TRURO — At a joint meeting of the select board, school committee, board of health, and Walsh Property Advisory Committee on June 4, consultants from three companies previewed the town’s progress toward designing freshwater and wastewater systems to serve a future housing project of up to 160 units at Truro’s 70-acre town-owned Walsh property.
The big-picture plans — select board chair Nancy Medoff called them “conceptual strategies” — call for processing wastewater from the Walsh property, Truro Central School, and 30 nearby homes at what consultant Scott Horsley called a “state-of-the-art” wastewater treatment facility.
“Not only can we minimize water quality impacts but we can actually improve water quality,” Horsley said. “We can have our cake and eat it, too: housing and improved water quality.”
Erica Lotz of Stantec then presented what she called a “high-level desktop analysis” of a modeled well of up to 45,000 gallons per day for the Walsh property.
A preliminary analysis of a well sited at 0 Quail Ridge Road, a 9.4-acre parcel just east of the Walsh property that Truro owns, showed it was feasible, Lotz said. “Now we want to do the real world analysis,” she said: an exploratory well that would “allow us to collect data in real time.”
Five days later, on June 9, the select board endorsed a $328,600 contract with Stantec for a 170-foot-deep test well that could ultimately provide the water needed for 400 bedrooms in 160 units at Walsh and 36 more bedrooms at the Truro Motor Inn site, along with some additional capacity for fire suppression and potential commercial uses at the Walsh property.
The contract would be paid for with free cash for public water supply planning that was approved at town meeting in 2025 and 2026, DPW Director Jarrod Cabral said.
“I just want to make it clear that we’re not trying to do a well and a water allocation from Provincetown,” Town Manager Kelly Clark said, referring to the town’s December 2024 request to Provincetown for 9,900 gallons per day that could support a “phase one” development at Walsh.
Although Provincetown’s water and sewer board unanimously approved that request last summer, Provincetown’s select board has not scheduled a hearing on it.
“We’re just trying to keep both options moving forward, but I didn’t want anyone to think that we’re trying to get more water than is needed,” Clark said.
Short Notice
The select board approved the new contract unanimously despite Kevin Kuechler’s request for a delay. Kuechler, a former member of the town’s water resources oversight committee, said that building a well near the middle of the Walsh property could produce more water and give “Truro’s future generations the option to replace that well with a much higher-yielding public supply well, if we ever need one.
“The Stantec analysis was only released to the public last week,” Kuechler said. “Despite being developed last year, the public has had no opportunity to respond to it.”
The June 4 meeting had allowed for questions from members of the four committees but not the public.
Clark said that some of Stantec’s work had been posted to the town website in February. That posting was of seven slides from Stantec dated Oct. 8, 2025, the date of an executive session of Truro’s select board concerning the “purchase, exchange, lease, or value of real property” at the Walsh parcel, Zero Quail Ridge Road, and 75 Higgins Hollow Road, all of which are owned by Truro and have been studied as potential well sites. The “real property” exception to state open meeting law requirements can be used only if an open meeting would hurt the town’s negotiating position, according to guidance from the state attorney general’s office.
Kuechler said he had seen the slides that were posted online and the June 4 presentation. “What Stantec presented last week was different, went above and beyond what was posted in February, and again, I want to be clear, none of that material has ever been presented in public” before June 4, he said.
Digging a Test Well
The next steps, Erica Lotz had said on June 4, would be “about nine months of testing for us to capture this real world data” from a test well, followed by a “one-year design period” that would establish “what kind of piping, pumps, and treatment might be needed at this Walsh well.”
The state Dept. of Environmental Protection would also need to approve permits for the new water supply, which would take more time, Lotz said.
Although the timeline to develop a water source at the Walsh property is not particularly quick, Clark told the Independent on June 8, other parts of the development process at Walsh will take a similar amount of time.
“We’re doing these things simultaneously,” Clark said: “trying to address the wastewater, the water, working on access, applying for grants. This is the biggest project that Truro has ever done. We are literally designing everything from the driveway and ground up.”
The Provincetown water system already serves the Truro Central School next door to the Walsh property, and Clark was asked if it would be faster to hook up to that system than build a new one.
Securing water and wastewater plans will “both take a lot of time, no matter what,” she said, adding that Provincetown’s select board had indicated last summer that it won’t approve Truro’s request for 9,900 gallons until it has seen wastewater plans for the Walsh property that protect the nearby North Union Field wells.
“Since Provincetown’s allocation for our Phase One request is contingent on developing a wastewater plan, does it save us that much time?” Clark asked. “We would still have to ask for approval for future phases to get up to 160 units, and I don’t know how long that would take or what other conditions might be placed. It feels like we don’t have the same level of control over what our community has asked to see at Walsh” as Truro would have with its own well, Clark said.
Siting Provincetown’s Well
The other big sticking point, Clark said, is “where does the well for Provincetown’s water system go — they want it to be on Walsh.”
Provincetown’s staff and a consultant hired by both towns, Apex, reported in January that there is only one 11.5-acre circle of undeveloped land in Truro that could potentially host a 600,000-gallon-per-day wellfield for the Provincetown water system that is already fully owned by one of the two towns: the center of the developable part of the Walsh property.
Provincetown’s staff and select board have repeatedly called for that 11.5-acre circle to be set aside for a future well and for development plans at Walsh to be reconfigured to fit onto a roughly 17-acre area on the west edge of the property. To put 160 housing units on that many acres would require a similar density of construction as the Cloverleaf project in Truro, which includes 43 units on four acres.
That is not what Truro’s voters endorsed at town meeting, and the town can’t “give Provincetown the location and amount of land they’re looking for,” Clark said.
“Our issue is, how do we do all the things that town meeting voters told us they want and still meet Provincetown’s need, and I think that means looking at well sites that are not Walsh for Provincetown’s water system,” said Clark. “I had a wonderful meeting with state Sen. Julian Cyr and National Seashore Supt. Jennifer Flynn in early February, and we talked about the possibility of a land swap, which I think could solve this issue” of siting Provincetown’s new well.
Future Needs
Truro Health and Conservation Agent Emily Beebe told the Independent on June 8 that for most of 2025 it appeared to her that Provincetown officials weren’t “listening to Truro’s process.”
“They had their own preferred path for their own water supply, because it’s cheaper to put one big fat well on Walsh,” she said. “Cheaper for them.”
No one from Provincetown ever floated the idea of paying Truro for an 11.5-acre well-protection zone on the Walsh property, Beebe said. “That’s part of a negotiation, but you’re going to have a negotiation with the property that’s being offered, not that’s being demanded.”
Provincetown officials are focused on securing a single 600,000-gallon-per-day well site, Beebe said, but Truro is “not in a hurry for a big well. We don’t need a big well.”
The town’s needs could be met by two or three smaller wells, she said — and Stantec’s 170-foot “test well” could ultimately become one of them.
Households in Truro can hook up to Provincetown’s system only if their “water quality is so substandard that it’s the only option,” which is rare, Beebe said. Truro’s aim is to keep nearly all its homeowners on their existing private wells, “protect our water supply together, and not make any more use of that system than we absolutely have to.”