Lanesborough Selectmen Show Revised Police Station Plans
LANESBOROUGH, Mass. — The board of selectmen showcased a redesign of the proposed new police station on Monday, hoping to ease concerns regarding its location and size.
The new structure consists of three levels rather than the one level of the initial design shown on Nov. 16 and would replace the current police station building on 8 Prospect Street. The new building design is 4800 square feet when accounting for the covered parking area for police vehicles.
While the previous design had the building at Bill Laston Memorial Park, community feedback pushed the board to reconsider the location and scale of the project, necessitating a redesign.
"Basically, this new building is designed for the current location," said Selectboard Chair John W. Goerlach.
Goerlach said this design is not final and explained changes based on community and other feedback are likely. He said he plans to work with Brian Humes of Jacunski Humes Architects to get cost estimates on the building and aspects like the proposed training classroom.
"This is still a work in progress with Brian [Humes]," he said.
In other news, Town Collector Jodi Hollingsworth said those who usually have an exemption should receive a revised tax bill early in January that properly includes exemptions. She said she wanted to get the word out about this in advance to let residents know as soon as possible.
"The initial tax bills they receive will not have those exemptions on it," she said. "They will, in short order, receive a revised bill."
The board discussed the possibility of streaming meetings on Facebook Live. While the board currently broadcasts their meetings on Lanesborough Community Access TV, they do not stream their meetings live online.
Selectboard Member Michael Murphy said the board streamed the recent police station public hearing on the "Lanesborough, MA: Our Hometown" Facebook group. In addition to those who visited the hearing in person, he said over 50 people watched live on Facebook, which he considers a great success.
"And the beauty of it was, we were able to do it live," he said. "And that same concept could work for an annual town meeting at the school or something we have downstairs in the community room."
The board was unsure whether or not to incorporate live questions from the Facebook audience into meetings. Goerlach said someone could potentially manage the questions and answer them separately.
"You could get 20 or 30 questions. That would be the hard thing about managing that," said Town Administrator Joshua Lang. "I know I've seen other towns and organizations do that and you almost have to have someone have a computer on the side answering those in order to keep up with it. I think if you wanted to do something like post those questions as an addendum to the minutes, that would be a good way to start out and incrementally see how that would go."
The board acknowledged the hire of new Administrative Assistant Makayla Zonfrilli. Zonfrilli will be starting at the position on Jan. 3.
Murphy said administrative assistant is the job title that will replace the town secretary position. He explained they based this decision on feedback from Lang.
"Just tweaking, per Josh [Lang], the job title and some of the responsibilities to add some things," Murphy said. "Very excited about Makayla coming on board.
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