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Photo by Pru Sowers
Truro residents vote on one of the earlier articles at Town Meeting on Tuesday. |
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Photo by Pru Sowers
Martha Nagy, chairman of the Truro building committee, and Tim Dickey, vice-chairman, presented a slide show of the proposed community center’s lay-out.
Photo by Pru Sowers |
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Community center voted down again
By Pru Sowers
Banner Correspondent
TRURO — One year after voting down a proposed community center that came in higher than the original cost estimate, voters again rejected the plan at Tuesday’s Town Meeting.
The vote capped off one night of emotional speeches and one year of planning, wrangling and budgeting. The debate over the proposed center took up most of the evening Tuesday, pushing the annual Town Meeting into a second night.
After a long debate over whether the vote on the new community center budget should be by the normal show of hands or a paper ballot — with paper winning — the final tally was 187 to 144 to approve the cost override on the project. However, the article needed a two-thirds majority, which would have been 221 votes.
The vote effectively kills the project for now, even though the question will also be listed on the May 9 election ballot because of printing deadlines.
“I need to absorb it,” Board of Selectman chair Fred Gaechter said after the vote. “We need to go back and figure out how to build the building for the amount approved. I can’t imagine coming back for another increase.”
“It was an additional $20 a year [in increased taxes]. I can’t understand how that affected everybody. It’s absurd,” Selectman Chris Lucy said.
Voters approved a plan in 2004 to spend $3.96 million on a proposed community center but voted last year not to proceed with the project after new construction estimates increased the original cost by $825,000. A new design for the building put the price overrun this year at $860,000, but that figure was lowered to $795,000 on Tuesday as a result of new construction estimates.
Still, the lower overrun figure wasn’t enough to convince voters to move ahead with the project. The construction costs of the original community center would have added approximately $65 to the annual tax bill for a house assessed at $400,000 while the newer version would have added another $20 on top of that.
Robert Weinstein, a former member of both the Truro building committee and finance committee, referred to the Wellfleet Community Center, which was completed in 2003 at a cost of approximately $1.6 million. He pointed out that Wellfleet has a larger population than Truro but chose to build a smaller building.
“Look into your hearts and look at what you are saddling people with. Twelve thousand square feet is an awfully large elephant,” Weinstein told the crowd of approximately 500 people.
The deciding blow to the more expensive community center may have come when a close vote approved a motion to allow residents to vote on the override via paper ballot, instead of the more public show of hands.
(For the full text of this article, see this week’s Banner.)
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Bergman takes a bow
In the News
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Apr 27th, 2006