Ostberg resigns; Jackson and Holtzman to share chairmanship
The newly appointed municipal buildings advisory committee met for the first time this week, but not before one of its members had already decided to quit.
Ron Ostberg, who led the Municipal Buildings Committee (MBC) for the past two years, submitted his letter of resignation to Town Hall early this week. In explaining his decision, Ostberg told the Press he wanted to spend more time with his family. “It’s a good committee,” he said. “I’ve done two years of work already on this job; there are other ways I can contribute to the town.”
The immediate impact of the resignation was to reduce the size of the committee to six members and complicate the selection of a chairman. And while it wasn’t exactly an episode of “The Apprentice,” the deliberations of the group were carefully monitored by its two nonvoting selectmen liaisons, BOS Chairwoman Marie Sobalvarro and Ron Ricci, especially when it showed signs of deviating from the Statement of Intent backed by the Finance and Capital committees, and the selectmen at Town Meeting this year.
There were no immediate nominations for the position of committee chairman. The resignation of Ostberg “creates a huge gap for the town,” said Doug Coots, former MBC co-chair, who said he was not qualified to lead the group. “I’m a newcomer,” he said, adding that he had never served on a building committee before and was not as familiar with Town Hall and Hildreth House as others. “The chair is going to have to think carefully about what the missing pieces are” on the committee in the absence of Ostberg, he added.
At this point Wade Holtzman, a member of the Town Center Sewer Building Committee, nominated himself, a motion which was seconded by Mark Cooper. Sobalvarro asked if any others were interested in the job, prompting Chris Cutler to ask Pete Jackson if he was willing to lead. Jackson said he was reluctant, knowing from his experience on the library building committee how much work needed to be done, much of it this summer. But in the end he did not object when his name was placed in nomination.
The vote was inconclusive. Three members–Coots, Cutler, and Jackson—voted for Jackson and three voted for Holtzman—Cooper, Holtzman and Lou Russo. “So co-chairs it is,” said Sobalvarro.
Jackson immediately weighed in with a list of actions he said the committee had to complete quickly to meet its goal to hire an owner’s project manager (OPM) and architect-engineer (A/E) by October this year. Meeting the October deadline is crucial to developing schematic plans for Town Hall and Hildreth House in time for Town Meeting next year. He said delays in getting started had rendered the schedule—of which he was an author—an “optimistic” rather than a “realistic” one.
The immediate task of the committee is to write a request for the services of an OPM. Jackson said that in his experience, the two most important steps are to write a description of the work the committee wants the OPM to perform, and to develop a list of criteria for selecting the most qualified of the candidates who apply. He asked Coots to write the project description, since he was most familiar with the recommendations of the former MBC, and he asked Cooper, a former member of the Westford Town Hall Building Committee, to develop selection criteria. “The rest is boilerplate,” said Jackson, who proposed that he and Holtzman meet with Town Administrator Tim Bragan and Finance Director Lorraine Leonard to mark up an existing RFS, such as the one used by Boxborough for its recently constructed town library.
As the meeting continued, one could observe the fault lines of future policy debates, ranging from the need to appoint a full building committee sooner rather than later, to restlessness over the limits of the Statement of Intent, which some members worried would prematurely restrict the work of the architect.
Jackson said he thought a full building committee needed to be appointed as soon as possible and expanded to possibly nine members. “This committee is over-qualified,” he said, adding that it could use a volunteer experienced in finance as well as a former elected town official who knew how to work with other committees and voters and how to navigate the politics of a major project. Russo agreed that a building committee is needed soon. Ricci was quick to remind the group that the matter would not be resolved until July and that the current committee was charged, for now, to write the RFS, no more, no less.
The advisory group will meet throughout the summer on Tuesday mornings and Wednesday evenings at a location to be determined. On Tuesday, the selectmen must appoint a seventh member to fill the position vacated by Ron Ostberg.
