By Alice Waugh
Despite the uncertainty surrounding the funding and timeline for school repairs, the town will move ahead with investigating specific sites and costs for a community center as well as the cost or renovating Bemis Hall to help Council on Aging in the more immediate future.
Among the Capital Planning Committee items that were approved for funding at the March 29 Town Meeting was a sum of $75,000 to fund architectural and planning services to develop options for meeting the needs of the Council on Aging (COA) and the Parks and Recreation Department (PRD).
The CapComm considered 32 funding requests totaling $2 million and recommended 13 of them to Town Meeting (all of which were approved) for a total of $495,000.
The move follows the release in July 2012 of a Community Study Feasibility Committee report, which noted that the COA’s headquarters in Bemis Hall are inadequate for several reasons including parking and Bedford Road traffic, overall space and private areas for counseling.
The PRD is happy with its current location in the Hartwell pods on the school campus, so its situation is “less daunting in the short term but more uncertain in the long term,” Selectman Renel Fredriksen said. “The buildings are old and tired, and the space is neither dedicated nor guaranteed.
In addition to the COA and PRD, more than 30 groups in town could use a community center, including the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Lincoln Minute Men and the Garden Club, to name a few, Fredriksen said.
The committee examined several sites—the Hartwell pods and main building, Pierce House, the Stone Church, Farrington Memorial, The Groves (now The Commons), the Smith School and Wells Road—for renovation or construction of a community center, should the town decide to proceed with the idea, although its report did not include any recommendations or cost estimates. At the State of the Town meeting in November 2013, some residents suggested locating a community center in South Lincoln, an area that was not included in the 2012 report.
The Board of Selectmen will now form a steering committee and hope to hire a consultant by this summer. In the longer term, much will depend on the route the town takes for renovating the Lincoln School. When the school is renovated or expanded, project plans might include repurposing older space such as the Smith building or the Hartwell pod area as a community center.
Bemis Hall renovation
Also at Town Meeting, voters unanimously approved spending $30,000 to study how the basement of Bemis Hall might be renovated and/or expanded to help out the COA and other groups in the future, should the COA eventually relocate. “This will alleviate some of the pressure while a more adequate and appropriate solution is found” for the COA, Fredriksen said. For example, the Lincoln Public Library has already expressed interest in additional Bemis Hall space, she said, noting that “renovating the space will serve the town well in both the short and long term.”
To improve safety right away for the COA and others who use Bemis Hall, the town has plans in motion to move the crosswalk in front of Bemis Hall about 50 feet to the north of its current location and install a pedestrian-activated flashing light.
Based on the study, a funding request for Bemis construction/renovation could be presented at Town Meeting in 2015.
The Bemis Hall appropriation was one of 14 projects recommended for funding by the Community Preservation Committee, which is funded by a 3 percent property tax surcharge supplemented by state funding.