Lately, many people have voiced the opinion that we need to “get started” on the Town Hall project. Therefore, we should accept the Board of Selectmen’s decision to proceed with Plan 1B, which was decided upon without the input of the project’s Building Committee.
My concern with this point of view is that while it places a premium on meeting the project schedule, it doesn’t address an equally important issue: the project vision. It’s fine to get started on something, but if we don’t share a vision of what that something is, we are likely to run into trouble down the road.
When I was an analyst a few years ago with the Massachusetts Inspector General’s Office, I was involved in reviews and performance audits of several public projects that had encountered major problems or had simply failed. What many, if not most, of these projects had in common was that a premium had been placed on getting them started and completed as quickly as possible, without having first undertaken a deliberative planning process. In each case, the overall project vision was lacking in a major respect.
In the case of the Harvard Town Hall project, there had been a deliberative planning process involving building committees and other stakeholders, and a vision had come out of that process that was supported by the town’s voters. But that support evaporated when the construction bids for the project came in higher than projected by the project’s professional cost estimator. This was an outcome that no one had anticipated. The voters did not support the project vision at that higher price.
What should have been done at that point was to return to the same deliberative process that would once again result in a vision that could be supported by the entire town. The Building Committee is the appropriate entity to work with the BOS to develop that vision.
Dave Kassel
West Bare Hill Road
