HATFIELD — Voters at a special election Tuesday overwhelmingly chose Edmund Jaworski over Stanley Pitchko to join the town’s Select Board.
Voters also approved a debt exclusion measure to raise $325,000 for more Memorial Town Hall upgrades.
In the Select Board race, Jaworski received 82 percent of the vote, taking in 363 votes to Pitchko’s 75, Town Clerk Lydia Szych said after polls closed at 8 p.m.
Jaworski will replace Patrick Gaughan on the three-member panel, joining Selectmen Marcus Boyle and Brian Moriarty. The term expires in 2018.
The vote for Town Hall upgrades — Question 1 — was closer. The measure passed by a 53-to-44 percent margin, with 235 votes in favor, 194 against and 15 blank ballots.
Szych said 444 out of 2,632 Hatfield voters came to the polls for the special town election — a 17 percent voter turnout. She described the turnout as “fair” for a special election, and added that few voters passed through the doors in the later hours, presumably due to icy weather conditions.
Neither Pitchko, 58, nor Jaworski, 62, could be reached after the polls closed, but on Tuesday afternoon, as sleet began to fall outside the Town Hall, Jaworski held his umbrella outside and greeted voters.
“I just feel like I’m a caretaker for the next generation, just to make this area, this space a little bit better for the next group that’s coming through,” Jaworski told the Gazette. “I’ve been overwhelmed with the great support I’ve gotten in this community today.”
Most voters interviewed after casting their ballots came down on the side of Jaworski, whom they believed had deep community ties and an open door policy.
They did not voice ill will toward Pitchko, who also has deep roots in Hatfield, but one voter did say one of the reasons he voted for Jaworski was because Jaworski was recently retired. Pitchko works as a deputy director of the Worcester Housing Authority.
“Not saying he (Pitchko) would do a bad job, but it just seems like having Ed here in town, he’s going to be available,” said Brent Eberbach, 36, adding that he knows Jaworski through the Hatfield Polish Club, where Jaworski is a past president.
Others also said they knew Jaworski personally, a main reason they voted for him.
“I’ve known him a long time,” said 24-year-old Troy Asher. “He was the JV baseball coach at Smith Academy.”
Asher said Jaworski had “assured me our values align,” saying that high on Jaworski’s priorities list are encouraging town involvement among the town’s younger residents and agricultural issues, including reservoir protection and land conservation — “making sure it (farmland) gets handed on to the next generation.”
Asher added that he supported the debt exclusion measure, which gained first-round approval at an October Town Meeting but needed to clear a last hurdle at the ballot box.
Jaworski was also in favor of the debt exclusion, while Pitchko wouldn’t say in a Gazette interview how he would vote. Asher said that was a turnoff.
“I don’t think he’s going to give anyone the run-around,” Asher said of Jaworski.
Elizabeth Proper, 81, also said she voted for Jaworski, partly because she’s watched him from afar at town functions and liked what he had to say.
She also voted in favor of the debt exclusion measure, which would piggyback off another measure approved by voters in November that funds an elevator installation and fire suppression system in Town Hall.
The elevator will take up basement space. Tuesday’s vote authorizes the town to raise funds for an expanded and renovated Council on Aging in the Town Hall basement, relocating the Building Inspector and Board of Health offices to yet-to-be determined locations.
Proper said she doesn’t use the Council on Aging facilities, but that “I do believe that there should be an appropriate space for the senior citizens.”
Jonathan Widelo, who voted against Town Hall renovations, said that Hatfield’s property taxes — $13.22 per $1,000 of property value for fiscal 2017 — were already inching too high. Property taxes in Hatfield have maintained an upward trend since fiscal 2007, when the rate was $10.42 per $1,000 of property value.
He said finding a new, modern space for the town’s Council on Aging would be better than renovating the basement of an aging town hall.
“Taxes are already pretty high,” Widelo said. “For what they want to do, it’s a lot of money.”
Jack Suntrup can be reached at jsuntrup@gazettenet.com.