Date: Fri 13-Nov-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

edink-office-space-needs

Full Text:

ED INK: The Hundred Million Dollar Decade

When Kaestle Boos, the architectural firm, presented the committee studying

town office space needs in Newtown with cost estimates last week, everyone

gulped. The firm meticulously outlined 13 different scenarios for addressing

the cramped conditions in offices, the structurally unsound Newtown Hook &

Ladder Firehouse, and Town Hall South, where leaks and floods over the years

have failed to wash away the building's intrinsic ugliness and make-do design.

The price? Depending on the scenario, $16.5 million to nearly $20 million.

It seems Newtown has become a high stakes town. Having completed construction

of a $32.5 million sewer system, $29 million in renovations to Newtown High

School and Hawley School, and a $4 million upgrade of the Booth Library, the

town is contemplating a $22 million school for grades five and six and now up

to $20 million more in improvements to municipal facilities. If anyone had

told us in 1995 that Newtown would be spending more than $100 million on

capital projects in the next decade, we would not have believed them. It seems

$100 million should buy us something more than relief from growing pains -- it

should buy us Xanadu.

But the proposals for a new school and for more and better office space for

town employees are, for the most part, not pie in the sky. (Though one

suggestion we heard this week -- that the Legislative Council needs its own

reserved "council chambers" -- seemed a little extravagant.) The need to

relieve the increasingly crowded conditions in the middle school has been

adequately documented. The makeshift way town employees are dispersed around

town, some in temporary quarters in Canaan House at Fairfield Hills, has

always been seen as a stop-gap measure meant to buy some time. That time is

now running out.

Taking on this new list of projects will have to be done in a measured way.

Slapping another quick $40 million on to the debt already encumbering the town

will put Newtown into a pretty deep hole and will have the effect of

ratcheting up public resistance to the inevitable budget increases. We would

hate to see Newtown's relatively calm and rational budgeting process become an

annual battleground pitting one interest group against another. Once the best

options are selected, priorities will have to be established, even voted on by

the townspeople, so the town can take care of first things first, leaving some

of the less critical capital needs for later.