By Barbara Smith,
Blogger and Social Justice Activist,
https://www.facebook.com/HWdemocrats/
Item 6 from the town manager’s newsletter relates to Town Hall and lack of ADA and fire code compliance….
- An internal team of staff is reviewing options for
making the Town Hall ADA and fire code
compliant.
It appears that the town manager and the officials that he answers to, and the Hamilton Wenham Human Rights Coalition, a political lobby led by Anna Siedzik whom they ALL answer to- got a bunch of people to try to figure out what we already know from the Town Hall Building Committees’ extensive and important work on this matter: you can’t piece-meal your way to a safe and ADA accessible Town Hall.
Mass General State Law(MGL) forbids a piece-meal approach for any municipal project where costs exceed the 30% threshold for the “assessed value” of the municipal real estate. In this case, it is Town Hall with an assessed value of only 300K……. That means Hamilton can only spend 30% of $300K to make the improvements. So, $100K won’t get us very far before hitting that ceiling of 30%………At this point, the State steps in and MGL forces you to do the whole building once we exceed the 30%. The Fire Code and ADA work will COST much more than $100K because in order to make Fire Code you have to upgrade Hamilton’s electric service which is still knob and tube!!!!
You cannot have ADA accessibility without updating the plumbing infrastructure to meet the MGL Plumbing Code. All these systems are integrated and dependent on each other. These systems cannot be individually teased out to deal with in a piecemeal fashion. Our Town Manager knows all of this. He has known this for years. This is common knowledge for him, so THE QUESTION IS.... why is he pretending that a piecemeal approach to town Hall is an option- when he and many others know that it is not? There is a lack of transparency here… his job is to help the SB execute the mandate from Town Meeting: move ahead with the restoration of Hamilton Town Hall. It is written in stone by virtue of the Hamilton legislature’s vote. He is not doing his job. The question is: why?
It is a mystery that Hamilton’s Insurance Company still insures given this outdated system! Knob and Tube is from 2 centuries ago. The thing is, Joe D must already know all of this and is still going through these fruitless and performative motions; it seems that they are basically sabotaging the Town Hall compliance effort. The Town Manager has had this MGL information all along but has not advised the informal working group that all their effort is for naught….
Town Meeting voted to make Town Hall ADA compliant and it is the DUTY of the Town Manager and whoever is elected to the Select Board, to execute what we, the Hamilton Legislators (the voters), mandate. The legislative mandates do not disappear when the composition of the SB or the Town Manager changes….. and continuity must be honored by all elected officials regardless of their personal beliefs. The Select Board is there to do the bidding of the Town Meeting, and Joe’s job is to help them do that in the most efficient and expedient way. Period.
This also applies to any and all Town Meeting votes including the Master Planning Steering Committee that the Town Meeting legislature voted to fund and support. The Town manager and the SB can’t just get rid of Town Meeting votes/mandates with a wave of the hand- or wish it away in their heads. They are not Kings and Queens.. We still live in a Democracy!!!
Here is a link to his entire report.Town Manager Report 090722 (hamiltonma.gov)https://www.hamiltonma.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/2022_09_19-Town-Manager-Report.pdf