Options vetted for bigger COA

Talk to longtime members of the Council on Aging, and you’ll get an earful about how cramped and ineffective their office and meeting space is.

“It’s a joke,” said Carolyn Harlow. “It’s been a joke since it started.”

The COA is now on the second floor of the Shattuck Street building, in several small rooms with a popular thrift shop across the hall.

But Harlow said there is not sufficient space for senior citizens to meet with support staff about managing their utility bills or seeking reimbursements on their taxes. There’s barely enough room for card tables so seniors can play mah-jongg or bridge.

On the bottom floor, the merged Park and Recreation and Community Education (PRCE) department occupies a suite of offices off the parking lot next to the elevator and the spacious multi-purpose room and diner that is used for COA meals.

For years, the COA has lobbied the selectmen for a separate senior center, but the board has said there is not enough money in the town budget to build a new facility. However, a new feasibility study by Maugel Architects, Inc. was unveiled to the selectmen last week offering six options for relocating the PRCE so the COA can move into the ground floor offices.

Two options rose to the top and one will be presented to the town at the Nov. 5 special Town Meeting, according to Selectman Ken Eldridge. One of them is estimated to cost $125,000 and would have the COA expand into the existing Conservation Commission space and half the PRCE space and build a shed either at Long Lake or the 300 King Street park space.

The other “preferred” option would reconfigure Town Hall and bring the COA to the ground floor in the PRCE and conservation space, and build a “modest new building for the PRCE at 300 King Street.”

That option is estimated to cost $425,000, with $75,000 in Town Hall reconfiguration and $350,000 for the new PRCE facility.

Park & Recreation Director Lisa Paradis is enthusiastic about the future.

“I am partial to the plan for a new building at 300 King,” said Paradis. “The option for the department to partial relocate to storage units, or "PODS", would not a favorable one for us. What I am most happy about, though, is that the feasibility study is done, and that this space issue that has been hanging over the heads of both the COA and Park and Rec/Comm. Ed. for many years is finally being settled,” she said.

“It’s been a long time coming, probably too long,” said Eldridge. “The seniors have needed more space for years, and they have been patient.”

He said the board would deliberate the two preferred options and bring one to the floor of Town Meeting.

COA activist Barbara McRae is “thrilled” with the plans, particularly the second option because the COA would be consolidated on one floor, accessible to the seniors, close to the diner and the multi-purpose room and the COA van.

Several options involve reconfiguration of Town Hall so that the COA moves to the ground floor and relocating the Conservation Commission and the PRCE storage offsite.

For example, Option 2A has the COA moving into the conservation space, and half of the first floor PRCE space.

Under the option, “PRCE is consolidated at Town Hall and given offsite storage space at the Long Lake site and adjacent to the Shattuck Street tennis courts,” the study said.

Another option gives the COA the space now occupied by the cable studio and office on the second floor and would relocate the studio offsite. But the cost for moving the studio is listed as “prohibitive and it would be difficult to find an appropriate space available for the cable studio.”

Relocating the PRCE to Long Lake with a new building was also deemed “not viable” due to the cost of construction and lack of parking, and a scheme to move the PRCE to a new building at the middle school, at an estimated cost of $525,000, was also not developed due to cost and “lack of proximity to town.”

McRae said she is beginning to think something might happen after so many years of disappointment.

“It could be possible,” she said. “Hopefully somehow we can work it out with the Park and Rec.”

Eldridge said factors the board would discuss include cost and disruption to the organizations that are affected. But he is enthusiastic that a plan is on paper.

“It’s exciting, and it’s about time,” said Eldridge. “The seniors need and deserve more space.”