NEW SALEM – The town’s Planning Board hopes to vote on the New Salem Museum and Academy of Fine Art’s site plan application next week, after the institution’s attorney adds specific language pertaining to indoor events, fencing and event setup.

Marc Goldstein will write into the application a definition of an indoor event, a stipulation that a fence gap be closed, and that museum staff will be allotted extra hours to prepare for and clean up after an event. The plan is to present the Planning Board with the revisions at its March 5 meeting.

Husband and wife Vincent and Laura Barletta bought 37 South Main St. from Vincent’s mother roughly five years ago with hopes of displaying their art collection for the public’s enjoyment and hosting fee-based events, though some in town have been concerned about environmental impacts, noise and alcohol use, as well as effects on water and septic systems.

The Barlettas received site plan approval in 2019 and renovated the facility. The following year they applied for and received special permits the Planning Board decided were necessary. However, a trial court judge ruled the portions of the New Salem zoning bylaw relied on for the issuance of the special permits were invalid. That case is now in the Massachusetts Appeals Court in Boston.

Abutter Sandra Fisher insisted on the closing of a gap in the fence. Abutter Brian Casey and others have repeatedly expressed concerns about noise generated from events.

“An indoor event can morph into an outdoor event pretty easily,” Casey said on Wednesday. He mentioned that no one has an issue with an event quietly spilling outside “on a beautiful June day” but abutters are concerned about food and alcohol service and music outdoors. Vincent Barletta agreed to the indoor event definition after stepping out of the room in the Stowell Building and talking with Goldstein, who returned and expressed his dismay what he perceives as an unnecessarily drawn-out process and abutters who are difficult to please.

“If you’re sensing some frustration, it’s that I don’t play whack-a-mole when I do this,” Goldstein said. “I do this all the time. We engage with abutters all the time. We negotiate stuff so that we show up and then we’re done. So it’s frustrating.”

The application has written into it a mechanism to revisit the conditions in a year. Goldstein referred to this as “the ultimate circuit breaker.”

Vincent Barletta also voiced frustration over this process, which he said has lasted a half-decade.

“Five years ago [abutter] Steve Schoenberg shook my hand and accepted this deal in front of [Planning Board Clerk] Dave Kramer … [in] October of 2019,” he said, adding that all events have been held indoors.

The Barlettas started their art collection in 2005 when they visited New York City for an anniversary and purchased one of Michael Klein’s original oil paintings depicting his wife, Nelida. Klein, an award-winning realist, and Nelida now live upstairs as around-the-clock caretakers. Some of Klein’s work hangs on the museum’s walls.

Laura Barletta previously explained she and her husband collect contemporary realism artwork, which she said is a modern North American movement by artists who paint in the style of brilliant European painters.

The building was once a dormitory and home economics education facility for New Salem Academy, which Vincent Barletta’s grandmother attended as a student. After the school closed in 1969, Vincent Barletta’s father, who shared the same name as his son, bought the building for sentimental reasons and turned it into a single-family dwelling that was used infrequently.

Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or 413-930-4120.