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10/02/2018 12:00 AMOver the past two months, the Ad-Hoc Academy Building Guidance Committee has met on a weekly basis to discuss everything from cost estimates to communications in regards to the potential future of the former Academy School. With a plan in place to formally trigger the public poll shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday, the committee is working to finalize options for the survey and the structure of the survey, and to build a narrative to help educate the public before the poll goes live.
Numerous residential, commercial, and municipal uses for the former Academy School have been kicked around over the last decade as the building sat vacant and deteriorating. In the past year, potential residential development of the building and surrounding land had sparked negative backlash from the community.
Keeping in mind that Academy is a hot-button issue for the community, the committee is looking at ways to present the possible private development and community uses to the public.
To date, the committee has four building-only proposals from private developers. Three of the proposals are adaptations of presentations the public saw in February and the fourth is a late proposal from the Horton Group, a local developer that handed in a proposal once it was made clear that building-only proposals were a priority. The Horton proposal includes 11,000 square feet of commercial space along with 21 market rate residential apartments, but might require the relocation of the basketball court and septic system.
On the community use side, the committee has considered possibly turning the building into a community center, relocating town offices, demolishing the building and putting in a park, and looking at various mixed use items like a marketplace or arts center that would require a third party to operate.
Colliers International, a project management firm with which the town frequently contracts, pulled together some rough estimates for various general options. The price range goes from $1.5 million to just demolish the building and leave open space to roughly $34 million for full demolition and a complete rebuild of a new structure. Last month, the Board of Selectmen (BOS) extended funds to the committee so it could dive a little deeper into some of those numbers.
“We are going to have to boil this down to a single sheet, but I think the main thing is going to be to understand the numbers well enough to defend them yourselves and say it with a straight face at a meeting,” said Committee Chair Henry Griggs.
The consensus regarding private development versus community use is that a private development has no direct cost to the town and a community use does. However, committee member Jerry Davis said the numbers need to be presented to the community in terms of individual taxes, not just the gross figure.
“This should be broken down in some way to [answer], ‘What does this really mean in terms of my taxes?’” he said. “So looking at that gross number is really kind of deceptive in the sense that someone might say ‘Oh wow, $10 million, I can’t consider that, but oh wait, if it is only this much per household, maybe I can.’”
Prep for Polling
The BOS signed a contract with Great Blue Research to conduct a telephone poll and assigned additional funds to be used if the committee wanted to include some sort of additional paper questionnaire. There will be a phone, online, and paper version of the poll and Griggs said the questions on each will be substantively the same.
The problem the committee has to solve is how to manage the paper questionnaire. When Great Blue was asked, the firm said it could provide 200 paper surveys for $5,000, or what Griggs called the “We don’t want to do this” price. Committee members are now considering possibly having paper copies available in the Town Clerk’s Office to save money.
The committee currently has a draft of the possible poll and committee member Kathryn Hunter said the committee needs to decide on what options will be included in the survey by early November. The committee has struggled over how many options to include on the survey and the level of detail that needs to be included with each.
Selectman Al Goldberg said it doesn’t need to be that complicated.
“To me, the key document that you are going to be presenting to the public is the options, and the options have to be more than a bunch of numbers,” he said. “The options have to include a painting of vision and it has to include pros and cons. That is the central document for educating the public…To me that is the focus of what needs to get to the public as soon as possible and as many times as possible.”
In terms of the options, the private development proposals are concrete, but the real challenge has been the community options: Can you put a full demolition option out there when there is a chance the town could be at risk for demolishing a historic building? Can you put a marketplace or arts center option on the table when you don’t know who the third party tenant would be? All of those questions are important, but Davis said those questions don’t need to be answered to put the option before the public.
“When we talk about a community center, there are certain tangible options like a community center or moving town offices there,” he said. “Then we have talked about community uses that involve third parties and we don’t have all of those facts…That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be included under that umbrella, but just that we will be forced to have hypotheticals. It’s OK to have hypotheticals, but we have to pose them as such.”
The Education Push
The committee decided at its Sept. 27 meeting that there will be a month’s worth of outreach for the education campaign leading up to public information sessions. Committee members agreed to look at all forms of communication such as the paper, the town website, town email lists, and social media.
In addition to sharing the to-be-finalized list of options and the associated pros and cons, the committee will also focus on pushing information regarding the history of the building, the various work done by prior committees, and the work done by this committee.
For now, the committee is looking to start the poll on Monday, Dec. 3 and hold two public information sessions on Monday, Nov. 26—one at the Senior Center in the afternoon and one at Polson Middle School later that evening.
Once the polls is conducted, Great Blue will compile the information and give the committee a report sometime early in 2019. That report then moves on to the selectmen, the only body that would make any formal decision.
“We are just running a poll,” said Griggs. “We are not deciding anything. And the poll will be one aid to the people who do decide. This isn’t going to decide everything.”