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| Who are you calling Historic ? |
This morning’s Cape Cod Times has yet another story about what’s happening (or not) with the Clark-Haddad building. Abandoned years ago by the School Committee as too old, too costly, too small and generally worthless, the building was, the School Committee thought, to be quickly sold with the cash earned to be used to maintain and improve other Town buildings.
There are more than $25 million dollars in already known Town building repairs NOT being done because there’s no money to pay for them.
But, amazingly, to many in Sandwich being old seems to be the same as being Historic and so the question of what to do with Clark-Haddad drags on.
Apparently, 100 years or less from now, when someone thinks that the Oak Ridge School has served its useful life purpose and that future repair and upkeep costs can’t be justified, others will attempt to label the Oak Ridge school “historic.”
Someone will even slap a silly, self made, historic marker to its door, I suppose. Somehow, just labeling something “Circa whatever” suggest to many a historic significance and import but this is not so.
"Old" and "Historic" are not synonyms.
A school is not historic because its old. A storage building is not historic because its old. Clark-Haddad is not historic; its old.
Its time to stop the historic hysterics; sell Clark-Haddad and move on.
Sandwich is rightly proud of its historic past but everything old is not historic and that’s a lesson Sandwich seems to need to learn if it is going to be able to afford to preserve what is truly historic and significant about this marvelous old town and its buildings.
3 comments:
Spending $500,000 to move a decrepit building across Town (and probably more to clean up the pieces that will fall off during the journey!)will not bring tourist dollars to Sandwich.
"Hey, Ethel, pack up the kids, let's go to Sandwich for a month -- they built a Welcome Center in a decrepit building!" I'm just not seeing the Marketing Buzz ...
What would generate revenue is decent beaches and water access. Nobody comes to the Cape to enjoy the Welcome Centers (at least nobody I want to come in contact with!!)
Spend the money to work on recovering the sand lost to the Scusset Jetty -- or (realistically)expanding the marina.
Along with improving the beaches, returning sand should reduce the risk of flooding when The Big One finally blows ashore. Otherwise, we're really going to NEED a new fireboat when Station One washes out to sea!
Free sand or a $1,000,000 (yes, one million) fire boat. Sandwich needs which one of these?
Sand
Which one is Sandwich getting?
Not sand.
Seen too much, I like your priorities. There is town money involved in this but most of the funding is up to the Chamber. No one has brought into account the actual value of the building so far as I can see. So that needs to be tacked on to what the town will be giving up is they loose the building.
The Chamber proposes to raise the money to rehab the building, not the town, but the Chamber also wants $150,000 of Community Preservation money as part of their overall financial plan to take this building from the town and turn it into an office/visitor center on the land the town has already given them. They asked for the land to build something on and the town generously gave it to them at last years Town Meeting.
The town money spent on the building as proposed in the Chamber's plan would be the price of the building and money from Community Preservation Fund. The CPA funds are a dollar resource to the town, and the town has other potential uses for it in keeping with the Community Preservation Act mandates. Haven 't we been down this road with the Chamber's proposed "Boardwalk project" of last year.
I'm all for trying to preserve the building as historic, but not for giving away town assets. It makes sense to me that the town should try and sell the building with a historic preservation restriction on it and see if we can't get it on to the tax role before we do anything else. Last year when the Selectmen came to Town Meeting asking to sell it, they did not place the condition of a historic preservation restriction to the potential sale. They did not go to the Historic Commission to see what they thought.
This is really getting silly in my view. It is a town asset. We need to get as much for it as we can. We need to try and kill two birds with one stone by selling it with a historic restriction.
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