‘Back to the Drawing Board’: Planners to Step Back, Reevaluate DPW Garage

Medfield Superintendent of Public Works, Kenneth Feeney, said he was disappointed after the but not surprised by the result.

"After the overwhelming vote [of approval] at Town Meeting, it is certainly disappointing, but you got suck it up and you’ve got to move on," Feeney said. "I got 35 years of experience and I never take anything for granted so I was not at all surprised."

The $10 million debt exclusion bond needed to build the proposed DPW garage was rejected at Monday's election by 289 votes: 1,000 rejected the proposal, while 711 were in favor of it.

"You know, 711 votes is not chopped liver and I am proud of those people that stepped up to the plate and realized [the need for a facility]," Feeney said. "I hope the 711 people don’t go away because it is inevitable, it has to be built before it literally falls in. There’s no other department that is in such horrible living conditions as is the Public Works facility. So [the 711 voters in favor] realize something is going to happen."

The next step, according to Feeney, is for the town's permanent building and planning committee to meet, take a step back and evaluate why the proposal did not pass.

"Right now, the chairman of the building committee is out of town on business and when he comes back, the building committee will meet again," said Feeney. "They have to sit down and think about what they want to do and what direction they want to go with this facility and what went wrong and what went right, there’s a lot of evaluation of ourselves that we have to do."

Feeney said the reasoning behind pushing for the DPW garage at this year's Town Meeting was because of low interest costs and a detailed and well-planned construction schedule. 

"It's too bad [it failed] because we pushed hard on it this year because interest rates will never be lower and money-wise, it [was] a good buy for the town," he said.

The proposal was fast-tracked to make it on the Town Warrant and as a result, may have turned many voters away with lack of information, and more importantly, lack of  time to process that information before asked to vote. While the garage failed to pass this year, Feeney said it was important to let residents vote on it. 

"We know it was financially hard times now but we thought we should give the taxpayers a vote and present it as the business of it being a good buy right now," Feeney said. "To sit on it and say ‘it’s not really the right time, we don’t know if we can sell it,’ is childish, let [the residents] vote. That’s what we did, we let them vote and like I said, 711 votes is not chopped liver. It’s encouraging and it’s really discouraging too on the other hand. You can see a light at the end of the tunnel, you got to be optimistic." 

This isn't the first time the proposal of a new DPW garage has been rejected by residents. Eleven years ago, Feeney said he proposed the idea for a new facility and it was shot down at Town Meeting. 

"[The proposal] failed dramatically at the Town meeting," Feeney said. "There was a huge school building override going on at the time and they had so many people at the Town Meeting, they were out in the classrooms. We held our own on the floor at the Town Meeting but it was not the right time. That was a very primlinary plan too, we did not have as much documents as we have nowadays on this thing. This thing is really up there, ready to go and back then, 11 years ago, it wasn’t really, it was more just a twinkle in my eye."

Feeney said he learned at that Town Meeting 11 years ago what goes into building proposals and as a result has worked long and hard over those 11 years to get to the proposed facility to where it is today. 

"This has been a lot of work," he said. "Over the past six years we have been going really strong [working on the proposal]. We appropriated $100,000 six years ago to a preliminary study to look at all the land we could use or anything we could do and then we appropriated $1.1 million to bring it up to 100 percent design for the highway garage. We’re really into it and I guess we step back and think within ourselves what the voters were thinking and what was going on with that."

Despite the rejection at Monday's election, Feeney pointed out that the taxpayers already have made a significant investment into this project.

"We have 100 percent design plans sitting in front of us and taxpayers are already into this project for a lot of doe and so it’s really important, it’s an important project to represent the taxpayers to the best way we possibly can," Feeney said.

One way to better represent the taxpayers moving forward, according to Feeney, could be public information meetings as a way to better inform residents of the proposed building and answer questions about its cost.

"I think that can help a lot ... a lot of education can help a lot," he said. "We sprung this because Town Meeting comes up once a year and then we were looking at the economy and looking at what's going on in Washington ... inflation is coming. We said let's get it out there and give them an opportunity to see if they can buy the business end of this deal. Construction trade is starting to recover and they're slowly going back to work. We wanted to catch that wave and get the right bids in."

Feeney admitted the proposal was "pushed too hard" but wanted to give voters an opportunity to decide. 

"I feel good that I gave them the opportunity and that we didn't make any decisions in the back room to not bring it to Town Meeting," he said. "We are called Public Works or a reason. Maybe it was too fast of a timetable for [voters] to buy into it but we tried to get as much information out. We'll try to get them onboard and let them know what's going on."

Issues the Building Committee Faces with the DPW Garage: 

• Feeney said it was important to get the DPW garage proposal to this year's Town Meeting because of the construction schedule. "We may have to wait another year to go back to Town Meeting or there was some talk about going back in the fall," he said. 
• The rejection of the proposal puts serious time constraint issues on the current construction plan. "We had it all planned out," Feeney said. "We were going to abandon [the current] garage in March 2012, abandon the site and we actually had an alternative site, which would have put a roof over all of our equipment and park the rest outside for the month of March. Our construction was supposed to have us back in [the new facility] before the snow flies. We have to evaluate a lot of things of what we want to do because we just can't go until [next] Town Meeting because even if they approve it, your schedule may not even be realistic. That could really cause bigger problems."
• Feeney said if voters do not like the proposed facility, it could cost more money for a redesign. "That would be a problem [if building plans had to be scrapped]," he said. "Something I'm already hearing is downsize to make it more palatable. Try and get the $10 million down to nine, down to eight and show them there is a reaction to the vote. We have heating systems that are measured for so many cubic feet of building and all these final drawings. All these green things we put into the building and if we start screwing around, it's not changing lines on a plan, you've got electrical, plumbing. It could cost us more to redesign it." 

Feeney said there will be much to discuss at the next building committee meeting and he will "rely heavily" on what they ultimately decide to do.

"These guys aren't chopped liver here," he said of the building committee members. "These are professional engineers, architect designers ... they've all had much more complex facilities to build than this. There's a lot of experience on that building committee. It's not a group of volunteers that think it should be done. These people are pretty smart and are as smart a group as I've worked with."

Now, for Feeney and the permanent building committee, it's "back to the drawing board."