Chelsea is buying land, taking easements and purchasing a bank branch for a flood barrier it currently has no money to build. The federal grant that was going to pay for construction, $50 million from FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, is gone. The city’s answer has been to spend the state money it still has, as fast as the deadlines require, on everything that has to happen before a shovel goes in the ground.
The reasoning is in City Manager Fidel Maltez’s own letters, and it is candid. “Although the loss last year of a $50 million BRIC grant has delayed the construction timeline, the project remains a top priority,” he wrote to the council in April. “We are continuing to advance it using secured state funding for design, engineering, and land acquisition. It is essential that we utilize these state funds now; delaying their use could jeopardize our eligibility and result in the forfeiture of significant grant dollars.”
What the barrier is
The Island End River Flood Barrier is a joint Chelsea and Everett project on the tidal river that separates them, near the produce market and the industrial waterfront. The city’s stated purpose in the taking documents is to “construct and maintain a flood barrier that will protect 5,000 residents, primarily in Chelsea, and significant critical infrastructure, from flooding in the event of a coastal storm.” The critical infrastructure is not decorative. The New England Produce Center and the Chelsea salt and fuel terminals sit in the same low ground.
The taking at the marina
In May the council began a taking at 305 Commandants Way, the Marina at Admirals Hill, owned by One Amco South LLC. The city acquired a permanent easement of 3,728 square feet and two long-term temporary construction easements totaling 14,088 square feet. The award was $287,643. The notice tells the owner it may petition Suffolk Superior Court for a different figure within three years.
Maltez described it as a friendly taking and said the owner supported the project. Eminent domain is used this way routinely when a clean title is needed on a deadline. The council took it in stages: a first reading on May 4, a public hearing and second reading, with June 8 held as an alternative date.
The bank that sold its building and stayed in it
The more unusual transaction is at 357 Beacham Street, where M&T Bank operates a branch. The flood barrier needs that site because, in the City Manager’s words, it “will host a large structure that will prevent water from flowing back up through a drainage pipe under the flood barrier to flood the low-lying Market Street area during a storm.”
The city bought the property outright for $1,650,000, the figure an independent appraiser set in February 2025. The money came from the state’s Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness program plus city matching funds already in the capital plan, and Maltez told the council no new appropriation was needed. The state grant money expired on June 30, 2026.
That deadline is the key to the rest of the deal. Because the barrier is years away, the city bought the building and leased it straight back to the bank. M&T pays, as rent, an amount equal to its annual real estate tax obligation, and remains responsible for maintaining the property. The city must give 18 months’ notice to end the lease. The council’s order authorizes a lease back to the seller “for a term of up to forty years.”
Read plainly: Chelsea spent $1.65 million of grant money to become the landlord of a working bank branch, on terms under which the bank’s rent equals the taxes it was already paying, in order to hold the land for a project whose construction funding does not presently exist. Every piece of that is defensible on its own. The city would have lost the grant otherwise, and the site is genuinely needed. It is still a striking arrangement. The council authorized it in March through Order 2629, which empowered the City Manager to negotiate and execute both the purchase and the lease back to the seller.
What is not known
The packets do not say when construction might start, what the new funding path is now that the BRIC money is gone, or what Everett’s share of the cost will be. They do not say whether the purchase closed before the June 30 grant deadline. The council has not held a public meeting this year devoted to the project’s finances as a whole, as opposed to the individual land transactions it has been asked to approve one at a time.
Those are the questions worth asking, because the pattern here is a real one in municipal finance. A city assembles the land for an unfunded project because the land money is available and expiring, and the construction money becomes someone else’s problem later. Chelsea now owns a bank branch on the Island End River. What it does not own is a funded flood barrier.