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| View of Main Street, Middlebury, with the proposed new Town Offices (in white) |
A Model Town?
We live in the town of New
Haven. Technically. It’s where we vote and pay taxes. What feels more like “our” town is
Vergennes to the north by four miles, or Middlebury, nine miles south. (Waltham town is right next door,
but it’s an entity without schools or town center, so doesn’t really
count.) New Haven is about eight miles east. Distances, though, have less importance
than what’s available in each place.
(New Haven has a delightful tiny library, a general store and not much
else, but hosts terrific monthly lectures on nature and wildlife.) We sort of “belong” to each one
in different ways. Early March was
Town Meeting time, but our own in New Haven looked to be pretty boring. Middlebury had the only one that
promised drama. So that’s the one
I went to.
Some 250 residents filled just
about all the available seats in the gym section (more of that later) of the
Middlebury Town Offices on Town Meeting day. (We observers were cordoned off to the sides.) The air was electric with impatience and
anticipation as agenda items 1 through 5 plodded by, all less compelling than
the main event, Article 6. This
night was the culmination of several years of failed plans and months of
meetings, angry rhetoric, angry letters to the editor, points made and
rejected––all about the proposed actions in Article 6.
The focal point of Article 6 is a
building, one that, if you wandered down Main Street in Middlebury as a visitor,
you probably wouldn’t pay much attention to. It’s not an imposing structure, and looks vaguely
high school-like. Sitting on a sort
of triangular lot opposite houses on one side and more eye-catching places on another side (Samas Cafe, the Otter
Creek Bakery Café, a wine bar), it sprawls across almost all of the space
allotted. In other words, architecturally
forgettable. With its five (or six?
seven?) facades, it’s hard to tell where to enter. Once inside, you may
be hard put to find where to exit. This is the Middlebury Town Offices building. It has a full sized gym attached, an odd
combination if you stop to think about it. How many town office buildings have a gym? The look of the place is a bit of a let down in such an attractive town.
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| The present Town Offices (gym section at left) |
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| The building that Middlebury College will move. |
Some of
the arguments on the “yes” side are obvious: Quite a lot happening for the town’s outlay of $2 million. A nice site for a park. A more functional recreation
center. An end to years of
“kicking the can down the road” on what to do with a town building that was
originally built as a school in 1911, and lacks sprinklers, has water leaks,
asbestos, foundation cracks, no insulation, antiquated heating and cooling. What’s more, the building lost its
second floor to fire in 1954, a loss that has never been remedied. As someone at the town meeting put it, “I’ve
lived here for 40 years, and the town offices were decrepit then and they’re
decrepit now!”
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| The proposed new building in its setting. The present Town Offices are located beyond the model on the triangular point of land at right |
A New Building? Or Not!
An easy
choice, perhaps? Or a plan in need
of a few thoughtful suggestions? Not a chance! For months now I have been reading the steady stream of
angry letters in our local newspaper with a growing awareness of the size of
this issue. I think I’ve become
too used to Vermont niceness. This
issue is big.
At the
Town Meeting on March 3rd I heard many of those angry voices first hand. Given that the issue was a building, albeit
an important one, I was astonished by the temper of the crowd. I’m no stranger to events that that can
divide a town. It brought to mind Lexington,
Massachusetts, back in 1971 when there was plenty of angry rhetoric. The town issue then was the mass arrest
of over 400 local residents who had protested the war in Vietnam on Lexington’s
Battle Green.** The Lexington
Board of Selectmen, the local police, and residents lined up on one side or the
other, each holding strongly felt views of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of
the arrests, views that for nearly everyone precisely reflected how they felt
about the war itself. It was a
local enactment of what was happening on a national level. "All politics is local,” as former House
Speaker Tip O’Neill once famously said.
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| Town Meeting, in the gym, Chris Huston presenting Breadloaf''s plan |
What We Talk About When We Talk About Parking
When people debate a local issue it’s often a proxy, frequently
unacknowledged, for some bigger topic. To use Lexington as an example again, when we talked about,
say, building some housing for people with lower incomes, we were actually
talking, not about housing, and not just about city residents moving to the
suburbs, we were talking about race.
The emotions displayed were not about house construction.
Take parking.
It has been said and explained more than once (as it was again on March
3rd) that this project, Article 6, is parking neutral. In the plan some parking places may be
moved but only a single parking space will be lost. Yet the lack of sufficient parking, and lack of parking in
Middlebury center overall was brought up time and time again as if this project
had something to do with radically altering the amount of parking in Middlebury. If it is, in fact, an urgent concern, is there a clearer way to address it?
Take deviating from the town plan. Moving the town offices away from its present central
location (the southern end of downtown) was cited repeatedly as a flaunting of
the town plan that called for keeping it in a central location and opting for
repair. This would be the strict
constructionist point of view if we were discussing the Constitution. So where is the building going? It will move some three hundred feet.
This puts it closer, actually, to the shops and public library on Main
Street than it is now. It will be
accessible to the disabled.
Take process. Should
one count as part of the process the number of years that have passed during
which time the issue of what to do with or how to repair the present old
building has been discussed?
Do you include the time it was thought that the building could be
rebuilt on its present site, estimated to the tune of $10 million? (A number
that probably didn’t even include the cost of relocating town employees in the
interim.) What is an ideal process and ideal time span for discussion and
input? Ideally I suppose there
should be several public presentations and lots of meetings open to the public
over a period of time. How many is
enough? How long is enough? Are eleven open steering committee
meetings and six public presentations over a six-month period not enough? If opponents don’t attend one of those meetings, does
the meeting count? Has everyone,
especially those opposed, been included in the design process? Should everyone in town have been sent
pencil and paper?
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| New building design |
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| New lobby design |
Take magical thinking. With blithe
optimism it was suggested that the College would surely help pay for some
unspecified project at some unspecified time in the future, so this opportunity can be easily passed up.
Or maybe we don't need Middlebury College at all. We’re all creative
people, we'll do it ourselves! Better
yet, the College should buy the land where the town offices are now located if
they want it so badly and pay what it's really worth, say $12 million. The
College should pay for the whole thing anyway! On the other side of the magical thinking is paranoia: The
College is encroaching on the town with its crazed out-of-control love for new
big buildings, and will eventually eat us up!
What is fueling these arguments,
or the scurrilous letters, the accusations, the cries of “lies!” and "betrayal of trust!" and "lousy process!" and so on and on?
I can’t fit the complaints to the evidence. It’s as if the opposers want to hear only themselves, and
have their eyes squeezed closed and their fingers in their ears. From all the heat, you could imagine
the topic was faith, or religion, or abortion, for goodness’ sake. And no, it’s not taxes. Remarkably, no one has mentioned taxes.
The bottom line is I don’t know. It bothers me that I don’t know, because it suggests there’s
a social or political dynamic in this town that I am not getting. It goes deeper than a building. People are hating something. Or
giving a good imitation of hating.
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| Craig Bingham (left) and other opposition supporters |
The Vote is Taken!
The next day Article 6 passed, 915 to 798. The most rabid of
the anti’s, Selectman Craig Bingham, was defeated in his own reelection
bid as Selectman. This is certainly an
expression of opinion. But does
that mean it’s over? Not necessarily! I hear that, led by Bingham (who no
longer has an election at stake), petitions and whatnot may be underway to
overturn the vote. In order to achieve that goal some
manner of skullduggery would need to be uncovered, necessitating a search for same. Perhaps something will turn up. Should this happen, it will doubtless insure acrimony for some time to
come. Oddly, comments about community “healing” seem
to be coming from those very people who created the wound in the first
place.
It will be interesting to see
what happens. Stay tuned.
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*Full disclosure. Chris Huston, lead architect on this project for Breadloaf is my
son-in-law. His role has been to
present his company’s design and answer questions pertaining thereto. Caught in the crosshairs. People have praised his restraint
throughout and his fair-mindedness.
But it is taking an emotional toll
**Details of the Lexington event and materials can be found in the
archives of the Lexington Historical Society and http://www.lexingtonbattlegreen1971.com
