Time to start over and build new senior center

Dear Editor:

Stoughton and Sharon have gorgeous community centers, primarily filled with us seniors. Their lectures, yoga and aerobics classes are things of joy. We in Canton also need a new spacious community center, which the town would vote for willingly if we did not limit it to seniors. A few years ago $800,000 was raised for a new center and there is land behind the police station ready to build on. Deck House-like prefabricated buildings are beautifully designed for ready use, as my neighbor who lives in one can attest, so we would not have to wait two more years to use it.

We don’t have to accept this gutted hut (the former K of C building on Pleasant Street), as we were promised by the selectmen that they had buyers willing to buy it for what we paid for it. Of course, that was before they left the pipes filled with water, which froze. Then, while claiming the damage was “minimal,” the selectman also said they “gutted the building.” I find those two statements amazingly contradictory. Now the evidence of mold on the walls is gone as well as other indications of deterioration.

We will vote a $1.5 million renovation tax for the first rebuilding, then another million when they find out what they really need to enlarge that place for usability, spending three or four times what the original cost was.

Was the $800,000 “free cash” that Bill Friel mentioned as available for the senior center the same $800,000 raised by those hardworking citizens years ago? Where otherwise will it come from? We definitely need a community center for the whole town. But in this time of economic troubles, we don’t need to willingly be taken to the woodshed (literally) by tricky maneuvers when we already have land to build on.

Let’s vote for a new senior center. But let’s do it the right way.

Sincerely,

Alice C. Brown

Reservoir Circle

Share This Post

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=19641