The Up-Island Council on Aging is warning town officials that deteriorating infrastructure and a growing need for services could necessitate improvements or even a new location for the council’s headquarters.
Members of the council, who run programs for seniors in West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah, have said in recent months that the Howes House building along State Road in West Tisbury needs a new elevator and is constrained for space. At the same time, the three communities are seeing the number of seniors rising.
“In addition to much needed work to keep the existing building operating both safely and efficiently, the demands for service for our quickly growing older adult population require more space than the existing footprint of the facility,” Bethany Hammond, the director of the council on aging wrote in an email to the Gazette.
Ms. Hammond raised the building’s issues to the three select boards in July, saying that the existing elevator in the Howes House was near functional obsolescence, exacerbated by a lack of parts.
The elevator was installed to transport clients to and from the Howes House basement for group activities. It is now only used to move medical equipment to and from the second floor. The elevator periodically gets stuck between floors, according to Ms. Hammond’s letter to the towns, and is expected to cost more than $95,000 to replace.
A new elevator would also likely be larger than the existing one, requiring a new elevator shaft that could snowball into several improvements at the building.
“The objective of this letter is to communicate the facility’s current limitations, solicit input from Select Board members on their thoughts concerns and potential solutions and to help the UICOA create a near-term and/or longer-term road map,” Ms. Hammond wrote. “Formation of a building committee, with representatives from each town, is likely required to evaluate practical and economically feasible options.”
Paul Bailey, a Chilmark member of the Up-Island Council on Aging, broached the topic at the Chilmark select board’s Oct. 6 meeting. He hoped to raise awareness about the need for a new facility.
“We just wanted to convey to the select board that this is something that we need to keep on our radar, and eventually there’s going to be a formation of a planning group feasibility study,” he said.
The select board thanked Mr. Bailey for the update.
This is not the first time that the council on aging has considered upgrades to the Howes House. In 2022, town officials talked about revamping the building to bring it up to modern building codes and make it compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act – a high priority for a building serving the Island’s elderly population.
At the time, cost estimates were pegged around $10 million. Renovation talks lost steam as Chilmark and Aquinnah questioned if they could cover the costs and the West Tisbury historic district commission criticized preliminary designs.
After that, the council on aging undertook a comprehensive assessment with UMass Boston’s Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging. The assessment wrapped up last year and the subsequent report concluded that demand for services up-Island, including yoga classes, blood pressure checks, nursing clinics and social and recreational programs — to name a few — were high and expected to grow as the age demographics skew older in the next few years.
That assessment was used to create a three-years strategic plan. Ms. Hammond told the Gazette that the council is in the early stages of talking to the towns about the building needs, and she was more confident that everyone was on the same page.
“To revisit this goal of a renovated or new location I feel positive that we have done the work to truly educate ourselves and the community on the needs of this collaborative three-town department and aim to bring together Aquinnah, Chilmark and West Tisbury on this project to better serve our senior residents and their families,” she wrote.