The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Tempers f lare while leaders review plans for town hall
EAST HAMPTON » Going into the Town Council meeting this week, town officials thought it would be largely a cut-and-dried affair.
The council would review the proposal to construct a new town hall/police station and then send it onto the Board of Finance, which would “come up with a plan to pay for this,” as Councilor Kevin Reich suggested.
The meeting was driven by complaints from councilors — two of whom participated in the meeting via telephone — of inadequate or late information, and incomplete documentation, which led to a pointed exchange between the
project architect and Councilor Mark Philhower.
The meeting ended with Ted Hintz Jr., one of the absent councilors, launching into a verbal attack on the town’s executive assistant.
The assistant works for Town Manager Michael Maniscalco, and if there is a complaint, it is usually directed at the manager, not his assistant.
Hintz’s actions proved too much for Council Chairwoman Patience R. Anderson, who struck back hard at Hintz as she defended the executive assistant. At one point, Anderson suggested Hintz was less than truthful in his version of the events in question, which involved arranging the telephone hookup for the night’s meeting, and cautioned him about making “assumptions.”
Anderson’s emphatic defense of the assistant is just the latest incident in an increasingly fractious relationship between her and Hintz. Their relationship has become so toxic that Anderson last month announced she would not run for re-election after the Republican Town Committee endorsed Hintz for another term on the council.
But more than that, Anderson said she was resigning from the town committee because she could not countenance the decision to renominate Hintz.
(Two other women who are committee members also resigned to protest the Hintz endorsement.)
In the end, the council did vote 5-2 to forward the proposal to the Board of Finance.
Members of the Town Facilities Building Committee had come before the council to outline the proposal and provide a rough estimate of the anticipated cost.
In one form or another, the council has been debating or discussing building a new town hall since 1982. The current building dates from 1946, and is, according to Maniscalco, old, worn-out and inadequate in both terms of space and amenities.
The 2,489-square-foot police station is woefully inadequate, officials acknowledge. The new facility calls for a police station of at least 10,000 square feet.
Committee Chairman Glenn Gollenberg said the project includes 31,387 square feet at an estimated cost of approximately $18.9 million. The actual construction cost is closer to $15 million, Gollenberg said.
The remaining roughly $3 million includes so-called “soft costs” (engineering and legal expenses) and contingency fees. Project architect Anthony Amenta said some 400 individual line items went into estimating the construction costs.
Philhower pressed for more exact numbers, however, and said he could not imagine why he could not get them. “I have an absolute right to see those numbers,” he said.
Amenta said many of those individual items will change as the architectural drawings become more exact and the estimator refines the numbers.
Philhower continued to press for the breakdown, however, and when Amenta said they represent “a guesstimate,” Philhower dismissed them as “fictitious.”
Amenta, who said he had 40 years’ experience as an architect, did not take well to that description. He said the town had hired his firm to have a professional team conduct a review and develop an estimate, adding he did not expect the council “to pick apart 400 items at a conceptual stage.”
Amenta was supported by councilors Reich and James “Pete” Brown.
“Our sole purpose” is to pass the proposal along to the finance board and “not cherry pick it,” Reich said.
“I’m very comfortable putting this in the hands of the Board of Finance,” Brown said, adding that he felt Amenta “has done his due diligence.”
As passions cooled, Gollenberg said he would see to it that Philhower got the information he had requested.