Whitefield Bicentennial plans, progress on the town center proposal, and resident Bob Rideout’s offer to pay property taxes topped the agenda of the board of selectmen’s meeting Monday.
The town also hired a new animal control officer, Bethany Rackliff (cell phone 557-1994).
Rideout, who is planning to build a greenhouse and enlarge his farm, said, “I’m here because I’m not being taxed on my house. I don’t want people saying, ‘Hey, you’re trying to get away with something.'”
Selectman Kurt Miller commented, “This is a first.”
Sometimes house construction or other new development does not come to the attention of selectmen in their job as assessors, especially if the owner does not file a notice to build.
Board chairman Steve McCormick said of Rideout’s voluntary offer, “We don’t have this happen very often.”
Sue McKeen, of the town’s Bicentennial Committee, asked the board to approve use of the school grounds for fireworks on Aug. 8 to celebrate Whitefield’s 200th anniversary. She also requested that the schedule of events be printed in the town report and that the display and sale of Bicentennial items be permitted at March town meeting.
McCormick said town officers want to “keep stuff out of the gym” where the open meeting and voting take place because distractions interfere with conducting the town’s business. They reached a compromise of having people enter the school that day through the middle door near the art room, and setting up a table near the top of the inside ramp that leads to the gym.
Erik Ekholm and David Dixon of the town property committee announced plans to hold a public information meeting the week of March 9, at the school. Architectural designer Lynn Talacko will furnish graphics of the proposed town office and arguments for building and financing the estimated $750,000 center in 2009 will be presented.
McCormick said he should have figures from Crooker on the cost of a loop road.
Ekholm admitted to “something else worrying me.” If the building is approved to be built next summer, how will it be furnished and made ready for occupancy the first part of the fiscal year it might be open? Certain increases in the operations budget might be necessary, he said, to provide for file cabinets, voting stations, and chairs.
Also questionable is the continuing use of the existing town office with second story 1843 townhouse. The historical society, whose headquarters are the townhouse portion, won’t have the money to operate it, Ekholm said. McCormick said the building is “pretty cheap to heat.”
Nonetheless, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements for making the town office and upstairs voting space handicapped accessible “will have to be addressed” and the new town center has been pitched as the means of doing so. Otherwise, the existing building will have to be modified at some expense, affecting its historic character.
