BY JOSEPH B. NADEAU

WOONSOCKET — If the city’s $80 million middle school building project needed a pistol to mark a leap from the starting blocks, its report would have been heard off Hamlet Avenue on Monday.

Joel D. Mathews, city director of Planning and Development, viewed the city’s completion of efforts to take ownership of ACS Industries land at the site as just that kind of a start and one also signaling a long race course ahead before two new middle schools open there.
“We made the deal, it’s over, it’s recorded and we are moving forward,” Mathews said of the city’s completion of the key step allowed by last week’s City Council vote authorizing the acquisition.
The city already owns a portion of the 21-acre school site but needed ACS Industries’ remaining mill buildings and vacant land cleared by two past fires at the site to begin demolition and needed clean up work there.
Two of the three large textile mills still standing on the northern side of Hamlet Avenue are included in the ACS acquisition and will be demolished in the coming weeks as the first step in conversion the land between Hamlet Avenue and Florence Drive to school use.
The deal closed with ACS Industries and recorded at City Hall Monday, gives the city the seven-acre parcel and its buildings for the nominal cost of $1 while also releasing ACS from future liability for the industrial property.
The city will in turn carry out a clean-up of the site already included in school project planning and also collect a $2 million contribution from ACS toward its cost.
The city will also need to acquire a smaller 1.9-acre parcel owned by the former Capeway Dye Co., a textile plant destroyed under the first major fire at the location four years ago. A purchase and sales agreement with Capeway was completed by the city last week, Mathews said, and will be considered by the City Council at its next regular meeting. The vacant parcel of the land would be acquired for approximately $120,000 and also included a release from future liability for the site, Mathews said. The city already owns the site of the FDS Mill destroyed by a fire two years ago as well as another vacant mill on Villa Nova Street, the former Consolidated Print textile
operation, that will also be razed under the project.
 The Capeway property is within the area to be clean-up and has already been reviewed under the city’s studies of the site.
 The last parcel that will be needed for the project is the former Miller Electric building, a large mill on the hill on Hamlet climbing toward Morton Avenue. That property is owned by the Procaccianti Group, a Providence-based real estate management and development company, and is still in use by manufacturing tenants and as a storage property.
  The city is in talks with Procaccianti for an acquisition of the site so that it could also be razed and used as open space and parking for the schools.
 Mathews said the fact the site is not part of the construction areas of the new buildings gives the city some time to complete the negotiations and potential relocation of the existing tenants.
 However, the city will need to know by the end of February, Mathews said, if the talks will be successful or whether the city would then have to begin proceedings to take the remaining parcel by eminent domain authority allowed under state law for the construction of schools.
 “We do have time since no school buildings and no real re-mediation to speak of is planned at that site,” he said of the ongoing talks.
 With acquisition of the ACS properties Monday, Mathews said the responsibility for securing the site and managing its access will be handed to the Gilbane Building Co., the city’s construction manager for the schools. Gilbane could begin asbestos removal in the building as soon as this week, he noted, and commence demolition work 10 days to two weeks later.
 The city’s environmental engineer, Fuss and O’Neill will be working on the final plan for site clean-up work that would then go to the state Department of Environmental Management for approval.
 If all goes well, the site clean-up would start in the spring and run through the actual start of construction during the summer.
 All of that is just a fraction of the planning and tasks still ahead of the city under a project some have dubbed the largest to ever be proposed in the area.
It most certainly is the largest taken on by Mathews, a city planner for over 30 years, and members of his staff and the school building committee, and one he was not about underestimate in its complexity.
 “The race may have started but we have a long, long way to go before it’s over,” he said.