SHELBURNE FALLS — Establishing a West County Senior Services District may come before Annual Town Meeting voters this spring, now that the Senior Center Expansion Committee has approved sending a final draft of the district agreement to the Ashfield, Buckland and Shelburne selectboards.
The document, presented to the committee Thursday by consultant Daniel Pallotta of P-Three Inc., outlines the goal “to establish a Senior Services District to meet the needs of the senior population in the member towns of Ashfield, Buckland and Shelburne.”
“We think we have a really, really good document,” Pallotta said of the agreement, saying no major changes were made since the committee’s last meeting in January.
While Ashfield, Buckland and Shelburne currently provide senior services and programming as a consortium, with the Senior Center operating out of the Masonic building on Main Street, Shelburne is the sole fiscal agent. Establishing a district is designed to give the three towns equal say, particularly as the Senior Center looks to expand.
“The Senior Center space that we have is limited,” said Senior Center Expansion Committee Chair Sylvia Smith, noting that population projections from the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Donahue Institute show growth in the number of seniors in the area.
Should the three towns operate under a West County Senior Services District, each selectboard will appoint two people to a six-member board of managers to oversee its operation. Managers will have a mix of two-year and three-year terms. The committee wanted members from the same town to have staggered terms, although there will be overlap at the six-year mark.
The proposed district agreement will now be sent to the selectboards of the three towns, which can in turn vote to put an article approving the agreement on their respective Annual Town Meeting warrants. If approved during Town Meetings, the agreement will be up for a vote in the state Legislature and need a signature from the governor before heading back to the selectboards for final approval.
“I’d like it sooner rather than later,” Smith told the Greenfield Recorder on Friday, adding she expects the document to be sent to the Legislature this summer.
“We’ve had a long road here, and this is one of the first of its kind that we know of in the state,” Pallotta said.
The three-town Senior Center Expansion Committee formed in 2017 to begin exploring possible expansion. More than 20 different sites for a new Senior Center were explored, Smith previously said, and surveys were given to Senior Center members in late 2019 to gauge their preferences. The results revealed that people overwhelmingly wanted to renovate and expand at the current center in the Masonic building.
Meanwhile, the committee has worked to iron out the details of a potential West County Senior Services District agreement that would allow the three towns to have equal say in decisions with respect to the Senior Center and its future expansion.
Early last year, the Ashfield Selectboard and Finance Committee wrote a joint letter withdrawing from the Senior Center expansion efforts, citing budget concerns.
“Our goal now will be to pause and reconsider how we can meet the needs of our residents in ways that strengthen our community and use our limited finances as effectively as possible,” the letter read. “We believe the best way to do this is to continue to pay attention to what folks in Ashfield tell us about their needs, which includes requests for more services and resources located in town.”
However, Smith explained Ashfield rejoined the project after a survey showed interest from residents.
The Buckland Selectboard will host a joint meeting with the Ashfield and Shelburne selectboards at Buckland Town Hall on Tuesday, March 8, at 7 p.m. to discuss the document’s final draft. The Senior Center Expansion Committee will meet again on March 10.