If you build it they will come.
You have services but no facility which makes it harder on the Parks and Rec
staff or LEAP to provide quality services to everyone. You build a school with
up to date facilities to help encourage people to move to Lincoln with
children, you provide elderly services to keep families in the town, or even as
families grow older the parents need more assistance and move back with the
kids to help provide the necessary help instead of living alone. It gives
flexibility and leverage to attract people to the town and then keep those
people there instead of chasing people away because the overall view of Lincoln
is they are concerned with themselves, not others, not a very diverse community
of people live in the town.
Lincoln is a beautiful town, lots of history. close to Boston but from the
outside people do not want to move to Lincoln unless you fit the criteria.
School population is going down for several reasons, we moved to Lincoln for
the school and LSHS. My belief is that Lincoln needs to take a look in the
mirror and ask if they just want to be a town where the priority is to continue
to make Lincoln less welcoming to others or make it more welcoming. There is no
need to run more studies, or take more census, the need is to understand and
provide the necessary services for children, parents, and the elderly of the
Town a Community Center makes Lincoln on par with other surrounding towns to be
more attractive to move into.
If this was a discussion to put in EV Charging stations at the Commuter Rail
Parking lot for $10 Million dollars the project would already be under way, why
is it that hard to commit to provide positive services to the community in
general and society as a whole? A Community Center to house programs for the
elderly, LEAP facility for after school programs that help working parents, a
central housing area for Parks and Rec Staff to provide other quality services
makes a community more centralized and welcoming. This entire discussion is
eerily similar to the School discussion, at that did not end well.
“ The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but
expecting different results” – Albert Einstein
Thanks,John01776
On Wednesday, September 13, 2023 at 07:08:44 PM EDT, Peter Buchthal
<pbucht...@gmail.com> wrote:
Lynne, Karla and David make excellent points. One of the challenges the town
faces with the community center is the lack of trust in the building committee
to size a COA/ParksRec building to meet our needs and not our wishes. I
believe the major hill the community is trying to climb is how many seniors
actually use the facilities today.Parks and Recreation has provided actual
attendance figures for all of the activities. COA has provided only maximum
and minimum numbers without means or averages. The maximum and minimums for a
particular activity can vary greatly with the maximum being sometimes triple
the minimum headcount. For residents who are not awash in money, in may be
hard to justify building a larger council on aging for the occasional
activities that may need more space once every three months. Wayland, a town
with twice the senior population compared to Lincoln just built a new Senior
Center for 11 Million dollars. Their building that meets the needs of a town
with twice the senior population is 12,900 square feet. Our small, medium and
large Community Center proposals are 16K, 18K or 20+k.
I believe the Building Committee should ask Fincom or the Select board to fund
a consultant to provide average and mean numbers from the COA computer system
so that the community can see the actual consistent usage of today's COA. As
someone who is familiar with computers, I believe the town could easily also
find several residents (representing different groups within the town) who
might volunteer their time to provide the needed computer expertise to extract
the needed average and mean numbers from COAs computer system and generate more
meaningful usage statistics for the community.
Let's not overbuild a public building again.
Peter BuchthalWeston Rd.
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