Hi Neighbors, I urge you to vote yes for the new Fairbank Community Center, Ballot Question No. 4, so that we can live in the kind of town that serves and respects us all. After eight years of exhaustive study, the proposed state-of-the-art building is the optimal solution to house the departments that are now run out of old ramshackle buildings: Parks & Recreation, The Senior Center and the Sudbury Public School Administration.
It replaces a building that cannot be feasibly renovated and updates the Atkinson Pool systems and its decrepit locker rooms. It gives us a multi-purpose community, cultural and civic building with an ultramodern air filtration system and enough space for social distancing should the pandemic linger. It serves our current and future needs. In an admirable cooperative spirit, the design concept uses extensive shared space to take advantage of the differing program timing needs of seniors, parks, and recreation.
It also serves an important safety function, allowing the town to house 1% of its population in the event of an emergency. It’s a primary voting site. The proposed solution is the best, reasonable approach to meeting the needs of our town in a new building, which will cost less than $231 per year in taxes for many residents and will not impact taxes until 2024.
Our debt from building Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, the last construction project of this size, comes off the tax rolls in 2025. Historically low interest rates now allow us to build this critical community infrastructure project less expensively. The new building will not change the operating budget of the town even though the new facility will be 1/3 larger. Because of modern design and construction technologies, the new building will use less energy (40%) than the current building and that savings will offset the increase in custodial expenses. Plus, no need to hire additional staff for Park and Recreation or the Senior Center.
If you don’t think Sudbury needs a new community center, I encourage you to watch a virtual building tour and the town presentation on Let’s vote yes to show we value all town residents and employees who use this space.
The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?
