Fox Hill Building Will Proceed Following Overwhelming Vote

Town Meeting Members and residents wishing to share their opinions and concerns about the proposed Fox Hill building project were met with a shorter-than-expected discussion on the project at last night's Town Meeting.

The Meeting began with updates from five different town organizations:

• The High School Building Committee is still in early feasibility stages.
• The Economic Development will be breaking their Mall Road Multi-Use Zoning proposal into two phases, the first of which will be before Town Meeting in January.
• The Sign Subcommittee of the Zoning Bylaw Review Committee has engaged a consultant with Town-Meeting Approved funds and will present proposed guidelines for a Town Center Signage District in January.
• Municipal aggregation is off and running, and you'll see it on your November billing statement.
• The Human Services Committee is looking for members.

Articles 2 through 7 all passed, with the body approving:

• An April 5 election date for 2025
• The use of the Water Department building for a temporary police station while the old one is being demolished and a new one built in its place
• The placement of a question to convert the Town Clerk position to appointed (rather than elected) on the local election ballot in April
• The extension of a 2025 deadline to issue liquor licenses at the Burlington Mall until 2028
• The acceptance of more than $77k from the will of Marshall Simonds
• The Administrative & Professional Compensation Plan

Article 8, and the last Article to be discussed on the evening, was the question of whether or not to approve funding for Fox Hill. Presentations were given by representatives of the owner's project manager, the design firm, Superintendent Dr. Eric Conti, and Ways & Mean Chair, Doug Davison. A video was also shown, featuring Fox Hill educators and Principal David Rosenblatt discussing what they loved about the school and how the building provided a challenging educational environment.

Presentations lasted for about an hour, and several Town Meeting Members asked clarifying questions or spoke in favor or against the project. The facts of the situation are laid out in the Focus on Fox Hill series, and no surprises came up in the discussion itself. That is, until, a member of the body "move[d]  the question." In Robert's Rules of Order, which guides Town Meeting, when a question is moved, the body must vote whether or not to stop discussion and vote on the article. There were residents in the auditorium waiting to speak, none of whom had had the opportunity to do so, and this objection was raised, but the Moderator (who runs Town Meeting), constrained by Robert's Rules, held the vote to move the question. A 2/3 vote is needed, and approximately 75% of the body opted to end discussion and vote.

The body never got to hear from the residents who were in attendance, but the vote was overwhelming: 97 in favor, 7 opposed.

The next step for the Fox Hill building is to begin the detailed design process. It is still not certain whether or not the town will place a debt exclusion on the local election ballot for the Fox Hill building or the police station, though this was presented as a likely scenario at May's Town Meeting.

The High School Building Committee, as mentioned at the top and in Town Meeting's Article 1 reports, continues going through the feasibility process with their own design team, and they have said that they plan to bring the high school to the town for funding in the next 1-3 years—a question that will certainly require a debt exclusion, considering its size.

Town Meeting will reconvene on Wednesday evening, September 25, at 7:00 to pick up where they left off.