About NMH Northfield

Northfield eyes NMH campus holdings

October 2, 2006
By Janet Bond, Recorder Staff

NORTHFIELD — From a building for a new senior center to the trails and open space around Rustic Ridge, the wish list for land that Northfield Mount Hermon owns in town is long. Tuesday night at 5, the selectmen will go through the responses of various town committees and make a priority list to pass on to NMH. The wish list comes at the request of Northfield Mount Hermon President (sic) Tom Sturtevant, who asked the town to prioritize what it would like from the private school’s holdings in Northfield.

The Northfield campus was closed two years ago as the school consolidated to its Mount Hermon campus in Gill. The school has been looking for a buyer for the campus, which consists of 30 buildings on about 300 acres of land. The town’s NMH Transition Committee, of which all three selectmen are members, has the responsibility to look out for town interests as NMH makes decisions about how it will divest itself of the entire 2,028 acres it owns in Northfield in addition to the campus.

When the committee tried to talk to the school in the first year of its consolidation, Carol Lebo, the director of the Northfield Campus Initiative, said the trustees wanted to settle decisions about the campus before they start thinking of other holdings. However, at the June meeting of the NMH Transition Committee, Sturtevant asked the committee to make a list and prioritize just what it wanted from the school. In response, Administrative Assistant Sue Draves sent a memo to town committees and others asking for their input.

Northfield campus update

The main campus continues to generate interest, said Lebo in a recent interview, but no offers have been made. “Over the last year and a half, there have been probably 50 individuals or groups on campus,” she said. While NMH won’t say what it is asking for the campus, Lebo has said the assessed valuation by the town is about $35 million and the replacement value of the campus is $150 million.

“We’ve met some new groups over the summer with new ideas,” said Lebo. She added that the “campus was filled every week this summer with summer camps and conferences of every kind.”

“We have seen both returning and new prospects who have an intention of making an offer but have not designated any time (deadline),” she said. “The questions that people ask are, ‘What do I want my enterprise to look like?’ ‘How will it fit on the Northfield campus?’ ‘Can I create a large enough enterprise to fit on the Northfield campus?’”

Lebo said she has met with groups and individuals whom she thought “would be a great fit for the campus.” But, she explained, “it is a very, very complicated and expensive proposition for these groups. They have constituents they have to work with, business plans they have to create.”
“We continue to investigate what mixed use would look like on the campus and we are talking with groups that might have that interest.

“Still, our primary hope is for a single user in the educational field,” she said. “In general, it takes about three to five years to move a property of this size; we’re on the early end of that.”

You can reach Janet Bond at: jbond@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 263.

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