The Lincoln Squirrel – News, features and photos from Lincoln, Mass.

community center*

My Turn: Reflections on a community center for Lincoln

By Barbara Slayter

Over the years, there has been a lot of discussion about the pros and cons as well as the specific characteristics of a community center that we might eventually have in Lincoln. Three contributions to the Lincoln Squirrel’s “My Turn” in recent weeks have shaped my thinking about how to vote at Saturday’s Special Town Meeting. They are Ellen Shorb’s “How would you use a community center?,” Dilla Tingley’s “A community center for Lincoln” and David Levington’s “How about equity for seniors?”

Ellen’s delightful essay encouraged us to imagine possibilities. The question she posed was not “How would I use a community center in Lincoln right now?” but rather “How might I have used it when I first moved to Lincoln with four young children?” and “How might I use it in the near future?” Her lively responses led me to reflect on these same questions for myself. How might I have used a community center at different stages in my life? What opportunities could have existed in the past and what might be available in the future? It is intriguing to speculate!

Dilla’s essay led me to ponder another set of questions. We are not talking about a senior center. We are talking about a community center that will serve the whole community — seniors, school children, and everyone in between. LEAP will be ensconced in the community center as planned, but more than that, the building will be accessible to all ages, interest groups, and organizations in the community in the way that the facilities at Bemis Hall (much as I treasure them) simply can’t accommodate. If you have ever tried to schedule a discussion group at Bemis or a public meeting with your state representative, you know the pressure that exists on use of those spaces.

With an “edge” about seniors being left out, David asks us to look at the big picture. Given three options to consider, he (and almost everyone else) writes off the least expensive as being unacceptable, a structure totally inadequate for addressing the programmatic and administrative needs of the COA&HS and Parks and Recreation.

He then looks at the tax implications of the remaining two choices and determines that, from his perspective, the difference is not large. Why not, he asks, take the step to create a structure that will serve us well over a long period of time? “Why not?” I ask myself. This might be an opportunity not to be missed. Who knows when it will come again.

I would also add another thought. Isolation and loneliness are widely regarded as significant concerns in contemporary American life. Across the country approximately 30% of households have only one adult in residence. 

In Lincoln, a significant number of adults live alone. While this may be especially true for seniors, it is also the case for all age groups. I can well imagine the benefits of a gathering place where residents can get together informally, at will, and as need be for casual interactions over a cup of coffee or planned discussions, activities, or events.

How special to have a place to go without invitation, or pre-arrangements, or pre-programming. Just turn up! This is my community, my center, and I, along with everyone else in this community, am welcome. And if it is beautiful, spacious, and accommodating, so much the better.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

My Turn: Thoughts on a community center

By Craig Donaldson

On Saturday, a key vote will determine the future course of the proposal to build a town community center. As I have considered our best course over the last year, the answers to several key questions have gradually become clearer:

Does the town have sufficient resources now to support current and future program needs? 

The Council on Aging and Human Services (COA&HS), Parks and Recreation Department (PRD) and Lincoln Extended-Day Activities Program (LEAP) are three stakeholders among a virtual beehive of social, educational, and cultural activities sponsored by town government and local organizations. A mixture of core staff and large numbers of volunteers provides the leadership and energy to make these three programs available.

Though possibly skewed by recent experience with the pandemic and my perspective as a participant in COA activities and service on the Friends of the COA board, it appears that matching these programs to current resources and venues increasingly taxes the ingenuity and patience of all, despite exercising our Yankee virtue of “making do.” In upcoming years, any increase in number and scope of programs will be stymied without improved accommodations. Though any particular program’s value must be judged in the eye of the beholder, there are likely valuable programs which have failed or were never started for lack of suitable venue or facility.

Is it necessary to build a new building now to meet current and future needs?

Concern that stakeholder programming was being inadequately served by our existing facilities resulted in funding for further study this year. The Community Center Building Committee (CCBC) and consultant ICON Architecture have appraised currently available venues as part of their charge. Early indications suggest that remodeling and renovation of existing spaces to enhance parking, access, and necessary amenities would cost significantly more than building a new facility.

Meanwhile, the experience with resources such as Bemis Hall, Pierce House, Town Hall, and our schools and churches suggests that ongoing programming will entail continuation of familiar stresses, with additional strain should programming expand. Investing in new space would add a central venue, up to modern code with parking, internet interconnectivity and facility to host a wide array of activities for all ages, interests and needs. Concern that the existing venues will lie fallow after a new building is opened appears unfounded, given crowding in some town facilities and likely gradual growth of town services and programs.  

Would an alternative site to the Hartwell campus be preferable now?

The charge to CCBC and ICON from the Special Town Meeting in fall 2022 was to provide three alternative cost points for a community center at the Hartwell site on the school campus. Some proponents of the community center concept have reasonably suggested that the new facility be located in the commercial center at the train station, given a projected increase in population density there as the state mandate for additional housing takes shape.

As discussions have evolved, however, it is clear that the needs of all three stakeholder programs will be best served by space at Hartwell, interfacing LEAP with the school, PRD with outdoor and gym facilities and COA&HS with all. The path to an expanded commercial and housing center has yet to be clearly mapped and its realization appears remote, particularly considering community center stakeholder needs which many feel have been evident and growing for years.

How can we afford the cost of a community center now?

The cost of a new building is certainly an important concern, especially as we now face the fresh burden of debt for the new school. As many have urged, we must be clear about the difference between what we need and what we want. The CCBC and ICON have created plans for a center at three different cost points to allow careful choice of the best fit for our needs and means as a town and as taxpayers. Whichever option is chosen for further design, it should feature a core structure which would enable efficient adaptation and enhancement in future years should needs dictate and means allow. It is clear that costs will only be higher as time goes by — an important reality urging us to reach decisive action soon.

How can we assure the best choice for the town?

The CCBC has taken on the task of leading the process through these issues, working with ICON on behalf of the town to solicit input from townspeople as well as keeping us informed of the issues and options at hand. Discussion and voting at Saturday’s Town Meeting will result in a choice for the town to pursue in detail prior to a final vote on funding in March. Throughout, constructive participation with civility, compromise, and good faith has been prominently displayed on behalf of reaching the current crossroads for the town.

Exercise your civic enfranchisement by joining the festivities on Saturday!

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

My Turn: The tax impact of Option 1 for the community center

By Lynne Smith

On December 2, many of us will go to the Donaldson Auditorium in our new school to vote on the options for a community center. The newsletter sent by the Selects last week estimated the tax impact of three building options.

Here I will focus on Option 1, the 100% option that will cost $24.01 million. For households with a median tax bill of $17,488, this option will increase annual taxes by about $773.* The new school, which cost approximately $93 million, resulted in an annual tax increase of $2,100.**

These are big numbers, especially when you do the math: the bonded debt for the school over 30 years adds up to about $63,000 for each household.

When you do the math for Option 1 for the community center, the bonded debt over 30 years is about $23,190 for each household.

Everyone who attends the meeting can decide on the value of a new community center building for their household. I have not yet decided how I will vote but I am thinking seriously about the decisions our generation of Lincoln residents is making. Brand-new buildings will saddle us with large tax bills for years to come. And our irreplaceable historic buildings require our stewardship for their continued use.

As a recent New York Times article said about Town Meetings, “The most important part of these meetings is always the ensemble of townspeople who stand at the small podium to ask, sometimes beg, that our needs be met, wrongs be prevented or righted.” That’s a lot to ask of a municipal meeting — but let us have the courage to do so.

I look forward to meeting again in the auditorium and seeing my friends, neighbors, committee members and town staff as we gather to participate in democratic governance on December 2!

* If the entire cost were paid through bonding at an interest rate of 4–4.5%.

** See note on page 6 in the FinCom’s “Town Capital Capacity” presentation in September 2023.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

How will you vote on Saturday? Take a Lincoln Squirrel poll

How do you plan to vote on the three issues at the Special Town Meeting on Saturday, Dec. 2? Or if you don’t plan to attend, how would you have voted? If you aren’t a Lincoln Squirrel subscriber, see the item between the red stripes near the top of the right-hand sidebar on this page. The polls will close at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 29 and the results will be reported in a Squirrel post and on LincolnTalk shortly thereafter. There is also a link to the polls on the public right-hand sidebar of the Lincoln Squirrel website for those who aren’t Lincoln Squirrel subscribers — please do not take any of the polls twice. Thanks.

Community center poll

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HCA rezoning poll

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The Commons rezoning poll

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My Turn: A community center for Lincoln

By Dilla Tingley

I hope everyone was able to review the community center options recently published in the Lincoln Squirrel and the Special Town Meeting mailing that went to all households in Lincoln.

The Special Town Meeting on December 2 is an opportunity for us to greatly improve the inadequate facilities occupied by our very special and hard-working COA&HS and PRD [Council on Aging & Human Services, and the Parks and Recreation Department] and the excellent LEAP after school program. All three are extremely valuable resources in our special community. They deserve proper accommodation.

The 100% option provides a space that would comfortably house existing programs for COA&HS, PRD, LEAP and also accommodate activities of a number of other town organizations, with some room for modest growth. It would demolish all existing ancient pods and provide green, new construction with some architectural amenity that would be a lasting legacy for our special town.

The 75% option is a pared-down version with reduced space, just adequate for current programming and little opportunity for use by other organizations. It tears down pods B and C but just renovates pod A for the LEAP program.

The 50% option, which we will present as required by the Town Meeting in November 2022, does not even provide for current programming. It basically gives COA&HS and PRD the space equivalent to two of our current pods and leaves LEAP in an unrenovated pod C which will require further appropriation at a later, less convenient time.

Our wonderful town deserves and will benefit greatly from a handsome new and spacious facility for community gathering. Please come on December 2 and support a needed and meaningful new building for generations to come.

Dilla Tingley represents the COA&HS on the Community Center Building Committee.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

Three community center schemes finalized for December vote

From top: the 100% option, the 75% option, and the 50% option.

The Community Center Building Committee on November 15 eliminated one of the two 75% options that had been under consideration and will present the three final plans (100%, 75% and 50%) for a “preferred option” vote at the Special Town Meeting on December 2. 

Whichever option wins will be sent on for developing more detailed plans and cost estimates ahead of an Annual Town Meeting and ballot box vote in March to approve bonding to fund construction.

Until last month, there were two options priced at about $18.75 million (75% of the maximum price of the earlier $25 million estimate), one with two stories and the other with just one. The committee voted to discard the two-story 75% option and asked ICON architects to develop a second 75% option that would include renovation of the LEAP pod.

On November 14, architects presented the latest versions of the four options, and the following night, they removed what was being called the “75% B” option from consideration. That scheme was eliminated largely because it would have moved the play area that’s now behind the pods farther northeast into the hillside. The architects and committee members agreed that the “75% A” option was better because it allowed for more green space. 

The 100% and 50% design schemes are essentially unchanged from earlier meetings. The 50% option has no activity room, and the multipurpose and fitness rooms are smaller than in other options while the mechanical room is larger because there isn’t any attic space.

“When I look at the 50% plan I kind of cringe — the square footage for the community center is so shrunk. I don’t see how anybody can truly enjoy the space because everybody would be tripping over each other,” Lori Leo said at the November 14 presentation. Leo is the director of Magic Garden but is not on the CCBC.

On December 2, the option that wins a majority after a ranked-choice voting procedure (first by ballot then by standing vote) will advance. The vote to fund the project in March must win a two-thirds majority at Town Meeting and a simple majority at the ballot box a few days later.

My Turn: How would you use a community center?

By Ellen Meyer Shorb

A friend asked me the other day, “Do you really think you will use the community center?” Absolutely, I said. Another friend leaned in to the conversation and said, “If we don’t build a community center, I may not stay in Lincoln.” The first friend said, “Tell me, how do you think you would use the center?”

Well, I said, I imagine that… since I work from home a lot and particularly when I retire, I will have a routine where I work out in the mornings at the center, in a class or on my own. After my workout, I stop by the lobby for a cup of coffee. While there, I sign up to read to second graders on Tuesday after my workout. And in my afternoon watercolor class at the center, I find myself sitting next to the second grader that I read to!

I imagine that… every Fourth of July I attend a fundraiser at the center, enjoy a barbecue and wine, see my friends, and then mosey over to the fireworks with my blanket and friends I bumped into.

I imagine that… if we’d had a center 17 years ago when we moved in during August with four kids ages 7 to 15, our realtor would have mentioned that the center has welcome ambassadors, one at Parks and Rec and one at the Council on Aging. And that I would have found out about the pool, Valley Pond, membership to the deCordova, and made my first friend through an ambassador.

I’m curious — what do you imagine? Why are you interested in a community center? 

Shorb is submitting this piece as a personal note, although she is a member of the Finance Committee and the Community Center Building Committee. You can contact her at meyershorb@gmail.com.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

CCBC drops one community center option and asks for another

Editor’s note: this article was updated on October 17 to correct erroneous statements about the third option now being developed, and about the approval margin required for selection of a preferred option at the December 2 Special Town Meeting.

Based on resident feedback, architects will put aside the two-story 75% community center option and substitute another option in the 50%-to-75% price range ($12.5 million to $18.75 million). 

Residents saw presentations of four options at the State of the Town meeting on September 30 and ranked them in order of preference in person via a total of 524 paper and online survey responses. (Note: the drawings at the bottom of the September 28 article headlined “Community center options readied for SOTT” have been updated to show the labels that were inadvertently omitted earlier.)

Results of the SOTT and online surveys collected by the CCBC (click to enlarge).

The 100% option got the highest number of first-choice votes but also the highest number of “I would not vote for this option” entries, with the two cohorts almost canceling each other out. The two-story 75% option got the fewest first-place votes. None of the four in the poll reached the 67% that will be required for eventual funding approval in March; a vote on the preferred option at the Special Town Meeting on December 2  requires only a simple majority. The CBCC analysis, along with replies as to why the respondents voted the way they did, can be found here.

The Community Center Building Committee delved further into the data on October 1 as they tried to discern what sort of proposal could get over the finish line. If the two-story 75% option were taken off the table and the SOTT survey were reranked and recounted, the one-story 75% option would get 65.8%. The data also showed that this option might get a 73% “yes” share if the 100% option were also theoretically removed from consideration. 

The current plan is to present four options to residents on December 2:

  • The current 100% option, “tightened up” to trim some cost and reduce the size of the large community gathering space
  • The current 75% one-story option
  • A third option comprising a slimmed-down version of the 75% one-story option that would be smaller and less expensive but also includes renovation of the LEAP pod
  • The current 50% with some “modest adjustments”

The CCBC also considered discarding the 100% option but decided against it. “You’re doing the town a disservice if you don’t continue the work” to refine that option along with the others, committee member Rob Stringer said. “I think we deserve to have a look at the 100%… A lot of people said they would vote for it.”

Given that there will be at least three options to choose from, the CCBC discussed structuring the December 2 voting procedure similar to that used in June 2018 when residents selected the preferred option for the school project. At that Town Meeting, officials used voting machines to narrow five options down to three. A second vote then resulted in the winning option gaining 74% of the vote, comfortably over the required 67% supermajority.

Architects will present the next set of options on November 1 to the CCBC, which has another public forum scheduled for November 14.

My Turn: A scaled-back 75 % option might get my vote for the community center

By Lynne Smith

At a public forum on October 10, CCBC reported on the 155 surveys turned in at the September 30 State of the Town (SOTT) meeting. Jonathan Dwyer (the member representing the Select Board) analyzed the ranked first choice results and Sarah Chester described the comments according to various categories such as cost, size, and LEAP. 

The results of the surveys seemed to lead the committee members to conclude that:

  • A 100% option would not get the required two-thirds supermajority in a town vote
  • Survey respondents preferred a one-story building over a two-story for the 75% option
  • Some respondents preferred a 50% option because of its cost but others rejected it because it did not include LEAP

Discussion from committee members and the dozens of people attending on line explored these three findings. 

I asked that ICON and the committee explore the layout of the one-story 75% option to see if the square footage and cost could be reduced. An option costing about $15 million ($3 million of which would be the LEAP renovation) would get my vote if the layout could accommodate most functions with more activities scheduled off campus. Without these changes and new information, I fear the proposal at Special Town Meeting in December will fail.

Many of us have noted the desirability of locating additional activities off campus. I will not repeat these suggestions here, but I would appreciate seeing the committee comment specifically on how these areas were explored and why they were rejected.

The committee will hold a regular meeting on October 11 to decide on the guidance for ICON as a result of the SOTT survey. As of this writing, that meeting has not yet occurred. I look forward to seeing what design changes might happen as the town barrels toward a December 2 vote at the Special Town Meeting.

“My Turn” is a forum for readers to offer their letters to the editor or views on any subject of interest to other Lincolnites. Submissions must be signed with the writer’s name and street address and sent via email to lincolnsquirrelnews@gmail.com. Items will be edited for punctuation, spelling, style, etc., and will be published at the discretion of the editor. Submissions containing personal attacks, errors of fact, or other inappropriate material will not be published.

What’s your opinion about the community center?

This is the first in a periodic series of informal, nonscientific “Lincoln Thinking” polls of Lincoln residents on important issues. Note: you do not have to be a Lincoln Squirrel subscriber to participate; the poll will live in the right sidebar of the Squirrel website, which is available to all.

Our first poll is about the proposed community center, which has been the subject of much discussion on LincolnTalk and at various public meetings. Here’s the latest:

You can find all the articles and opinion pieces published by the Squirrel on this topic here.

Once you’re clear on the options that will be presented at the Special Town Meeting on December 2, take the poll, which is below and ALSO on the top right-hand side of this website where it says “Lincoln Thinking: A Poll” in red, under the search box. You can see results right away. Note: the poll will also ask if you were able to attend the State of the Town meeting. You can give general feedback on the meeting here, whether or not you attended. This iteration of the poll will stay open until Wednesday, Oct. 11 at 5 p.m., though we may run the poll again before December 2.

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