This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.

Public Meetings for Academy School in the Works in Madison

With the future of the former Academy School still uncertain, town officials are working to set up a series of public workshops to solicit ideas for building uses possibly later this year, but more likely in early 2017.

First Selectman Tom Banisch said the town is working to bring in professional facilitators to help run the meetings and offer a fresh perspective.

“We would love to try and do something in early December, but we are still trying to get in touch with a couple people to have them help facilitate the meetings,” he said. “So it is likely going to be early January.”

The Academy School has been a hot button topic in town since the school was vacated more than a decade ago. Over the past three years, the town had been working with Shoreline Arts Alliance (SAA) to explore the idea of building a cultural arts center and the two parties had signed a letter of intent designed to facilitate further investigation to that end. After discussions with SAA broke down this July, however, the town must now come up with a new plan for the aging building.

Director of Planning & Economic Development Dave Anderson is working to organize the meetings, which he said will include a presentation on the history of the building and the studies the town has done to date.

“We haven’t selected a consultant to help facilitate the workshops yet, but are scheduling meetings with a few different consultants to solicit proposals and ultimately make a selection,” he said. “I anticipate we would hold two or three workshops, but it’s going to depend on who is selected and what they recommend.”

Banisch said the use of facilitators would be of minimal cost to the town and would hopefully bring some new ideas to the table.

“My intent from the beginning has always been to say, ‘Let’s open it up and see what it could possibly be,’” Banisch said. “We hear about condos all the time and that is fine, we know we can do condos there, but what [else] could this be to Madison? What could this be besides just condos?”

In addition, Banisch said he wants to see the whole property, including the building and the adjoining fields and parking space, brought into the conversation.

“If you look at just the building, it doesn’t have a lot of value, but if you look at the property of five acres, what could those five acres become?” he said. “That is what I want to have people in town understand. I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh you are going to take away the fields and then we won’t have any more fields’—we can always replace the fields. That is not the issue. The issue is this is the last piece of potentially developable commercial/multi-use property downtown, so what is the best thing we can do?”

Some opposition to commercial development at the school has centered on the original bequest of the property from Daniel Hand, which stated that the facility must be used as a school. Town Attorney Ira Bloom told the Board of Selectmen’s on Sept. 26 that the conditions listed in the deed had been satisfied by naming the current high school for Hand, therefore releasing the town of any possible restrictions, but Banisch said the town will continue to take the historic significance of the building into account moving forward.

“My own feeling is the historic part of that building is the front part and the rest of it is kind of an add-on, but I would hope that something interesting could be done with the whole thing,” he said.