Firehouse vote an affirmation

Anyone who cares about public safety and the state of volunteerism in the Northwest Corner should be happy with the results of Friday night’s town meeting in Salisbury in which voters gave a 158-11 nod of approval to the Lakeville Hose Company’s plans for a new firehouse.

The meeting in the Congregational Church was inspiring on several fronts. Citizens who were in favor of the project did not hesitate to say so. Skeptics asked excellent questions about the value and potential uses of the current firehouse and the environmental condition of the ITW building, which is the Route 44 location where the new firehouse will be constructed.

There were scores of senior citizens, some of them disabled, who braved an impending snowstorm to listen to the presentation and assess whether they could support the program. First Selectman Curtis Rand and moderator Charlie Vail did a commendable job of running the meeting. Rand, in particular, faced a barrage of questions about the $3.3 million proposal, but assured voters on one major concern: The price tag is a worst-case scenario on all points, so there can be at least hope for some savings over and above the proposal.

Significant grant support and fundraising efforts are expected to bring the cost to taxpayers down, along with the possible sale of the hose company’s assets and a capital reserve account held by the Lakeville Fire District, an anachronism that will happily dissolve itself later this year. And a bond issued in the early 1990s for a renovation and expansion project at Salisbury Central School will be paid off in three years, meaning the firehouse project could be accomplished without a tax increase. There was some new information about environmental concerns on both the current firehouse and ITW properties, but nothing that approached the level of a deal-breaker.

To the relief of just about everyone, there seemed to be little sentiment for selling one of the fire district’s most prized assets — the community ballfields in Lakeville. As the writers of a letter on this page observed last week, those fields contain several acres of land with access to town water and sewer, making them desirable for affordable housing. But the fields have a long tradition of serving as a gathering place for community teams of all sorts, making them a sort of sacred ground for many who played there as both children and adults.

While there have been some mistakes made along the way, both the selectmen and the committee that drafted a report recommending the ITW site appeared to have learned much from firehouse proposals in Kent and Northfield, where a number of factors combined to delay those projects interminably. Salisbury’s new firehouse site seems to be well on the way to becoming a reality now.

Salisbury taxpayers, however, will be closely watching another major public project that will no doubt be in the news again shortly. The search for a new transfer station will likely come to a head next month as the options to purchase the Luke and Fitting properties have been extended but will expire May 10. This is another expensive public project that the community needs to analyze carefully to avoid an unmanageable increase in taxes.

No matter how well costs are controlled in the firehouse endeavor, it appears taxes will have to be raised to pay for the Luke and Fitting properties and the construction of a new transfer station there. With the cost of living rising much faster than wages, it will be a challenging time for all of us who are required to pay the bills.

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