The Only Spending Proposal Voters Rejected? A New Town Building

Every single proposed town spending article was approved by voters this week with the exception of one: a $6 million appropriation to design a new central municipal facility at 2 Fairgrounds Road.

The rejection was noteworthy considering the other, larger spending proposals were approved by wide margins. The new municipal facility has been under consideration at that the town-owned property at 2 Fairgrounds Road since it was acquired in 2004.

Perhaps it was the price tag: spending $6 million simply to design, permit, and engineer a new building that is currently estimated to cost upwards of $50 million to construct.

Or maybe it was the larger question about the appropriateness of moving key municipal departments out of the downtown area?

“We didn’t do as much outreach as we did with the Our Island Home warrant article, and we had a lot of projects at Town Meeting and on the ballot,” Town Manager Libby Gibson said. “It was a lot of money, coupled with other very large projects that are going to cost a lot of money. But we’ll regroup and do a better job next year, or somehow break it down in a different fashion.”

Gibson said she did not believe the rejection was about voters’ desire to keep the town hall offices in the downtown area, and that most people understand that with sea level rise, the Town & County Building on Broad Street will at some point be in jeopardy of regular coastal flooding.

“I haven't really heard that,” Gibson said of concerns about moving the building out to Fairgrounds Road. “Most people seem to say that with climate change and coastal resilience, it’s a good idea to move it out of town.”

The original proposal was contained within Article 16 on the Town Meeting warrant, which sought to raise $6 million for the design, permitting and engineering of a new municipal facility. The building would allow for the consolidation of several town departments that are currently spread out over multiple locations into a new, energy efficient building that is centrally located. While it was called for debate at Town Meeting and received a majority vote - 535-309 in favor of the $6 million appropriation - it did not meet the two-thirds threshold required for passage.

At the polls, it fared far worse, as voters rejected it with 1,362 people voting against the spending measure, and 843 people in favor.

Select Board Chair Jason Bridges said the town simply wasn’t as focused on the project as it was on others - the Our Island Home facility as an example - and that the central municipal facility funding proposal would be back in the future. Bridges stressed that the current Town & County Building would continue to provide key services - namely the District and Superior Courts, along with the RMV office - even if the town functions eventually move to Fairgrounds Road.

There is still a town bylaw on the books - originally passed in 1997 - that prevents any town offices from moving out of the downtown area without a vote of Town Meeting to authorize the move. Bylaw 46-6 reads: “no offices presently within the downtown core district shall be relocated to any site outside the downtown core district without a vote of the Town Meeting.”

In some cases the town administration has ignored the bylaw and moved certain offices - most notably the Planning Department - out of the downtown area without a Town Meeting vote by calling it “temporary.” In other cases - such as the new police station - the move was indeed authorized by voters.

An effort by the Select Board in 2016 to repeal that bylaw was overwhelmingly defeated, and it remains on the books.