The Woodstock Town Selectboard voted unanimously Tuesday evening to set a bond vote to fund renovations to the Woodstock Wastewater Treatment Facility for Town Meeting on Tuesday, March 3.
“The main wastewater plant needs renovation. [The plant engineers], Hoyle Tanner, [have said] that they are ready to go to work towards a Town Meeting Vote in March for the wastewater plant,” municipal manager Eric Duffy told a joint meeting of the selectboard and trustees at Woodstock Town Hall Tuesday night. “The timeline is basically this week to wrap things up, so if the town wants to go forward with the vote in March, they need the green light. If the vote can be delayed to another time, whether it is in the summer [at the primary election in August] or [at the general election] next November, that’s also okay. They just need to know so that we’re not spending money for them to gear up when we don’t need to,” Duffy added.
At a special meeting last week, the town selectboard members discussed the importance of aligning the wastewater plant bond vote with an already scheduled election. The selectboard at that meeting opted to put off a decision on choosing a date for the bond vote until Tuesday’s joint meeting with the village trustees. At the joint gathering this week, selectboard members discussed maximizing the use of staff resources by holding the bond balloting on the same day as an election that was already scheduled in 2026.
The last time that engineering firm Hoyle Tanner projected a potential cost for the plant renovations was in January 2023, when the price tag was estimated at between $20 and $25 million. At a meeting of the Woodstock Selectboard in December of last year, Hoyle Tanner regional business manager Jon Olin noted that construction costs had likely changed substantially in the preceding year. No new estimate of the present-day projected cost of the renovation project was offered at Tuesday evening’s meeting.
A controversial aspect of the selectboard’s Tuesday evening decision to set the wastewater plant bond vote for next March is the fact that MVSU administrators say they are on track to bring a proposed bond for construction of a new, regional “hub” high and middle school complex on the current WUHS/MS site before the voters in Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Plymouth, Pomfret, Reading and Woodstock on Town Meeting Day in March 2026 as well.
For more on this, please see our October 16 edition of the Vermont Standard.
