Letter to the Editor: The Truth of the Matter About Killingworth Town Hall

The following letter to the editor was submitted by Selectman Fred Dudek and First Selectman candidate Matt Young, both Republicans:

We have recently seen a lot of discussions on the town hall addition project.  The good news is that having an open discussion on this, just like anything else that concerns the town, is always a healthy thing because it lets the residents have their say.  The bad news is that when there is a lot of incorrect information being passed around it makes people anxious over issues which aren’t  true.   

I think we can all agree that before we can make a sound decision on matters that affect the town we first need to know the full story on what it is we’re actually deciding on. 

First, there hasn’t been any vote on the town hall addition since the referendum last year and there won’t be another vote on it until after a direction is decided, and approved by the Boards of Selectmen, and Finance.  Anyone who is telling you otherwise is not being honest with you, and it was disappointing to hear that quite a number of concerned voters came to the budget referendum as well as the primaries expecting to vote in a town hall referendum that didn’t exist.   

Secondly, although we need to avoid unnecessary expensive projects , we need to avoid doing nothing simply for the sake of doing nothing.  

Something genuinely needs to be done about the current town hall because the town hall modulars are in dreadful shape. The truth of the matter is, the reason why the town hall addition proposal was so expensive is because there were too many ambitious ideas being put into it.  In short, the idea to create an emergency operations center for the town, and integrating it into the town hall added cost..  We have seen enough power outages and town wide damage from storms to recognize that we need a central location from where the town can direct emergency services and communications.  

The problem is, we can’t just build an EOC; we have to accommodate the strict requirements that come with creating the EOC.  This doesn’t even include the strict requirements that come with the creation of the new offices for the resident state trooper (which are likewise in dreadful shape).  It was these requirements which brought so many additional expenses to the town hall addition project and it is these requirements that need to be addressed if we want to come up with a better solution.

What Matt and I agree on is that a more realistic proposal is to examine the options available to us with the use of the STEAP grant.  Rather than build the emergency operations center in the town hall, a more practical approach is to forgo the town hall project for now and instead use the STEAP grant to build the EOC in another location.  

Two ideas that immediately come to mind are utilizing the grant to add the EOC to the Killingworth Fire House, or renovate the barn structure existing on the town hall footprint already.  The EOC can be added to the barn structure, and the barn itself can be renovated and used for town meetings, and voting.  These are ideas to be explored.

Once the EOC has become operational, it will allow us to propose a scaled down version of a town hall project.  If the resident troopers office is integrated into the town hall project,  it will allow us to request additional STEAP grants that would not only give us additional funding,  It would also mean an amount of the cost of the project would no longer have to be passed on to the residents of Killingworth.

How much money will this idea save?  To be honest, we don’t know.  The truth of the matter is, there’s no way we can know until the town of Killingworth elects leadership that allows us to start looking at other common sense proposals like this.  Our position is simple;  we want to avoid the cycle of the town spending thousands of dollars in design fees and thousands more in referendums. Let’s chose an option that will pass the public vote the first time and  propose a practical, cost saving proposal for the town.  

This is what Matt and I hope to accomplish, and this is why Matt and I are hoping for your support, this November.