A regional funding agreement to renovate the Howes House, headquarters of the Up-Island Council on Aging in West Tisbury, was the focus of a joint meeting Wednesday with representatives from the three up-Island towns.

The meeting included members of the Chilmark and West Tisbury select boards, as well as Aquinnah administrator Jeffrey Madison, attending on behalf of his town’s board.

At a special town meeting this April, West Tisbury voters approved $523,000 to hire a project manager and a designer for the project to renovate the building located in the heart of the town’s historic district. The Howes House building committee now hopes to hire an architect within the next two weeks.

“This is an old, old building,” said building committee chair and West Tisbury select board member Skip Manter.

Bethany Hammond, assistant director of the Up-Island Council on Aging, detailed how the structure needed updating for handicapped accessibility, privacy for their legal and medical clinics and to provide more space for a growing elderly population. The proposed upgrades would roughly double the building’s square footage and bring the building up to current code.

West Tisbury treasurer Katherine Logue then outlined the proposed budgeting arrangement, modeled on the tri-town ambulance building. While the design phase had been thus far fully funded by West Tisbury, they are proposing a three-way split on construction costs and a proportional split of operations funding. Rough estimates for construction, she said, put the costs at around $8 million.

“This project has been stunningly constrained by outside factors,” said West Tisbury administrator Jen Rand, explaining the high price tag.

Such factors include existing underground library infrastructure and a requirement from the town’s Historic District Commission to preserve the core structure.

Chilmark select board member Warren Doty expressed some concern over the regional utility of such a project.

“I’ve always thought of this building as the West Tisbury Council on Aging” he said, “It doesn’t serve each of the other two towns as much as it should.”

In response, Ms. Hammond gave usage statistics for 2021, which showed 580 individual users from West Tisbury, 300 from Chilmark and 50 from Aquinnah.

Mr. Madison also addressed the regional aspect of the project, saying Aquinnah might have a difficult time agreeing to such a large project after its participation in other regional programs had caused deferment of town capital projects.

“The notion of adding another cost to a regional effort is going to be a difficult sell,” he said. “I’m sorry to put that out there, but you can only wring so much out of that small town.”

While no formal agreement was made, all three towns agreed to continue talks and to appoint representatives to the Howes House Building Committee.

Chilmark finance advisory committee chair Susan B. Murphy was appointed her town’s representative, and Mr. Madison resolved to talk to Susan Collins, an Aquinnah resident and member of the Friends of the Up-Island Council on Aging.

In other business, the West Tisbury select board appointed David Bouck, watershed outreach manager at the Great Ponds Foundation, as the town keeper of the dam. The position, previously held by longtime select board member Kent Healy, comes with a $1 annual salary and a responsibility to monitor the dam at Mill Pond.