By Anne Steele, News Staff

Northeastern sold its 74.5-acre Whispering Hills Woods property located on Cambridge Road along the Woburn/Burlington town line to the City of Woburn for $6.7 million in March, Northeastern University’s Director of Communications Renata Nyul confirmed in an email to The News.

Colliers International Senior Vice President Robert Cronin represented both the university and the city of Woburn.

“Northeastern felt that the right thing to do was to sell the property to the city of Woburn so that the local community can benefit from this wonderful open space for many years to come,” Cronin said to online publication CityBiz Real Estate.

Whispering Hills Woods borders Mary Cummings Park conservation land, where Northeastern’s Burlington campus is located. Northeastern acquired the site in the 1980s, at which time it was considering turning it into a suburban campus, Nyul said. She said those plans changed over the years and the university used the land for biology research.

“We also had greenhouses there and we donated the flowers grown in those to the community in the Fenway area,” she said.

The university plans to use the sale proceeds to reinvest in the Boston campus.

The sale has also met favorably with locals after controversy arose over a proposal from developer Archstone Properties to purchase the land when Northeastern put it up for sale in 2000, said Cath Moore, a board member of Friends of Mary Cummings Park. Dispute over the number of residential units that could be built without affecting the infrastructure of the city, combined with efforts of Woburn residents and city officials to block the proposal, caused Archstone to back out of the deal after eight years of legal litigation.

In the spring of 2009, Northeastern released a real estate advertisement again attempting to sell the property, The News reported in its June 2 issue. The advertisement described the land as a “residential development opportunity” in a “strategic location.” By that time, the Massachusetts Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program had deemed Whispering Hills Priority Habitat after a local botanist discovered an endangered species of plant there, Moore said.

It was also at this time that Woburn Mayor Thomas McLaughlin began looking into the possibility of purchasing the land, she said.

According to Waldenfront.com, at an April 28, 2009 Woburn city council meeting, all nine members adopted a resolution for the city of Woburn to “work collectively to develop a comprehensive plan to allow the City to competitively bid for the so-called Northeastern property consisting of a 74.46 acre parcel of land … for the potential purchase of the land by the City of Woburn.”

Moore said the advertisement was taken down from the website after The News published the article about Northeastern’s attempt to sell to a developer. However, she called this a “hiatus” as the advertisement for proposals went back up in the summer. Again, after The News published another article, the advertisement came back down.

Moore then approached Northeastern’s Husky Energy Action Team (HEAT) for help blocking the sale to developers, and the group sent a petition to President Joseph Aoun. Moore said she wasn’t sure how much it actually helped but said, “All of a sudden there were serious discussions about selling it to Woburn.”

A bigger problem, according to Moore, was how Woburn would pay for the land. Town officials decided to implement a sales tax on food at restaurants, the revenue of which could stay in the city to fund the purchase of Whispering Hills.

Negotiations began with Cronin acting on behalf of the university and Woburn and an agreement was reached in March, Nyul said.

The sale comes after officials of the Burlington Planning Board approved an expansion of Northeastern’s Burlington campus, which will nearly double the size of the campus’s facilities, The News reported in June.

The proposed building, estimated to be between 60,000 and 70,000 square feet, will house a graduate-level research center slated to become the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security. Renovations will be funded by a $12 million grant from George J. Kostas, a 91-year-old alumnus, The News reported in September.