Four Dorchester civic associations, in conjunction with Accordia Partners, the company selected to re-develop the UMass-owned Bayside parcel on Columbia Point, will launch a series of “vision” meetings to gather community input for its plans this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Boston Teachers Union Hall on Mt. Vernon Street. The meeting is called "Citizens Connect to Bayside."

Accordia and the UMass Building Authority signed a lease agreement for the 20-acre waterfront property this past summer in a deal that could yield the Boston campus more than $200 million. Richard Galvin and Kirk Sykes, the principals at Accordia, have also attended several civic meetings in Dorchester over the past few weeks to invite neighbors to participate in the planning.

Accordia has retained Catherine O’Neill, a longtime civic and business consultant who lives in Savin Hill, to help them engage with the community.

“For us, the Bayside property is a once-in-a-lifetime culmination of career opportunities, and it’s a benefit to UMass Boston,” said Galvin at a Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Association meeting in September. He added: “We won’t be filing publicly until sometime in late January. The first step is engaging in the conversation and hearing your concerns, ideas for what will make the project work. You all live here and you know best.”

Said Sykes: “The name Accordia means “together,” and we see this as an opportunity to work together. We have a history of working with communities, which is important to us.”

According to City Councillor Frank Baker, who spoke at the September civic meeting, the “visioning” meetings are similar to the process that informed redevelopment at the South Bay Shopping Center.

“This is not a BPDA-sponsored event,” he said. “It’s just the community coming together to give these guys a sense of what we would like to see.”
Accordia Partners will lease the property, which UMass Boston acquired in 2010 for $18.7 million, for 99 years and make an up-front payment that will fall between $192.5 million to $235 million.

The developers say they will keep the 2011 Columbia Point Master Plan in mind as they proceed. That document offered a consensus guideline for growth on the peninsula.