Second vote needed Dec. 8 to approve debt exclusions
Tara Vocino
Reporter
TEMPLETON Residents voted to pass a new elementary school and police station addition at a Special Town Meeting on Monday.
According to interim Superintendent Dr. Steve Hemman, the proposal for a $24.8 million Proposition 2 1/2 debt exclusion tax override to pay the town’s portion of a new $47 million Templeton Elementary School was voted for by more than the required 2/3rds vote.
The proposal will increase the tax rate by $1.74 per thousand dollars of valuation, if approved at the ballot box. A ballot vote will be held Dec. 8 to get the second needed vote for final approval of the project.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Mr. Hemman said. “It’ll be wonderful for the schoolchildren and a huge investment in town. When families move to town, they often ask what the school system looks like.”
Matthew Syring, a resident of French Road, was one of many who went to the microphone to speak in favor of the school.
Mr. Syring spoke about how the Massachusetts School Building Authority has been working closely with the town and school officials for nine years to move the project along, but to no fault of anyone, have failed up to now to pass a proposal for a new facility.
“From a business and taxpayer perspective this project couldn’t make any more sense financially,” Mr. Syring said at the microphone. “If approved, the commonwealth is willing to fund over $22 million of the project. With that type of financial assistance from the state, why would we not capitalize on this? Failing to accept this project now is leaving money on the table. We can pay less now, or pay more later.”
One concern that was voiced was that traffic congestion will significantly increase hazards faced by police, fire and rescue vehicles responding to emergencies. And it would require the tearing up of a playground just built by volunteers in honor of former teacher and town leader Gladys Salame.
Others were concerned about the traffic pattern, one way south on Wellington Road and one way north on South Road, but it wasn’t enough to hold back the project.
According to town meeting volunteer Judy Levangie, 351 registered voters and about 40 others attended Town Meeting.
The $975,000 addition for the police station won initial approval by a unanimous vote. The police station addition debt exclusion will also be voted on a second time, in a ballot vote on Dec. 8.
Board of Selectmen Chairman John Columbus called it a big night for the town.
“Getting the police station and the school passed the same night,” Mr. Columbus said. “I never thought I’d see that day coming.”
The station addition would be funded by a two-year debt exclusion override, which would increase the tax rate by $.94 cents per year.
Police Chief Michael R. Bennett presented a slide show, comparing the former and new station.
Mr. Bennett said the addition would include a 4,000-square-foot expansion of the current police station to the west, which will include an additional cell, an interview room, a dry evidence room, a training area, a sergeants’ office, shower and locker facilities, a break room, an interior staircase and exterior parking for two police vehicles.
He compared the ballot question to winning the World Series. “It’s a huge victory,” he said. “It’s a huge accomplishment to have the ballot finalized. I’m ecstatic.
I’m very appreciative to the citizens of Templeton for seeing the need.” He was anticipating some negative reaction and said he was prepared to respond to those questions from residents.
However, all three public reactions spoke in favor.
The annual Town Meeting was held in May.
Well you would never know that there was any opposition to the School project judging by what was printed in TGN. What I found some what disturbing was the woman who came to the microphone and brought up the eminent domain subject. Templeton Center has worked hard to make this area a beautiful historic district and that shot about the eminent domain just didn't sit right. Here is something from The Underground History of American Education called A Fool's Bargain.
ReplyDelete232. A Fool's Bargain: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
A Fool's Bargain
A recent analysis of American diet by the Harvard School of Public Health disclosed the curious fact that the extremely poor eat healthier diets than upper-middle-class Americans. If that doesn't break you up, consider the lesson of the 232-year-old aristocratic merchant bank of Barings, destroyed in the wink of an eye through the wild speculations of an executive who turned out to have been the son of a plasterer bereft of any college degree! The poor man's schemes were too impenetrable for company management to understand, but they needed his vitality badly so they were afraid to challenge his decisions.
"They never dared ask any basic questions," said the young felon who gambled away $1 .3 billion on parlays so fanciful you might think only a rube would attempt them. "They were afraid of looking stupid about not understanding futures and options. They knew nothing at all." Quis custodiet ipsios custodesl
ReplyDeleteYou can't help but smile at the justice of it. Having procured a Leviathan state finally, its architects and their children seem certain to be flattened by it, too, soon after the rest of us become linoleum. No walled or gated compound is safe from the whirring systems rationalizing everything, squeezing children of social engineers just as readily as yours and mine. "They knew nothing," said the criminal. Nothing. That's the feeling I frequently got while tracking the leaders of American schooling at every stage of the game while they mutilated their own lives as fantastically as they did the lives of others. All that sneaking, scheming, plotting, lying. It ruined the grand designers as it ruined their victims. The Big Schoolhouse testifies more to the folly of human arrogance, what the Greeks called hubris. Our leaders, one after another, have been childish men.
So many of the builders of School were churchmen or the sons of churchmen. We need to grasp the irony that they ruined the churches as well, the official churches anyway. That probably explains the mighty religious hunger loose in the land as I write; having slipped the bonds of establishment churches as it became clear those vassal bodies were only subsystems of something quite unholy, the drive to contemplate things beyond the reach of technology or accountants is far from extinct as the social engineers thought it was going to be. Such an important part of the mystery of coal-nation schooling is locked up in the assassination of religion and the attempted conversion of its principles of faith into serviceable secular wisdom and twelve-step programs that we will never understand our failure with schools if we become impatient when religion is discussed, because School is the civil religion meant to replace Faith.
American Protestantism, once our national genius, left its pulpit behind, began to barter and trade in the marketplace, refashioning God and gospel to sustain a social service vision of life. In doing so it ruined itself while betraying us all, Protestants and non- Protestants alike. A legacy of this is the fiefdom of Hawaii, saddest American territory of all, an occupied nation we pretend is an American state, its land area and economy owned to an astonishing degree by the descendants of a few missionary families, managed by government agencies. The original population has been wiped away. Under the veneer of a vacation paradise, which wears thin almost at once, one finds the saddest congregations on earth, parishioners held prisoner by barren ministers without any rejuvenating sermons to preach. Hawaiian society is the Chautauqua forced schooling aims toward.
ReplyDeleteThe privileges of leadership shouldn't rest on the shaky foundation of wealth, property, and armed guards but on the allegiance, respect, and love of those led. Leadership involves providing some purpose for getting out of bed in the morning, some reason to lay about with the claymore or drop seeds in the dirt. Wealth is a fair trade to grant to leaders in exchange for a purpose, but the leaders' end of the bargain and must be kept. In the United States the pledge has been broken, and the break flaunted for an entire century through the mass schooling institution.
Here is the crux of the dilemma: modern schooling has no lasting value to exchange for the spectacular chunk of living time it wastes or the possibilities it destroys. The kids know it, their parents know it, you know it, I know it, and the folks who administer the medicine know it. School is a fool's bargain, we are fools for accepting its dry beans in exchange for our children. Roland Legiardi-Laura
Is it true that a member of the school committee made the remark about taking people's homes by eminent domain?
ReplyDeleteWho is paying for this project? The school district or the taxpayers?
Yes Mrs Matson did bring it up and the room got very quiet when she did. Later as the police station was the topic Bob Whalen made a joke that it's good to hear the chief wasn't talking about the topic of eminent domain. If they want their own web site just "go daddy"
ReplyDeleteThis is the way the people in town do the persnickety selling of a project.
The way the Advisory board does research and tried to get it to the people was covered in way as to not be allowed.
The point Will Spring was about to make was we are told what we needed to hear to vote it yes.
The rate for the school loan was what we would have been told about but not evr allowed.
Even if the vote took place without a word or presentation the vote would be the same.
The real vote comes at the ballot box and it may or may not be the same.
Does the rate of interest matter? Hell yes it does.
Do we know what it will be? Hell no we don't.
Lets all think about it.
Who stood up with George Barnes ? What happened to the people who had the "No" signs on their lawns ? Were they glued to their seats? Afraid to look incorrectly correct ? Gee is their such a thing ? I almost got up, but no one was listening and besides how many times has he got up to back me ??
ReplyDelete