Please note that the following message and attachment was sent to Representative Town Meeting Members today. If you are a Town Meeting Representative, please accept my apologies for seeing this message twice. If you concur that amending Article 21 to require continued operation of the River Garden while ownership issues are resolved with oversight from Town Meeting, please reach out to Town Meeting Members in your District. A listing of Members is on the Town website.Also, please note that there are vacancies for Town Meeting Members in all Districts [Districts 1 (9), District 2 (9) and District 3 (4). If you wish to become a Town Meeting Member, please attend the caucuses to be held March 13 at 6:30pm at Academy School, prior to Town Budget informational session.=====Dear Representative Town Meeting Member,
On behalf of the ad hoc “Committee for the River Garden,” I am asking you to support an amendment to Article 21 which seeks appropriation for the “capital and operating costs of projects of the Town’s duly designated downtown organization.”
The manner and amount of the appropriation are the same as last year’s. What is different is that the downtown organization has now opted not to include the Robert H. Gibson River Garden in its budget. The organization is seeking to divest itself of the River Garden by the end of its Fiscal Year in June 2013, but as of this writing it is far from certain how that will happen. Indeed, the proposed process will be less than a week old by the date of Representative Town Meeting.
In view of the history it appears reasonable to condition the appropriation on continued operation of the River Garden going forward and oversight of any change in ownership by a committee answerable to Town Meeting.
More complete information, answers to anticipated questions and an historical timeline can be found at this link […]. Should you require further information, want access to source documents, have further questions, or have difficulty accessing the link or attachment, please do not hesitate to contact me.
On behalf of the “Committee for the River Garden”,
Robert A. Oeser
PO Box 6001
Brattleboro VT 05302
email: Robt.Oeser@gmail.com
home: 802-254-8750
cell: 518-505-9031
Committee for the River Garden
Arlene Distler
Veronica (Ronny) Johnson
Steve Minkin
Robert Oeser
Jane Southworth
John Wilmerding
Running the River Garden
Tying BaBB to the continued operation of the building is a flawed approach, despite it being convenient.
Remember that in addition to saving the building as a public space, another goal is to remove BaBB from operation of the building to allow their maximum focus on the downtown program. Downtown programs don’t manage buildings, and BaBB has been trying to correct this error in operations.
Why not go big with a proposal for Town Meeting Reps to vote on whether to take over the River Garden as a town-owned property? Do we taxpayers want it or not? I’d like to hear the public debate, and the result.
Kicking it down the road again delays inevitable decisions, in my view.
It seems that the decision
It seems that the decision the BaBB has made to not hold public meetings on the future of the River Garden and to, instead have people submit proposals does away with the opportunity for public debate. When BaBB announced they would no longer be able to manage the River Garden they stated several times that they were amenable to having community meetings to hear what the residents of Brattleboro thought about the future of this very vital public space. Instead it seems that only a few people will have any opportunity to offer suggestions and that there will be no public input into the River Garden’s future. In order to be a part of the process that BaBB has chosen you need to first be skilled and knowledgeable enough to put together a comprehensive proposal and secondly,you need to be able to do that in a relatively short amount of time -about a month. Then -and perhaps I’m not understanding the whole process correctly -but it sounds as though BaBB will look at the submitted proposals and make a decision -on their own -with no community input -as to which proposal is feasible. Then..what? the town would find out after the fact what will happen to the River Garden?
I strongly feel that BaBB needs to allow residents to have a say in what the River Garden future holds. It is and always has been -a public, community space and the community should be involved in it’s future.