Facilities Committee Final Report

For over a year, a committee of volunteers has been assessing the condition of the town’s facilities. In September they presented their final report to the Board of Selectmen. This 17-page report should be considered essential reading for anyone involved in the town’s management. The volunteers were: Gary Anderson (Chairman of the committee), Eric Danis, Charlotte Fyfe, Paul Dallaire, and Barbara Draper.

The committee’s most important overall finding is that no one is identifiably in charge of facility maintenance. Maintenance issues are addressed in an ad hoc manner, with town employees doing maintenance tasks that are not part of their jobs and with occasional contractors brought in to do specific larger tasks. The committee urged the town to put someone in charge of maintenance of all of the town’s facilities and to have staff available to address routine maintenance issues. 

Another important finding is that the town tends to defer maintenance or to address it with cheap, short-term solutions. Viewed from a longer-term horizon, this is creating problems that become increasingly costly to deal with. Charlotte Fyfe referred to this approach as “penny wise and pound foolish.”

In addition to the large number of minor and moderate maintenance issues identified in the report, the report also discusses several big-ticket facilities issues facing the town.

• The closed-off, unused portion of Town Hall is dangerous. To save this portion of the building for future use its interior needs to be gutted and replaced. 

• The Highway Department’s garage is inadequate. There’s room for a small addition to inexpensively address some issues, but only a new facility can address all the issues.

• The Recycling Center is at capacity and cannot be readily expanded. A new facility in a new location will be needed if the town continues to grow or if a sizable number of residents decide to switch from using trash services to using the Recycling Center. 

• Major remodeling of Town Hall is needed to provide additional space to the Recreation Department. 

• The current Police Station has several unresolvable design issues. To address these there should be a long-term plan to build a new facility adjacent to the Fire Station.

Images from the town’s Highway Department facility