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02/02/2021 01:16 PM

Facilities Study Results to Shape Decisions on Academy, Other Projects


First Selectman Peggy Lyons said the town is anticipating an initial presentation of a town-wide facilities study at the end of this month or early in March, with decisions about several important projects and initiatives (including the Academy School) likely to hinge on the findings.

Lyons said she anticipates the findings of the study, commissioned last October to provide a more comprehensive overview of all town properties and buildings, to drive decision-making on a wide range of issues, from Surf Club buildings and sea level rise to the future of the Academy School community center project, which has been shelved since the beginning of the pandemic.

“We’re going to see what this study says. I’m not going to just let Academy sit there for another year,” Lyons said.

Among other, broader issues to be addressed by the study are space-sharing efficiencies from the Senior Center to the school auditoriums and the potential need for a full-time standing building committee, according to Lyons. The “broader thinking” that Lyons said she wants to use runs from usage to long term plans, though she also emphasized the study was merely providing data and it would be up to town officials and residents to implement it.

“Reports are only good if you take action on them and use them, and have accountability,” Lyons said. “We just have a lot of things we need to tackle, and we have to have some mechanism to prioritize them.”

A lot of these issues came up during the discussions on Academy, as residents debated where and how to invest in space. Lyons said some of the data provided by the study will hopefully answer more definitively some of the questions residents had about the use of spaces like school gyms or the library.

The Board of Selectmen (BOS), members of the Academy Community Center Design (ACCD) Committee, and the general public will all help guide decisions on these projects, according to Lyons, though she also expressed support for a standing building or facilities committee that could provide a more permanent focus on town properties going forward.

The town has been talking about many of these projects for several years. Apart from the decade-long search for a use for Academy, Madison has also grappled with the Surf Club’s vulnerability to storms and sea level rise since at least 2016 when a coastal resilience plan identified significant threats to that area.

The town had also proposed around $1.1 million in the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) to renovate the Surf Club buildings, though some town officials cautioned that a long-term solution might require relocating those buildings, making expensive investments like that a waste.

Other less dramatic concepts coming out of the study include the sharing of space between school buildings and the town and the best place for municipal offices like the Youth & Family Center, which has struggled with its cramped offices for years as well.

As far as Academy, Lyons said she did not have a specific timeline for moving forward, and added that the pandemic might now have altered what is possible, feasible, or desirable as far as the original design.

Last winter, shortly before the virus swept through the town and the country, Lyons stated she was working with the ACCD Committee to potentially tweak the original plan with a focus on arts and culture programming and long-term rentals. Today, she said it was clear that approach was much less viable with the arts community “devastated” by the pandemic and likely unable to afford long-term financial commitments to a space.

“Then the question becomes, ‘Do we go back to the community center concept?’ And I think we’ll get some good data and feedback from the facilities study to say [if there are] space needs in the community for these types of things,” Lyons said. “And that would help validate the need for a community center, or perhaps say we can use some of our existing facilities to suit those needs.”

Lyons promised to involve the ACCD Committee as well as the public in conversations about changes to the plan, whatever that ends up looking like, and adapt to changes both in need and sentiment around the project.

“I think we really just have to reflect on all of that,” she said.

There is a potential to have the consultants do more work on any of these specific buildings or projects, Lyons said, because the study is “significantly” under budget at this point. The specifics of that focus will most likely come out of BOS conversations following the study presentation, according to Lyons.