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Somerville seeks to remove public safety building from 90 Washington Street plan, prioritize recouping eminent-domain costs

Somerville City Council Land Use Committee & Somerville Redevelopment Authority · November 7, 2025
AI-Generated Content: All content on this page was generated by AI to highlight key points from the meeting. For complete details and context, we recommend watching the full video. so we can fix them.

Summary

Somerville planning staff told the joint meeting of the City Council Land Use Committee and the Somerville Redevelopment Authority (SRA) that they are proposing amendments to the 90 Washington Street Demonstration Project Plan to remove the public safety building component and to add an explicit objective to recoup funds the city and SRA paid following litigation over the 2019 eminent-domain taking.

Somerville planning staff told the joint meeting of the City Council Land Use Committee and the Somerville Redevelopment Authority (SRA) that they are proposing amendments to the 90 Washington Street Demonstration Project Plan to remove the public safety building component and to add an explicit objective to recoup funds the city and SRA paid following litigation over the 2019 eminent-domain taking.

Ben DeMerce, senior planner with the Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development and staff liaison to the SRA, said the city and the SRA together paid about $39 million for the property, including roughly $30 million above the initial 2019 acquisition after a court judgment. "This change in the project direction has already been stated…

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