After Defeat At Town Meeting, Could The Land Bank Help Save Our Island Home?

The Select Board has instructed the town administration to pursue the possibility of selling the land the current Our Island Home facility rests on to the Land Bank in order to reduce the cost of a new building at Sherburne Commons after voters rejected the town’s most recent proposal for a new $125 million, 45-bed skilled nursing facility at Town Meeting.

“I would be interested in having a discussion with the Land Bank. See if there's a number,” Select Board member Brooke Mohr said.

Mohr and other Select Board members hope that if the Land Bank makes an offer, the savings could be enough to sway voters at the next annual Town Meeting in the Spring. But it’s not yet clear if an offer is forthcoming, or how significant the savings would be if it is.

“That is an option that the Land Bank is open to discussing, but we're not going to get $50 million for that property,” Town Manager Libby Gibson said. “It's not going to offset this in a large way.”

The decision from the Select Board came after assistant town manager Richard Sears presented a list of alternative options for Our Island Home to the town, looking for guidance before progressing with developing a concrete plan of action. None of the alternatives were received favorably by the Select Board, and the recommendation to negotiate a potential sale with the Land Bank wasn’t one of them.

The sale could meet with significant opposition. Previous suggestions to sell the land were highly controversial, though some Select Board members expressed hope that selling to the Land Bank instead of a potential developer could alleviate concerns. Finance Committee member Peter Schaeffer suggested that the main reason for the previous opposition was fear that the land would be developed into expensive luxury homes.

Sears came to the meeting with four options: prepare for closure, renovate the current facility, modify the existing plan, or embark on a total redesign. All four options, even closing Our Island Home entirely, would be costly for the town. If Our Island Home were closed, the town would have to pay to relocate all of the residents, assuming space could even be found for them, and would likely face lawsuits from affected families.

“Every resident and family must approve of the transfer site we are suggesting,” Sears said.

He expressed concerns with the cost of that option, also noting that it would fail to meet any of the guiding principles that underpinned the initial plan for the new facility.

“We kind of think of this as our last resort from a recommendation perspective,” he said.

Select Board member Malcolm MacNab suggested that the option should not be discarded immediately.

“There is no good solution to what we have here, and whatever we do is going to cost money,” MacNab said. “We may no longer have guiding principles. We have to deal with the fact that we have a major issue.”

The second option - renovation - would decrease the available number of beds and might not even be possible in the first place. Much of the current Our Island Home facility fails to meet state codes, and waivers would likely be needed to allow some of these non-compliant elements to remain. Those waivers aren’t guaranteed. Renovation could also pose staffing challenges, as some employees would have to be laid off during renovation, and it might not be possible to hire them back.

The third option modifies the existing plan for a new facility at Sherburne Commons, removing an entire wing, the photovoltaic solar arrays, and new staff housing, as well as decreasing the size of the basement. Stressing that the numbers were preliminary and negotiations with residents of Sherburne Commons would be necessary, Sears estimated that the modifications could save around $18.75 million.

But decreased revenue from the reduced number of beds, as well as higher energy costs and smaller available storage space, could offset a significant portion of those savings.

“My greatest concern here is that we [reduce] a percentage of a fixed cost, and we trade off a reduction in revenue that we'll have forever,” Mohr said. "The amount we'll have to subsidize the building on an operating basis will go up. And that's in perpetuity.”

“I look at saving $18 million and everything we give up, and it doesn't make sense to me,” Select Board Chair Dawn Hill Holdgate said.

The last option is to completely rework the plan.

“We can design just about anything,” Sears said. “[But] it would be very challenging to do that by the 2026 annual Town Meeting.”

There’s no guarantee that a redesign would reduce expenses. As the cost of materials skyrockets nationwide, large projects are rapidly getting more expensive.

“This is the type of cost we're going to start seeing,” Gibson said. “It is a dilemma, but the Island Home is not the only dilemma we're going to be faced with.”

Facing a list of undesirable options, the Select Board pivoted, with Holdgate first raising the possibility of selling the land.

If the Town isn’t able to reach a decision soon, one may be forced on them.

“Nobody wants to close the facility, but that is probably in our future if we're not going to pursue one of the other options,” Gibson said.

The initial $125 million plan passed 1,185-1006 at the ballot box, and also received a majority vote at Town Meeting, 450-283, but failed to pass because a two-thirds majority threshold was required. The project needed to win at both Town Meeting and the annual election to move forward. The possibility of bringing it back before Town Meeting at a special Town Meeting this fall was also discussed.