“They Are Holding Us Hostage" - Select Board Lambasts Sherburne Commons For Raising Mitigation Payment Demand

Select Board members, town staff, and community advocates lambasted the non-profit senior living facility Sherburne Commons at the Select Board’s meeting on Wednesday for demanding an additional $200,000 in mitigation payments before work can begin on the new Our Island Home skilled nursing facility slated for construction next door.

“They are holding us hostage,” Select Board member Bob DeCosta said.

In the end, the vote was 4-1 to approve the payments, with DeCosta voting no, as the rest of the Select Board felt that, despite their anger, there was no other path forward.

“It's so disappointing,” Select Board member Jill Vieth said. “I'm really disgusted with them.”

Sherburne Commons, for its part, didn’t send a representative to the meeting.

“We invited them to be here tonight to go over their reasoning, and they declined,” said Select Board chair Dawn Hill, who also serves on the Our Island Home work group. “They are holding us hostage a little bit on this, and I don’t think it’s in terribly good faith, but I think we don’t have a choice.”

While no one from senior living facility was in attendance at Wednesday's meeting, Sherburne Commons executive director Rachel Mandle provided a written statement about the situation in response to an inquiry from the Current on Thursday.

“The transaction between the Town of Nantucket/Our Island Home and The Residences at Sherburne Commons is complex, and the details were not fully represented at the Select Board meeting,” Mandle wrote. “The terms of the agreement between the town and [Sherburne Commons] are being finalized in the coming days, and at this time, we will refrain from commenting on statements made at last evening's Select Board meeting.”

Mandle did not clarify which details she believed were misrepresented.

“Our Board has a fiduciary responsibility to our senior living community, which includes 52 residences – all filled with future neighbors of Our Island Home,” Mandle wrote. “And we look forward to welcoming the residents of Our Island Home one day soon.”

The town owns the land Sherburne Commons is on. However, Sherburne Commons has a long-term lease of that land, including the portion where the new Our Island Home will be built. To place the Our Island Home facility on that plot of land, the town had to reach an agreement with Sherburne Commons to amend the existing lease and allow construction.

The town had already agreed to a compensation deal for Sherburne Commons totaling nearly $20 million. Then, Hill said, the non-profit came back and said it had added driveway aprons, sidewalks, and other miscellaneous improvements to the total footprint of the new Our Island Home facility for the purpose of calculating mitigation, which meant that the ground area of the facility suddenly exceeded what the town had already paid for.

“Shame on Sherburne Commons for doing this 11th-hour Hail Mary and putting this whole thing at risk,” said Sconset resident Amy Eldridge, who initially opposed the project.

Hill said Sherburne Commons initially asked for $600,000, but the town negotiated them down to $200,000.

“To quote Michelle Obama, when they go low, we go high,” Town of Nantucket real estate manager Tracy MacDonald said. “I think it's very, very disappointing.”

If the town didn’t agree to the payments, Hill said, Sherburne Commons planned to refuse to sign an updated memorandum of understanding with the town, blocking all construction work on the site.

“I cannot think of a better example of being caught between a rock and a hard place,” Select Board vice chair Brooke Mohr said. “While I’m hugely disappointed that this is where we’re at, I think the cost of delay of construction could exceed this number.”

Matt Fee took a different approach than his fellow board members.

“I don't think it's all doom and gloom,” he said. “I think we've got to vote this and move on and make it a positive relationship.”

The request from Sherburne Commons sparked broader worries about the Our Island Home project potentially going over its $137 million budget, as the town has now already been forced to dip into its contingency funds before a single shovel of dirt has been moved on site.

“I do not think, under any circumstances, that this project is going to come in on budget,” Vieth said.

Jon Lemieux, a representative of Vertex, the consulting firm working with the town on the project, offered some hope on that front, citing lower-than-expected buyout costs.

“We're [at] well over $10 million right now of, let’s call it, one big bucket of contingency, so we're in a really good place, but again, we haven’t put a shovel in the ground,” he said. “We’re in a better position than we could have hoped to be in at Town Meeting, which is great.”