Saying the job could be done for less money, the Board of Selectmen Wednesday created a new, eight-person committee to supervise the planning of a sports field at the high school.
The vote was 2 – 1, with Selectman David McKane opposing.
The issue has been a hot topic in town for some time.
The move essentially stripped the authority of a committee formed under previous First Selectman Mary Ann Drayton-Rogers. That committee had been working for a year coming up with a design for the playing field.
McKane, a Democrat, was outvoted by Republican First Selectman George Temple and Republican Selectman Jeff Haney.
After the Selectmen meeting, McKane doubted whether town will come up with a cheaper plan. He questioned the wisdom of dismissing the work done by the previous committee, called the “New Oxford School Planning and Building Committee.”
“You’re taking all this work they have done and basically throwing that out,” McKane said. “I think it discourage volunteerism in the town when you have people work very hard and then being told ‘No thank you.’”
Background
In 2007, residents rejected spending about $3.5 million on a multi-purpose football field with an associated running track at the high school.
In July 2010, the Board of Selectmen, which included McKane at the time, established the New Oxford School Planning and Building Committee with completing a new field at the high school as part of its charge.
Last October, a landscape architect working with that committee presented plans for a new field totaling nearly $5 million.
Temple — then a candidate for First Selectman — expressed “sticker shock” over that price tag.
And at a selectmen’s meeting in February, Temple and Haney said the town could save on the project by having the town engineer design the field and then putting its different components out to bid separately.
Temple said during that meeting he would like the project done by fall. Haney said a review he had done of the work required — he is in the construction business — put the cost at about $3 million — about $2 million less than the committee’s estimate.
Reaction
New Oxford School Planning and Building Committee member Mike Gamauf said his committee “wasn’t comfortable” with Haney’s proposal. He said Temple and Haney had run a “parallel process” instead of working with its members, who had put together a responsible and comprehensive plan.
McKane doubts the savings envisioned by Temple and Haney will materialize.
“I just don’t believe it,” he said, saying he’s never received any specific information to substantiate where the savings would come from.
Still, he said he wants the project to get done.
“I hope they can bring this in as cheaply as they can,” he said, adding later that if he was shown how the savings would come about, “I’ll be the first one to jump on board and say ‘Go for it.’”
“I haven’t seen it,” he said.
The residents appointed to the committee Wednesday are Todd Romagna, Alana Flach, Nona Baker, Sergio Desiderato, Mark Gross, Paula Jensen, Kathleen LaFrance, and Dawnmarie Krassner. The committee will hold an organizational meeting April 16 at 7 p.m.
The committee is charged to “secure plans, construction estimate and contract documents for the construction of a combined football field/soccer field/rubberized asphalt running track complete with bleachers, access ways, lighting, press box and other appurtenant structures and to report back to the Board of Selectmen by a date certain.”
The committee may also be authorized to get bids for the project and oversee its construction.
Resignations
What, if anything, will happen to the New Oxford School Planning and Building Committee is unclear. In the spot on the town’s website reserved for a meeting Tuesday there is a hand-written note posted which reads “Regular meetings will be cancelled til further notice due to lack of quorum resulting from resignations from committee.”
The note is signed by Committee Chair Patricia Severson,