West Tisbury Voters Gather Tuesday

By IAN FEIN

The fate of the West Tisbury town hall has been in limbo since town
voters rejected a cost overrun to the renovation project last November.
But a new direction may emerge next week when voters convene for the
annual town meeting to consider a series of articles that address the
town hall project in different ways.

Voters should be familiar with the topic. The town hall renovation,
in one form or another, has been discussed at six town meetings over the
last three years.

One town hall article appears on the warrant for a special town
meeting, which will begin five minutes before the annual town meeting on
Tuesday.

Town moderator F. Patrick Gregory will open the five-article special
town meeting warrant at 6:55 p.m. and the 41-article annual warrant at 7
p.m. Both meetings will be held in the West Tisbury School and will be
subject to a new quorum bylaw, adopted in January, which requires five
per cent of registered voters.

Along with the town hall articles, voters will also take up a
proposed $12.2 million fiscal year 2007 town budget, which represents a
2.7 per cent increase over the current year.

Budgetary discussions may include questions about legal bills, which
dominated special town meetings last fall and winter. The 2007 budget
marks the first time some town departments will identify their legal
expenses as separate line items, allowing voters to exercise more
oversight of the town's legal spending. Town assessors in a
special town meeting article are also seeking an additional $15,000 to
cover legal expenses for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends
June 30.

The town police department has a series of spending requests,
including $32,000 for a new four-wheel drive vehicle, and the fire
department is seeking $40,000 for a new Jaws of Life rescue tool. A
series of articles from the Tri-Town Ambulance committee asks whether it
should start charging for ambulance calls and create a designated fund
for the receipts.

Voters will also be asked to contribute the town's share to a
number of regional agencies and efforts, including the Massachusetts
Estuaries Program, the Dukes County Regional Housing Authority and the
Martha's Vineyard Cultural Council. And the town health agent is
seeking permission to enter into an intermunicipal agreement to provide
public health services.

Other articles ask voters to accept deeds on a number of small
parcels in lieu of tax title foreclosure, and to take by eminent domain
Old Stage Road, so the town will own the road to the transfer station.
The town is also seeking $50,000 to repair and upgrade the transfer
station.

The eminent domain article will require two-thirds approval, as will
a proposed zoning bylaw amendment that would prohibit signs from
cluttering the veteran's monument at the triangular intersection
of State and Edgartown-West Tisbury Roads.

The planning board will withdraw a second bylaw amendment that
appears on the warrant as a citizen petition. Voters rejected the
proposal, which would increase the maximum building size allowed in the
mixed-business district, at a special town meeting last fall. Planning
board chairman Murray Frank said this week that according to state law,
only the planning board can bring a defeated bylaw back to town meeting
within two years.

Along with the zoning bylaw, five other citizen petitions appear on
the annual town meeting warrant.

One would create the honorary office of Poet Laureate of West
Tisbury, to be appointed annually by selectmen. Another proposed town
bylaw attempts to limit the number of elected offices any one person can
hold, but town counsel Ronald H. Rappaport told selectmen this week he
has a problem with the legality of the bylaw as worded. Mr. Rappaport
said the bylaw, if adopted, could not cut short the terms in office
someone already holds, and that it is unclear whether the current
language would affect the outcome of the annual town election next week.

Two citizen petitions address the town hall project, though the
author of one told selectmen on Wednesday that he intends to withdraw
his proposal.

The concept in the article calls for selling the current town hall
building for a symbolic sum to a private nonprofit, like the
Martha's Vineyard Preservation Trust, which would then renovate
the building and lease it back to the town. But preservation trust
executive director Christopher Scott said this week that the
organization would only be interested in purchasing the building should
the town decided to move its town offices elsewhere, prompting the
article's author, Richard Knabel, to say he would withdraw it on
the town meeting floor.

The second citizen article would rescind the October 2004 special
town meeting vote that approved a $3.7 million price tag for the town
hall renovation. If it passes next week, the article would not affect
the $260,000 already spent from that sum. But it would wipe from the
books any funds remaining from the original appropriation and pose a
significant setback to those who want to scale back and redesign the
renovation.

One such attempt, and the reason for the special town meeting, is a
town hall building committee request to pay project architect Deborah
Durland $36,000 to prepare a scaled-back design for a professional
estimate. Ms. Durland this winter said that by removing the basement
meeting room from the original design and using a smaller addition, she
believed she could bring the project back within the $3.7 million
budget. The finance committee is unanimously opposed to the $36,000
request; Glenn Hearn is the lone selectman who supports it.

The capital improvements committee authored the remaining two
articles that address the town hall issue.

The first deals with immediate repairs to the town hall building,
specifically seeking to amend the scope of work from a $75,000
appropriation passed by voters at a special town meeting more than two
years ago. Town officials held off on doing the repairs because they
thought the overall renovation project was moving forward, but now that
they are ready to spend the money, the most pressing needs in the
building have changed. The town wants to make the scope of work less
restrictive, so it can include bathroom rehabilitation and not require
floor refinishing.

Aside from the scope-of-work amendment, four other spending requests
address maintenance and upkeep of town buildings, including the police
station, fire stations, Howes House, and community hall building on Old
Courthouse Road.

The second capital improvements committee article seeks to jump
start a townwide space needs and feasibility study. Aimed at moving away
from the town practice of looking at capital projects one building at a
time, the study would take a step back and examine what the town already
has and what it will need in the future.

The comprehensive planning idea arose after the annual town meeting
last year, when voters rejected the selectmen's plans to turn a
private home into a police station, but selectmen never pursued it.
Capital improvements committee member Katherine Logue said this is an
opportune time to conduct such a study because the town has three
capital projects on the near horizon - with the need for a new or
renovated town hall, a new police station, and an expanded library.

The article, as written, asks for $100,000 to begin the study. But
after hearing some concerns about the price over the last two months,
the capital improvements committee decided to scale back its original
request and take the study one step at a time. The committee plans to
amend the article on town meeting floor next week, reducing the spending
request to $5,000, according to Ms. Logue.

Instead of hiring a consultant right off the bat, the proposal would
now ask selectmen to appoint a seven-member volunteer committee to begin
the process and report back to a special town meeting in the fall.

The committee would poll town citizens for their opinions, study how
comparable towns address similar space issues, compile data from
previous studies on the Island, conduct an inventory of town-owned lots,
project the town's long-term debt schedule, identify alternate
sources of funding, prepare a report about the town's space needs,
and determine where the town hall needs can best be met. If the town
decides that it wants to hire a consultant at a later time, the
committee would also prepare a draft request for proposals.

"The good news is, we're taking it one step at a time
and making sure that the voters are with us along each step," Mrs.
Logue said this week. "The bad news is, it slows the whole process
down. But clearly, like it or not, that's what's
needed."