Keep The Town Hall Where It Is

To the Editor:

I’m beginning to think that building a new town hall at Fairfield Hills is an idea whose time has come and gone.

Various letters to The Bee point out the huge expense of building new. While the personal attacks on the first selectman in some of these letters call for polite apologies, the suggestions that Newtown can’t afford a new town hall are wise. Likewise, the dubious “if-we-build-it-they-will come” connections that consultants try to draw between a new town hall and commercial development at Fairfield call to mind jokes about the mental apparatus of consultants.

Meanwhile, our existing town hall is in danger of becoming our next Grand Union — only this abandoned hulk will sit smack on Main Street instead of lurking half hidden in a forlorn parking lot. None of the ideas I have read in The Bee come remotely close to making such an large building self-sustaining without our government’s offices paying the rent. It was built, after all, to be a town hall, and we are lucky to have this warm and welcoming building serving its purpose.

In fact, it was built to be more, which might now offer additional office space for a small investment. The theater is a marvel and should be fully utilized — a simple matter of flying the movie screen out of the way every hour that the space is needed for music, theater, dance, and lectures. (If Madison Square Garden can switch from ice hockey to circus elephants overnight, surely our theater can accommodate nearly simultaneous musical comedy, film noir, and ballet.) But other spaces like the venerable gymnasium might be better used for additional government offices; similarly, I for one would hate not to eat Rotary Pancakes in the Alexandria Room, but we should ask whether a catering hall in a town full of restaurants is the best use of the space.

As for the lack of storage space, why can’t storage be moved off site? In this day and age of electronic record keeping, and inexpensive paperwork repositories, that would free up even more room for offices.

We win three ways if we keep Edmond Town Hall as town hall — we save money, we maintain Newtown’s traditions, and we preserve a splendid, useful, centrally located building on Main Street where it belongs.

Justin Scott

Parmalee Hill Road, Newtown                                   January 2, 2007