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11/15/2018 11:00 PMAnother year has nearly come and gone and the former Academy School building still sits vacant in the center of town. While the massive brick structure has seen no use for over a decade, public interest in its future has only grown over the years and in the coming weeks, the town may finally get some clarity on what the majority of residents want to see happen to the building.
The Academy Building Guidance Committee (AGC), an ad-hoc committee established by the Board of Selectmen (BOS) earlier this year to help gauge public opinion on potential uses for the building, held two public information sessions on Nov. 14 to educate residents on current options and prepare them for a public poll that begins the week of Nov. 26.
The committee has been meeting weekly over the past several months to tease out feasible private development options and public/community uses for the building. The private options are, for the most part, a scaled down version of development options the public first saw, and quickly balked at, back in Feb. 2018. Of the four private development options, none use the land behind the structure, focusing on building-only proposals.
The three public or community options include turning the building into a community center, moving town offices back downtown into Academy, or leveling the building and keeping the open space for a park. All public options would come at a cost to the taxpayer. (See sidebar for more details on all seven options).
At the first public information session at the Senior Center, a crowd of nearly 100 residents packed into the cafeteria to hear the committee review its work to date, options on the table, and information about the poll.
“We are trying to find the preferences for the people of Madison for the use of this Academy Street School, or what I have called the incredible Hulk,” said AGC Chair Henry Griggs. “…We don’t know what the final recommendation will be…we are trying to present a fair menu of options for the town to decide on and potentially take a vote on down the road on.”
Questions, Comments, and Concerns
The presentation lasted 30 minutes and the committee then took questions from the audience for over an hour. The private development options did not generate many questions, but the public options did. Residents had questions about how the committee landed on those three options. Griggs said feasibility was the deciding factor.
“People have said ‘well, what do you mean by feasible?’” he said. “Well, I will give you an example. One citizen brought us a proposal to turn it back into a school and it was pointed out that any proposal to use it as a school would have to come from the Board of Education; so to do that we would have to hear from them first and that would require unwinding decisions that have been in place for a while, and our committee used its judgment and said that is not among the feasible options that we will consider.”
The property itself played a role in what public options were kept on the table. The parcel is 5.1 acres, in the historic district, and in the R-2 Residential Zone which allows for single family residential, municipal, educational, recreational, and religious uses. The building itself is 53,000 square feet with three floors, 16 classrooms, a gym, theater, kitchen, cafeteria, and music rooms.
The building is also on the National Register of Historic places, which means there is a risk of litigation if the building is demolished. The committee opted to keep the full demolition to build a park option on the table because of community interest, but said residents just have to be aware of that risk. For the other two community options, the committee looked at keeping the whole building because the more you save, the more historic tax credits the town would be eligible to collect.
The community center option and the moving town hall option drew some concerns from residents because of the unknowns. Those options come with rough cost estimates that could possibly increase as time goes on or be reduced if the town acquired grants or tax credits. Audience members said those unknowns make selecting a public option more difficult for some.
AGC member Kathryn Hunter said she understands that concern. She said the committee did its best to measure interest in those potential uses and get an as accurate as possible cost estimate.
“I agree there has been a chicken and egg problem all the way though this process, and it costs quite a bit of money to actually flesh out and get schematics and market analysis,” she said. “So for the developer proposals that were handed to us by someone with private money, that’s done and then one the community side working within the timeframe and resources that we had available to us, we know that we don’t have a schematics and a market study; however we did explore activity and meeting space needs and possible uses in a building of this size and we are going with the best we have.”
The presentation will be made available to the public on the Town of Madison website. Longtime resident Jack Davis, founder of the Grove School and infamous Academy comedian after his suggestion at the Feb. 2018 Academy meeting that the building be torn down and the land be used as a park, complete with a monument to Daniel Hand and a bathroom that had the audience roaring with laughter, said folks need to step back and digest all of this information. He said people need to think about the options and understand that the poll isn’t the final say.
“I listened tonight and I am thrilled and so overwhelmed by the good questions,” he said. “Maybe I’m not so smart because I haven’t been able to digest all of these things that have been thrown at me tonight even though my son is on the committee… lets consider this just one step in the process. Lets get this survey done and get some people involved and have another meeting or two or three or whatever it takes. It’s not going to change overnight.”
The Poll
The public poll, to be conducted by GreatBlue Research, begins Monday, Nov. 26 and consists of a phone poll and an online survey. GreatBlue has amassed 10,000 phone numbers for Madison residents – landlines and cell phones – and will call until it gets 400 responses for a statistically significant result.
Earlier in the year, members of the public made it clear that some who don’t get a phone call will feel left out so there is also an online option. Up to 2,000 residents can take the online survey, which is the same as the phone poll, and GreatBlue will consider the data from both options independently and collectively. If a resident gets a phone call, they are asked to not fill out the online survey.
Hunter said for both the phone component and online version, there will be a preamble explaining what the poll is about and give residents information on the options. She said it would help if residents are familiar with the issue when they take the poll, but they don’t have to be experts.
“For all seven options, it will be do you support or oppose, moderately or strongly, and once you have gotten through all seven it will be select one you would support at referendum to try to narrow this and put it on the public to really make a choice,” she said.
Phone polling will last the week of Nov. 26 and pollsters will call between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. during the week and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday. All calls will be identified as “GreatBlue” or “860-740-4000” or “-4005, -4006 or -4007”.
The online survey will be live for two weeks and residents can find the link on the town website starting Monday, Nov. 26. Once polling is complete, GreatBlue will deliver a report to the committee and the BOS in January. AGC will then make a recommendation to the BOS and then the BOS what question might appear before the public at referendum.
Griggs encouraged residents to participate in the survey because this poll is the next step toward finally doing something for Academy.
“This wont answer all of our questions for all of time but if it gives us a little direction, then it will be worth the effort,” he said.
To learn more about Academy, the poll, and review prior articles, photos, and a video, visit Zip06.com’s new page dedicated to Academy at www.zip06.com/academy.