 16, 2026 Salem Conservation Commission hearing, public comment period. Speaker identified himself on the record as being with DCAMM.
What comes next
Everything on this site came from public documents. Not one thing here was leaked, obtained by lawsuit, or dug out of anywhere it should not have been. It was all sitting in the open: a state agency’s request for proposals, a city document library, hundred-page engineering sets, and meeting recordings that nobody transcribes.
Public and findable are not the same thing. The reason a trail nearly vanished is not that anyone hid it. It is that noticing required reading several hundred pages of technical filings, comparing them against a bid submitted four years earlier, and being free on a Tuesday night. That is an unreasonable amount to ask of neighbors with jobs and kids, and almost everywhere, nobody does it. That is the actual design of the system, and it is why public benefits so often quietly evaporate between the promise and the shovel.
We are working on ways to change that. The aim is straightforward: to make it easy for any resident to see what a large development promised in order to win public land or public approvals, what changed since, and when, early enough to say something while it still matters. Not a newsletter after the fact. Visibility while the decisions are live.
So consider this a friendly notice to anyone planning the next one.
The next large development in this city will be read closely, from the day it is filed. What a developer promises to win public land will be a matter of public record from the start, side by side with what actually gets built.
There is nothing adversarial in that. Good projects have nothing to fear from an accurate public record, and the teams that do what they said they would do will look exactly as good as they are. This project got better because people were paying attention. The point is to make paying attention take less than six months next time.
The full case, in three parts
Page 1
What the developer put in writing to win this public land, conservation access, trail improvements, and work “in concert with the Conservation Commission.”
Read it
Page 2
How those written promises shrank, step by step, between the winning proposal and the plans on the table today.
Read it
Page 3
Salem awarded $66,148.66 toward fixing the Volunteers Bridge in 2022, but the grant relied on volunteer labor that could not be assembled. Today a DANGER sign hangs at its entrance instead.
Read it
New petition
Repair the Volunteers Bridge.
At 100 signatures we deliver it to City Hall.
First, to be clear
Salem needs homes, and this project delivers real ones. WinnDevelopment, the nation’s largest manager of affordable housing, is committing to roughly 60% affordability across the 55+ community in the historic Loring Villa and Convent buildings, and the broader project reserves roughly half its units for households at or below 80% of area median income. That is genuinely needed housing, and it deserves to get built.
This is not a fight against the housing. It is a request that the developer keep one promise they made to win this public land: build the trails they drew. The homes and the trails were always meant to come together, that was the deal.
Source: AvalonBay + WinnDevelopment proposal (affordability commitments).
One thing left
At 100 signatures the petition is delivered to the Mayor and the Community Preservation Committee, asking Salem to finish the Volunteers Bridge repair it funded in 2022. In 2022 the City could not find 100 volunteers. We can find 100 names.
Signatures so far
68 / 100
32 more to reach delivery.
Already signed? Send it to five neighbors. That is the whole difference between 68 and 100.
Procedural Note
The strength of any public hearing rests on procedural fairness. Massachusetts conflict-of-interest law, MGL Chapter 268A, §23(b)(3), requires municipal officials to file a written disclosure whenever a relationship with an applicant or their representatives could reasonably be perceived to affect their judgment. It is a routine safeguard that protects public trust in every city decision.
Residents raised this before the votes: that a board may be respectfully asked, as a matter of ordinary procedure, to confirm that all required disclosures are on file for the matters being heard. It is a fair question. It assumes good faith. The answer, either way, belongs in the public record, and it remains a fair question at any future hearing on this site.
Keep reading
The Promise
What the developer put in writing to win this public land.