Hadley voters: Please come to Town Meeting on Thursday, May 3, to vote down two poison-pill warrant articles.
We need to vote down the articles to move or quash the senior center. The town has voted four separate times to bring this much-needed project forward (and the library that will be built on the site of the current senior center, the decaying Hooker School).
You’ll hear a lot around town about “save the American Legion.” The Legion is not in danger. Its only suffering would be the loss of use of a strip of town-owned land that the town has generously allowed it to use for overflow parking. Town officials have offered repeatedly to work together to meet the Legion’s parking needs (plus the many spaces they’d still have on their own property), but the Legion only wants to keep using that town-owned property.
What is in danger are the two projects with the town’s wide support. The senior center might be homeless if Hooker is torn down with no new building going in, and the library could be in jeopardy of losing its construction grant.
Delays on the senior center and library would increase the cost, squander the $1 million already spent on design and preparation, and give us less for our money, just as the costs went up and the features went down while the elementary school was delayed several years.
Vote “no” on these two articles.
Shel Horowitz
Hadley