Moretown School. Photo: Parker Aviation
Town officials in Moretown made a resolution Monday night, December 19, that they would not use legal maneuvering to gain access to and use of the school building for a new town office.
After the town office was destroyed in the August flood, the town has been working towards finding a permanent solution for the displaced municipal employees. The town office is temporarily operating out of the fire station.
While the town has been investigating the future of the town office for the last 10 years, according to select board chair John Hoogenboom, “Irene happened and threw everything into uproar,” he said.
Town officials engaged the town planning commission and the school board to investigate several options for the new town office; the front building of the Moretown School was just one option being considered.
A town office committee was formed to study the option and make a recommendation to the select board.
Hoogenboom said many of the comments made by parents concerned about endangering children in a discussion about building ownership that took place on Front Porch Forum make sense. The first priority, he said, is “the safety of the children” and meeting everyone’s needs and desires.
“I’d hate to see anything divide the town; we need to work together any possible way we can and find the best solution,” Hoogenboom said.
School board chair Kaj Samsom requested that the town pass the resolution as a result of a legal opinion issued by town’s attorney Paul Gillies that contained what he said was antagonistic language about the “strong bargaining position of the town regarding the village school property.”
Samsom said, “I know there wasn’t an attempt to elicit the language in the opinion, but that set me off.”
In response to the town’s query of who owns the schoolhouse, Gillies referred to a special town meeting held in May 1931 to vote on whether the town would authorize the school district to purchase the current property for “school purposes.”
The property was sold to the town in 1931 to build a new school. Gillies said that he didn’t find any deed of the town conveying the school to the school district but cited the presence of mold in the index books for the lack of a thorough search.
Gillies found, “The town owns the lot. It isn’t perfect. The voters approve it as an expenditure by the school directors and the school district probably should have taken title to it to respect that vote.”
Upon receipt of the opinion, Samsom said, “As a school board chair and separate legal entity, the Moretown School District, I have a choice to make. Do I hire an attorney to refute this? Do we have a legal and fiduciary responsibility to respond?
Samsom told town officials that he was requesting in writing that the town has “no intention of subverting this process with this legal opinion so that we don’t need to be defensive or reactionary.”
“The town has a dubious history with attorney’s fees for sure. What I ask is that you allow me to have faith in the process,” Samsom continued.
In addition, Samsom said, there has been a misconception in town about the available space in the Moretown School building. “There is no empty or available space at this point; space could be made through reconfigurations,” he said.
Select board member Tom Martin said that he first reached out to elementary school Principal Duane Pierson about the feasibility of using the school building for the town office.
“I reached out to Duane to see if you guys wanted to do it at all. If he had said no, I would have taken my energy elsewhere,” Martin said.
Samsom said that the legal opinion, “Regardless of context, the mere presence of it for me presents a problem. If it did come to a townwide vote, it puts us in an awkward position. The school tried hard to honor the process.”
School board member John Smeltzer said, “The school is only one option. We’re still in the beginning of the process and no decision has been made.”
Select board member Clark Amadon made a motion that the town would not try to take the school through legal maneuvering.
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