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Capital Plan Includes Library Windows

Voters will get the plan at the March 16 annual town meeting.

 

Some Westborough Public Library windows installed 105 years ago would be replaced this year under the capital plan Town Manager Jim Malloy presented Tuesday night.

At $160,000, the window project is the second most expensive item on the list.

A $215,000 Mill Pond School gym floor replacement project tops that list. The 10-year-old floor has “reached its useful life expectancy” and constantly bubbles and tears, Director of Finance and Administration Irene Oliver told the school committee on Nov. 28.

Voters will get the capital plan at the March 16 annual town meeting.

A committee rated department heads’ capital requests using the same criteria as during the past three years, Malloy said: public safety and health, infrastructure needs, efficiency of services, legal requirements, public support, personnel impacts, service impacts and administrative needs.

Malloy said his plan also includes each item’s scheduled replacement date, to “address questions raised at recent town meetings.”

The library windows, for example, were installed in 1908, the plan notes.

“They’re beautiful windows. They look great. They’re single pane, and they let in a lot of cold air,” Malloy explained.

The plan also includes four department of public works requests: a water/sewer backhoe ($140,000), an F350 Utility vehicle ($57,000), a sewer van ($28,000) and a garage roof study ($15,000).

The rest of the plan is: repairs to three fire department pumpers ($75,000); two replacement police cruisers ($106,500); and a Fales Elementary School stairway replacement project ($55,000).

 

Related Topics: westborough public library

Kristin

7:55 am on Friday, January 11, 2013

Library window project seems like a huge waste of money.
The library gets very little use and use will diminish as time goes on. Most people use the Internet for research and use tablets/Nooks/Kindles for reading. The library is a dinosaur and the building should be sold. Use 1 room in Town hall as a consolidated library if desired.

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Jon McGrath

12:18 pm on Friday, January 11, 2013

Full disclosure: my wife works part-time at the library, but my response would have been the same even before she got the job. I also happen to think that's a lot of money for windows.

With that out of the way, Kristin's statement may be one of the most ignorant ones I've seen on Patch, and that's saying something. With the rising cost of books and other media, I think the library will become more popular, not less. There are a lot of town expenses that leave me scratching my head and wondering what we're getting for our money. The library is not one of them. Spend some time there and you'll see a lot of people visiting and using its resources (as well as resources from other libraries). People using e-readers can also borrow electronic books.

“The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.” -Albert Einstein
“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man” -T.S. Eliot

Bubblicious

8:44 am on Friday, January 11, 2013

It's obvious that Kristin hasn't stepped foot in the library recently (or perhaps, ever). It's ALWAYS busy in there, not just with people checking out books, but using the computers, kids getting tutoring, etc. By the way, you can download ebooks for free for your Kindle from the library, but I suppose you wouldn't know that if you aren't interested in the library in the first place. I'm a professional researcher, and while I do use the Internet for much of my work, I still have to use the library (this one and others) at times for materials that are not online. I have no affiliation with the library other than that I live in town, gladly pay taxes to support it, and use it very frequently. So it irritates me to no end when people who have no clue make ignorant statements like the one above.

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