ORANGE — Town Hall business will inch back to normal with a schedule consisting of Mondays and Wednesdays from July 1 until Sept. 1, following a unanimous Selectboard vote this week.
Town Administrator Gabriele Voelker proposed a “soft opening” for the building at 6 Prospect St., easing into a post-pandemic world.
“This is really a tough subject,” she said. “I don’t know if people out there understand how hard it is.”
Voelker explained this decision means night hours would return to Town Hall, which is open from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Wednesdays. Business will remain by appointment only on Tuesdays and Thursdays; Town Hall will still be closed on Fridays.
Voelker mentioned there will still be some restrictions in place. These include the continuance of contract tracing and mandatory sanitizing.
“There’s still COVID out there, and 25 percent of the people are not vaccinated. The employees are nervous. We don’t know who’s going to come in vaccinated, who’s not going to come in vaccinated,” she said. “All the employees at Town Hall are vaccinated, but there’s still an unsettlement about people coming into the building and that sort of thing — the safety of the employees. So I would want to take that into consideration.
“If we find that this is working fine, that the numbers of COVID are going down, we can open sooner than” July 1, she added. “But I really would like to give it the summer to make sure that this all kind of goes away.”
Voelker said the town will have to figure out how many people are allowed inside Town Hall at one time.
“The two hallways that Town Hall has are very narrow, and so you’re not going to want bottlenecking of people coming in,” she said. “That’s kind of why I want to do a soft opening. We need to try this out. We need to see how it’s going to work, instead of just opening the doors and it being a free-for-all, because I have to be considerate of cleaning and all of those things.”
Thomas Smith, elected the board’s new vice chair at the start of Wednesday’s meeting held via the online video conferencing platform Zoom, said he was comfortable waiting till fall for a complete reopening. He said he wants Town Hall employees to feel safe. Pat Lussier, elected clerk at the beginning of the meeting, said a soft opening starting July 1 sounded reasonable.
“I think we’ll know right away if it causes a problem, if we see any kind of increase in the numbers (of COVID-19 infections),” she said. “If the whole staff has been vaccinated, what is this vaccination for if you’re still going to feel like you have to be isolated from everybody else? I don’t get that. If you’re vaccinated, you’re vaccinated.”
Lussier mentioned she is not willing to wear a mask forever and she wants “to get back to normal.”
Dick Sheridan, recently re-elected to the Selectboard after having served previously, suggested starting the soft opening June 1, but Voelker said this would not give the municipality enough time to inform residents of the plans.
Voelker also mentioned Town Hall will have a no-cash policy during the soft opening because “cash is dirty, it has a lot of germs and is problematic.”
Regarding masks, Sheridan said he has no issue with any private business or municipality requiring masks, noting that people don’t have to go into a building if they don’t want to wear one. But Voelker mentioned that puts the enforcement and discipline burden on individual town departments.
Resident Rhonda Bartlett chimed in to say she wants Town Hall reopened as soon as possible, saying Gov. Charlie Baker put restrictions in place 14 months ago.
Mercedes Clingerman, a medical professional who serves as chair of the Orange Planning Board, said she wants the Selectboard to be proactive, as opposed to reactive — she would rather the town be cautious about reopening Town Hall than have officials make a rash decision that could result in a spike in infections.
“And I know there’s a lot of perspectives out there in terms of beliefs. And science is hard to decipher and people need to understand that medical science is evolving with us,” Clingerman said. “But vaccines don’t eradicate disease — it just helps so that if you are exposed you don’t, hopefully, get as sick.”
Resident Ann Reed reminded those listening that COVID-19 comes with a nearly 100 percent recovery rate, and that the vaccines are experimental. She said she would be disappointed to see Selectboard members disparage residents opting not to receive the vaccine.
“I’m also disappointed that there’s still a belief that masks are a healthy measure,” she said, though physicians and scientists say wearing one has been proven to slow the spread of COVID-19. “I choose to wear a mask whenever I wish, but that is my choice. But there’s no talk of removing the masks from the poor children sitting in the classrooms day in and day out, with their little noses and mouths completely covered. I’m sure physically that cannot possibly be good for them and I’m sure psychologically it could not possibly be good for them.
“It is just starting to feel really neurotic, these reactions and these concerns and this preoccupation with this situation,” she continued. “It’s just not worth it. We really, really need our freedoms back and we need to be confident that the people are educated enough to make decisions — good health decisions — for themselves, to distance as they see fit and so on. But this wringing of our hands consistently and being ruled by this worry, it’s way too much at this point.”
Wednesday’s meeting was the first for newly elected member Andrew Smith, who is not related to the new vice chair, Thomas Smith. Andrew Smith said he simply wants good communication between the town and its residents.
Reach Domenic Poli at: dpoli@recorder.com or
413-772-0261, ext. 262.
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