By this time next week, the Greenfield Town Council will have gotten a look at a new scaled-down senior center plan, but will they like what they see?
“The architect and project manager are in the process of costing out roughly a 20 to 24 percent reduction,” Greenfield Mayor Bill Martin said. “We’re going from the outside walls in so that everything else outside — including landscaping and paving — will be left to other means, so we can really make this as bare bones as possible.”
How the rest of that stuff gets paid for clearly seems to be less of an issue to His Honor, who says he plans to keep fighting for a building that he believes the town’s seniors have waited long enough.
“There is a need for this,” Martin said. “We have 17,500 people, and I know everyone wants to use the numbers, but I prefer to go to my heart on this.”
“It’s not bad, it does no harm, It does cost something but it’s in the operating budget, which, by law, can’t grow by more than 2 percent,” Martin added.
Martin says he believes missing from the last debate was a clear understanding how the town manages its debt structure. He says Greenfield is constantly retiring both short and long-term debt, that it then replaces with new debt for improvements to infrastructure and community-related projects, the senior center among them.
“There are reasons we do it this way,” Martin said. “If you don’t spend any money and you don’t incur any new debt, then you pay it off and you have no debt. Is that a benefit? You really have to ask yourself.”
Martin says there have been a number of examples over the years where such fiscal austerity has led to bigger financial problems later on.
“If you don’t invest any money, which we haven’t in water and sewer in the past 10 years, if we don’t replace those kinds of things, we will end up paying for them anyway,” Martin said, “So there is an advantage to having equal, controllable and maintained debt payments.”
I have to wonder if Martin might have had more success the first time around had he explained that dynamic a little more clearly. It might not have satisfied the taxpayers who would never have supported spending $5.25 million, but it might have given the councilors who supported the project a little more ammo to beat back the overspending argument that fueled said opposition.
Martin also doesn’t see the March rejection as the beginning of a long-term budget rivalry between the town’s executive and legislative branches of government.
“If this was a tug of war between different ends of the dollar, I might consider it a confrontation, but it’s not. ” Martin said. “There’s no badge of courage for cutting a budget or reducing services.
“This is all about working to benefit the whole community, and this will be a building the community will be able to use for many years to come,” he said.
We will find out Wednesday if the people who control the purse strings agree with that assessment.
Chris Collins, who worked in local radio in a number of capacities, has observed political life in Franklin County for years. He also is a former staff reporter for The Recorder and a Greenfield native.