I would love to talk about how our esteemed Town Manager is leaving (hoo-rah!), but this morning I got a call from a friend, who talked to a friend, who talked to another friend to deliver some bad news. The subject of conversation was the giant truck stop they plan on building on Route 3, right off Exit 1. Apparently, this thing is in the advanced stages of planning. The 18 acres directly north of the commuter parking lot are going to be turned into a 24 hour truck stop.
There a lots of reasons not to let this happen. Can you say crime? Can you drugs? Can you say prostitution? Can you say giant trucks hauling ass through Hopkinton at all hours of the day and night? They plan on building it on top of our aquifer. Who pays to truck in bottled water when all of our wells are full of hydrocarbons? How will we sell our houses when we have no wells? How much lower would you like you property taxes to go? And finally, how historic do you think historic Hopkinton will look with acres of trucks on its backdoor?
In exchange for turning Hopkinton into industrial Warwick, we’ll get a measly $50K in taxes a year.
How do we stop this insanity? Show up to the Planning Board meeting at the Town Hall on Wednesday, June 3rd at 7pm and raise hell. Listen, you may like economic development, but there is no good reason for this atrocity.
This is a stupid, stupid idea. We need to fight it, we all do. There are a lot of things that go on in this Town that happen by either fiat or plain apathy. Don’t let this be one of them. A lot of Town meetings dont really matter. But this truckstop does matter. And this meeting is very important.
The Planning Board will need all the ammunition we can give them to shut this down. What we need is a mob. Apparently there are 3 other cases that night and no one is sure of the agenda, but we need to fill the halls. Get a baby sitter, get off work, do whatever it take to make this meeting.
