The Westerly Land Trust’s renovation of the United Theatre and adjacent Montgomery Ward building in downtown Westerly will mark a new mission for the nonprofit conservation group: revitalization of the town’s downtown.
“We have [changed] our mission statement as a land trust to now include responsible redevelopment of the downtown area,” said trust Vice President Bill McKendree, a volunteer who also acts as a downtown liaison. “This is our effort to try to manage sprawl in a way that you have the concentration of development in areas where you can truly benefit by having it focused.”
The effort is well-aligned with what has been the trust’s mission up to now, he said last week.
The United, a former vaudeville theater and cinema, will be the first major project in the trust’s new role, Executive Director Kelly Presley said. The trust bought the theater in 2005 and the adjacent Montgomery Ward building in December 2008 with the intention of changing its mission, she added. Those buildings cost about $1 million combined. Design work is under way.
As far as the rest of downtown, the “footprint” is strong, McKendree said. There are parks, theaters and retail, but “because of sprawl, a lot had been drained out of the downtown.” So the trust has started to target buildings and downtown sections where protection or redevelopment would increase property use and could bring more residents and foot traffic back to the town center.
The move toward revitalizing downtown isn’t meant as criticism of developers, McKendree said. “We’re not anti-development. We’re very supportive of responsible development.”
In its role as a land-conservation nonprofit, the trust has preserved more than 1,000 acres in Westerly, which by acreage would make it the second largest such trust in Rhode Island, after the Aquidneck Island Land Trust, McKendree said.
With almost 500 members, the group annually spends somewhere between $300,000 and $1.8 million on land purchased, but “every year is wildly different, depending on what property we hope to secure,” Presley said.
The annual operating budget is about $100,000, with much of the group’s funding coming from development drives, state and federal agencies and grant funding, along with member dues. Averaged over the trust’s history, the annual acquisition spending would be about 400 percent of the operating budget, McKendree said.
“Acquisition opportunities [determine] how much grant money we’re going after to secure property in any given year,” Presley added. “It varies widely year to year.”
The trust has partnered with the Royce Family Fund to pay for its efforts toward downtown revival.
“We’ll work together to identify buildings that we’re trying to save, preserve and rehab to eventually migrate over to the hands of others to manage,” McKendree said. “What the land trust is not trying to be here is [a] landowner.”
Details of those “migrations” are still being worked out, so it’s unclear whether the land trust will give away the properties – including the United Theatre – or sell them, he added. With the latter building, the trust plans to allow local theater groups to rehearse in the space and to eventually either give or sell it to such a group.
The local Shakespeare in the Park is one of a “number” of groups that have expressed interest in the property.
“They have to rehearse in the park and they have to set up their sets every summer in the park, even though they only do [the play] for two or three weeks,” McKendree said. “So what we’ll be able to offer them, up here, is rehearsal space … so they don’t have to be outside the whole time.” •
