thank you for such a thoughtful and positive peice. Your quote from Einstein was right on the mark. Our town needs a community center.
Sent from my iPhone On Sep 14, 2023, at 12:12 PM, sally kindleberger <skindleber...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you John Gregg for your thoughtful ideas about the Community Center. We desperately need a Community Center that meets the needs of the whole community. This Build is a long time coming! If the town votes on a 50% or even 75% reduction in size from the original proposed 100% it will be a huge mistake. Programs won't be possible in the smaller spaces. Why build something that does not meet the needs of the town? And prices will only increase over time. If we continue to quibble and bring up the same arguments and the same suggestions over and over, again we will never have a Community Center. Prices will never come down. We need to bite the bullet and build a useful space that works for the community. Visit community centers in other towns like Arlington,Bedford, Belmont, and Wellesley,(And yes I know these are towns with bigger populations and more money.) But we can build something that meets our needs if we just do it. There are folks in this town with big houses and expensive cars. Let's all dig deep and fund the build. Thanks John , a lot to think about here. And yes, a good, well researched plan is being picked apart to such a degree that it may never happen. All of Lincoln could benefit greatly from a Community Center. And it will never cost less than it will if we move forward now. Sent from my iPhone
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, John 01776
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 Buchthal Weston Rd.
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