By Anne Bordonaro
I was astounded by the decision of the Waitsfield Select Board Monday night to forgo doing an engineering feasibility study of options for improving pedestrian and biker safety on Joslin Hill Road in preparation for the repaving project next year. The paving project promises to be very costly (potentially $1 million-plus) and the town's share of the feasibility study would have cost approximately $8,000.
Grant funding for this study was secured quite a while ago by town administrator Valerie Capels, and matching funding for this study was already approved by voters at Town Meeting last March. This is pound wise and penny foolish. Furthermore, I believe the board's decision on this matter highlights two big problems that plague town decision making today.
First, as Logan Cooke lamented, projects seem to drag on forever these days. I could not agree with him more. However, I think a major reason why this is so is that this board has repeatedly circled back to reconsider, on its own, decisions that were already approved by voters at Town Meeting or other votes. This leaves us voters feeling that our votes don't matter. (Many of us showed up at the meeting Monday night to express our support for proceeding with the study, but apparently that did not matter either.)
Second, the board is not exercising its leadership responsibilities in providing options in an appropriate manner for public discussion. For example, if some of the board members felt strongly that an engineering study was not a good option and that they could conduct an equivalent analysis on their own, they should have presented this option to voters at last March's meeting where the entire town would have had an opportunity to weigh in on it.
Instead, in this and other recent examples, they have arbitrarily overruled voter decisions, substituting their own judgments. At this point, the only way for a voter to express disagreement with this decision is to cast a negative vote on the upcoming road repair bond. These "negative votes" have become more common and contribute to problem number one above.
The decision was not unanimous. Logan Cooke and Sal Spinosa wanted to proceed with the study, Chris Pierson and Scott Kingsbury voted against it and in favor of creating an unspecified public process to look into this within the board itself, and Paul Hartshorn broke the tie by voting with Pierson and Kingsbury. I hope that Hartshorn will reconsider his decision and vote to go forward with the study with a clear timeline for recommendations that can inform our bond vote this March.
Bordonaro lives Waitsfield.
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