Newport Spring Park moves closer to reality
NEWPORT — The City Council took one of the final steps on Wednesday to establish an official city park immortalizing the historic freshwater spring around which the city was founded.
“It’s a long time coming and there’s been a lot of work leading up to what’s happening today,” Councilor Lynn Underwood Ceglie said at the Newport City Council meeting on Wednesday.
The City Council approved a memorandum of understanding between the city, Church Community Housing Corporation and Aquidneck Land Trust which will allow the city to accept the property Newport’s Historic Spring project sits on as a donation and be able to adopt it into the city’s park system.
The Newport Spring has been identified by local historians and archeological experts to be the freshwater spring settlers built Newport around when the city was founded in 1639. The site sits just east of Court House Street and north of Touro Street and used to house Coffey’s Citgo gas station until the property was purchased in 2015 by Church Community Housing Corporation and remediated in 2017 with hopes to turn the site into a historical site and public space. Ground broke on the park project in 2022.
As a part of the memorandum of understanding which will officially sign the park over to the city, CCHC intends to grant a conservation easement on the property to the Aquidneck Land Trust, burdening the property in perpetuity. This, according to the action item on the Newport City Council’s April 26 meeting docket, is because major donors who contributed to the project conditioned their gifts on the notion the property would have a conservation easement protecting the property from further development.
Dig deeper: Newport's historic spring in the spotlight
The city made modifications to the conservation easement typically utilized by the Aquidneck Land Trust to “allow for more flexibility for the city in terms of management of the park.” When Councilor David Carlin asked City Solicitor Christopher Behan about concerns the easement limits what the city can do on the property once it becomes a park, Behan said the nature of the park that’s being built on the property lessens those concerns.
“We’re not going to be building tennis courts and basketball courts and playing fields on it… And so we had certain concerns and (Aquidneck Land Trust was) able to meet those concerns,” Behan said.
While the easement does not restrict the city’s right to lease, sell or otherwise convey the property to another party, it specifies it must “be forever used and maintained as a public park.”
The easement prohibits construction of buildings, structures or other improvements other than those currently on the premises or in the management plan included with the easement. It also prohibits private, for-profit, commercial or industrial activity on the premises, ditching or draining, dumping, manipulating or altering the spring which might negatively impact the water purity and the operation of motor vehicles unless they’re needed for maintenance or used to protect the property during an emergency.
This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Newport Spring Park easement approved paving way for park status
