(Update, 30 November 2025 – the proposal was voted down by nearly 50 points in May of 2025.)

Short version of this post:

Madison has a lot of community center-style spaces. Our leaders want to build more of that space, in the form of a new community center.

I wanted to figure out if the town needs that additional space.

I pulled the relevant records with a Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request and learned that the town doesn’t actually track and aggregate data on the usage of its existing stock of community spaces. I had to extract usage data manually by examining Outlook calendars and Excel spreadsheets day-by-day.

This means that anything the Board of Selectmen and others have been telling us about how badly we need a community center in the last two years has been completely fictional. Because they never tracked the usage data, they don’t actually know the answer to that question.

I also learned, from these records, that virtually no-one uses the municipal meeting spaces we currently have. Usage rates are 15% or lower for most of our public spaces; some, such as the rooms at the Surf Club, see relatively low use during peak season (25% for private rental capacity) and are even lower (4% – not forty, just plain old four per cent, as in 4/100) during the offseason.

Because of low usage rates, there is no prospect that this community center will be able to “pay for itself” as numerous members of town boards have claimed for years, or even come close to doing so.

Usage patterns of directly competitive space that already exists tell us that the new community center will be empty about 90% of the time. Also, the community center building will also likely rack up close to $1 million a year in annual operating costs, in addition to its (at least) $24 million construction cost.

This project will be a be a massive drain on town budgets for decades to come.

Good intentions don’t justify bad investments. Building a very expensive structure for which there will be no users is, definitionally, a waste of money.

This building will consume dozens of millions of taxpayer dollars over its operating life. We’d be better off spending that money our fire department, ambulance services, reversing budget cuts to the schools, paying down municipal debt – literally anything else that we know, for a fact, town residents will actually use and benefit from.

For these reasons, we should vote NO in the upcoming referendum.

Long version of this post:

Hi. I’m Preston and I live in a small town called Madison, CT.

I work in advanced technology fields including AI, crypto and social media. I first moved to Madison when I was 12 years old, left town to go to college abroad in the UK, and lived overseas for more than a decade, until moving back to Madison during the COVID crisis, in 2020.

For all 30 or so of my years either living in or being aware of happenings in this town, it has been run like shit. During that time my interest in Madison politics has been low-ish, but non-zero. The only reason it is not zero is because it seems that, despite my best efforts, local politics seems very interested in me – as indeed it is interested in all of us, principally by taxing the daylights out of us.

My property taxes are thousands of dollars a year higher today than the day I moved in. Same with others.

Another number which has gone up is municipal spending. On what, exactly, this extra money is being spent is anybody’s guess. Madison (population 17,498) has an insane operating budget of nearly $100 million ($96.7 million to be exact). This is up fully 10% from $88 million in the 2021-2022 fiscal year, when I moved here. In 2024, distributed evenly per-head this works out to about $5,526 per capita, $22,105 of tax dollars collected for a family of four. This might seem normal to us, but considered in the context of how the rest of the world works it is an enormous, ridiculous sum, higher than the annual wage of the median citizen of the European Union.

The bulk of this money, about two-thirds, is spent on our schools, with a further $80-odd million in capex (mainly on school buildings rather than actual education) needing to be allocated over the next decade or so. Since I am a technologist and I live about ten years in the future, you, the reader, should know that this will wind up being a huge mistake, although leadership of neither political party – nor most of the voters – seem to be aware of it yet.

How we all should think about Madison’s future.

Madison spends most of its money on schools and school buildings, old and new, in use and disused. It recently sold the Island Avenue School for next to nothing and that is now used as a private school called OLM Prep. OLM Prep will educate a child for $11,000 per student per annum.

Madison’s public schools, if we take the $63 million budget and divide it by the number of students in the system (2,444), perform the same job for about $25,700 per student per annum. If the public schools could match OLM Prep’s efficiency – keeping in mind that OLM Prep occupies a disused school the public system deemed surplus to requirements and not efficient to retain – our education budget would drop to $28.8 million, a cost savings of nearly sixty per cent. Municipal expenditures and the tax burden would be cut nearly in half.

If our public schools could do this, or if we mustered the political will to make them do this, the entire capex investment we need to make over the next decade would be paid for by cost savings in less than two and a half years.

There is of course a reason that the public option costs more and it is not because it is better.

Baltimore City’s public schools spend $22,500 per student per annum, for example, and that is one of the worst-performing school systems in the United States. (A major component of the cost is attributable to the fact that public school teachers are unionized, and our politicians refuse to stand up to those unions, with the result that staffing costs are 50% higher than comparable private options.) Public bodies also lack disincentives from spending more to deliver the same (or worse) results than the market could, because if you don’t hand a public body your money, you go to prison or the public body puts a lien on your house. Government does not need to compete for your “business,” and as such it makes decisions based on politics and not on efficiency.

The Academy Community Center is to be built in a disused school which too was abandoned and left to rot by successive local government administrations from both major parties. Public bodies’ failure to deal with this building efficiently – and obvious preference to deal with this building politically – is the subject of the rest of this post.

Before we address the matter of the Academy building, it should be noted that most of Madison’s school buildings are on the cusp of being rendered more or less obsolete.

As a technologist, I have lived ten years in the future for most of my professional life. I’ve gotten pretty good, during that time, at skating to where the puck is going to be.

To do that, you need to understand a bit about where you actually are. It’s obvious, in hindsight, why the horse and buggy was replaced by the automobile, and the ocean liner was replaced by the airliner. A new technology which performs the same function an order of magnitude better and cheaper will render old technologies obsolete, and business models that depend on them, extinct.

But if you want to understand the future, you must first understand the present and the past. So let me share with you what is about to happen to the educational half of Madison’s municipal budget.

Education expenditure in the United States is enormous. Public expenditures on education presently account for about 20% of total government expenditure at all levels. The model of education Americans currently use, where children sit in large classrooms in class cohorts teaching basic literacy skills to then proceed to many years of postsecondary training, is something of a historical oddity, first developed by the Prussians in the early 1800s.

Prussia was a German country that stretched across much of what is northern Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and even Russia (the Russian city of Kaliningrad was once the German city of Konigsberg). After the Prussians were soundly thrashed by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, they realized that they were ill-equipped to practice massed, nationalist warfare of the type that made Napoleon the master of Europe.

The Prussians blamed their defeat on freethinking soldiers who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the state – keeping in mind that French-style republican nationalism of the type now practiced in the United States was a new phenomenon at that time – and who couldn’t function effectively in massed formations. So they accelerated the development of a primary education system which above all was designed to produce obedient conscripts for the vast armies needed to win European land wars.

As it happened, this model was pretty effective at increasing literacy population-wide and training people for industrial age, and later information age, workforces. For this reason, American educators like Horace Mann were impressed by this model and reproduced it here, where for the last century or so it has produced obedient conscripts for our corporations and our military.

For most of human history prior to the Prussian model, education was primarily delivered (a) to the aristocracy and (b) via individual tutoring. Individual tutoring didn’t scale well in an industrial society which is why schools were created. What’s changed is that artificial intelligence, or AI, is on the verge of being capable of teaching a child everything he or she needs to know from kindergarten through college, as employed by the Alpha School (which uses AI to individually tailor education plans so kids can get a superior education to what they’d get in a traditional classroom in a mere two hours instead of the usual eight).

Costs of knowledge production and delivery are about to plummet. Don’t believe me? Cool, suit yourself. But when the tidal wave comes back in, you can’t say you weren’t warned. Entirely new AI models are already being trained from scratch for far less than Facebook AI engineering managers get paid in a single year.

Mark Andreessen coined the phrase, “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The key to knowing what the future is going to be is knowing where to look, which I, and now you, do. In places where AI is most advanced, it’s outperforming massive engineering organizations. It’s already way better than a bad school. It won’t be long before it’s better than good schools, too – and it’s pretty obvious that schools-as-we-knew-them are living on borrowed time.

Free one-on-one instruction will always be superior to instruction in a class of twenty other kids. AIs doing this for free means slow kids won’t get left behind, average kids will perform better, quicker minds won’t be limited in their potential at all, and – most crucially – virtually every aspect of educational expense at every level of government will be able to be vastly reduced, if not eliminated, because the cost of delivery is virtually free.

Out here in the sticks, however, the dinosaurs on our Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance are preparing decamillion dollar budgets to build yet another school, to replace two schools which already exist and are in active use. This is despite the fact that student enrollments are down 30% over a decade.

This brings us to the matter of Academy.

Thinking about the Community Center’s future.

Another huge tranche of expenditure, mainly debt-funded, is about to be diverted towards the renovation of another school: the dilapidated, borderline blighted Academy School, which has sat on Madison’s balance sheet for nearly a century, and sat empty, unused, and crumbling for the last 21 years.

At the same time as the town closes the Jeffrey and Ryerson schools, both of which are perfectly fit for, and used for, public use today, town leaders decided to bring back online a school which is in far worse shape through expensive renovations, new construction, and environmental remediation of poisons like asbestos and lead paint.

Why Jeffrey or Ryerson – both of which are being deprecated – could not be more efficiently repurposed for the job Academy is intended to serve has never been satisfactorily explained. All I know is that the town’s leaders put to the town, in a referendum, a proposal to renovate the old Academy school and turn it into a community center for the price of $15,900,000. Voters approved it.

Implementing the plan has, so far, been a disaster. The referendum didn’t budget enough to build the project that the politicians sold to the voters. The original plan did not account for basic expenses that anyone with expertise in renovating old buildings – you know, commercial developers rather than politicians – would have been aware of, like septic installation or environmental hazard remediation (remember the lead paint and asbestos? That has to go if we’re going to use this building.). There are also new elements for the project that are planned such as a theater stage (despite the fact that Madison has an abundance of stages in the municipally-owned-and-operated Arts Barn and also at the High School, both which are available for use).

Add Biden-era inflation into the mix and the project budget has ballooned, with the most conservative estimates having the project running nearly 50% over budget, with an estimated cost of $24,000,000. That’s just from the propaganda numbers the Board of Selectmen keeps using – which, it bears mentioning, they refuse to commit to. They just throw out piecemeal budget components and are hoping the voters won’t figure out the game. The game is that the the real figure for finishing this project is likely way higher, and that the only way to ensure it is finished is to break ground and invest enough in the project so abandoning it becomes more expensive than finishing it.

But I digress. Due to these cost overruns, the town is currently debating holding a second referendum to approve the new, higher numbers.

It’s a good-looking building by contemporary standards, I concede. But do we need it?

Do we need a community center?

The Community Center is supposed to do two things: (1) house new offices for town government departments and (2) provide more space for community activities.

As to the first proposed use, MBRD and MYFS – the intended tenants – both have space. There is no argument for growing these departments. Our population was higher in 2000 (17,858) and 2010 (18,269) than it was at the last census (17,691) and today (est. 17,498). Our population of young people is down 30% in ten years, if crashing school enrollments are anything to go by. The town should not be expanding the size and scope of its public administration in the face of a declining population.

As to the second proposed use, I assume that a community center is necessary if (a) current public infrastructure for rental space is inadequate to meet the town’s needs and (b) there’s a compelling reason to build more of that space.

This is a two-step analysis, and item (a) is a gating function: if we already have plenty of community center capacity available, there is no point in bringing more of it online until we’ve hit capacity with the existing space.

Does a community center have a place in our future?

I filed a FOIA Request to find out.

So I filed a Connecticut Freedom of Information Act request with the town to find out whether our current spaces are being adequately used. I asked the town for the following data:

1. Records or information showing the number of calendar days each of the following facilities were fully booked for the entirety of their normal hours of operation (“Fully Booked”) during the 2024 calendar year: Memorial Town Hall; the Surf Club; the Town Campus Gym; and the Madison Senior Center (each a “Venue” and together the “Venues”).
   
2. Records or information showing the total number of facility rental bookings for each Venue for the entire 2024 calendar year.
   
3. Records or information showing the utilization of each Venue expressed as a percentage of total capacity for the entire 2024 calendar year.
   
4. Records or information showing the specific dates in 2024, if any, on which each Venue was Fully Booked, listed by venue.
   
5. If any Venue was not Fully Booked on any day during the 2024 calendar year, records or information that demonstrate that such Venue was not Fully Booked on any day during the 2024 calendar year. The Town’s written confirmation will suffice.

It stood to reason that if a community center were truly necessary, what we would find is that the town facilities a community center seeks to augment would be at or nearly at capacity.

What did I find out?

Madison doesn’t really use its community center-style spaces very much.

In fact, what I found was that community center-like town facilities are not only not used at capacity, they are in fact used very little.

What I was surprised by is that the town doesn’t engage in real-time tracking of facility usage – probably because it doesn’t have to (see Ludwig von Mises’ pioneering work Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth which explains why entities which are not responsive to price signals make poor decisions around resource allocation).

The MBRD very helpfully provided me with PDF files showing printouts of their calendars (for Surf Club, MTH and the gym) and spreadsheet exports (for the Senior Center).

I tried using AI to analyze the data but – except in the case of the Senior Center where it was supplied to me as a .CSV file and thus was more readily amenable to automated examination – the rest of the information was supplied as PDF scans of monthly calendars, and I do not have time to go through an entire year’s worth of calendars for every room in the entire town.

I therefore had to review the information manually. For ease, I selected November as an example month for indoor spaces like the gym and Memorial Town Hall, a time of year when it is most likely that indoor spaces will be most needed, and used July as an example month for the Surf Club, which is peak season for it, and calculated utilization manually.

I have all of the calendars in PDF if someone has the time and wants to run the analysis for the entire year.

I hasten to add: this is really information the town should have immediately available and on-hand as it is about to call a referendum to approve twenty four million fucking dollars of expenditure to build even more indoor space.

QUERY #1: were any facilities fully booked on any day in 2024?

• Surf Club: 23 days (July), subject to a proviso.
  • Two of these were private events. 21 were MBRD programming. Private events generally take place in the evenings/on weekends where MBRD programming takes place on weekdays.
  • There’s really only one room at the Surf Club, and it’s always pretty busy in peak season.
  • Reservations drop off precipitously in the autumn and winter months (only one day fully booked in December, for example).
    
• Senior Center: Effectively zero, subject to a proviso:
  • The Senior Center is far and away the busiest public facility the town operates, indicating it is probably one of the best pieces of public infrastructure we have in terms of utility.
  • Unfortunately, the town’s data export did not include times and schedules, so it’s not possible to determine if the facility was in fact at 100% capacity for an entire day.
  • We can reasonably infer, based on the room usage data and the fact that smaller rooms are consistently available, that it is unlikely the entire senior center was fully booked for the entire day on any day, but this is not possible to confirm as the records do not exist.
    
• Memorial Town Hall: Zero.
  
• Town Campus Gym: 10

QUERY #2: what were the total number of facility bookings per facility in 2024?

Again, using November/July as examples, we can see the total numbers for a given month during peak periods and extrapolate for the year.

• Surf Club: 23 (July), dropping to 3 in December.
  
• Senior Center:
  • This dataset was provided in a machine-readable format so we could use AI to parse it. At least one booking was recorded on each of the 366 days of the calendar year, with (ballpark) 4,089 total reservations. Without a calendar it is impossible to calculate how many hours were consumed from the total room-hours-available and doing so manually would be extremely laborious in any event.
    
• Memorial Town Hall: 42 (November).
  
• Town Campus Gym:
  • For November 2024, 57 in 27 available days due to three days on which the gym was closed. Normalizing it to a 30-day availability we’d expect something like 63 bookings if the gym had been open for all 30 days.

QUERY #3: utilization as a percentage of total capacity?

I assumed that each facility had 355 work days in 2024 (being total days less federal holidays, including a day for the leap year) and is available for use 8 hours per day. In reality these facilities are available for up to 12 hours/day but we’re going to use 8 as a baseline to be charitable and avoid accusations of exaggerating the numbers.

Employing the above methodology, I calculated the facility utilization rate as follows:

• Surf Club: Between 4% and 76%
  • The event space was booked on 23/30 days giving a utilization number of approximately 76% in peak season.
  • This is mostly due to MBRD daytime programming occupying 100% of available time in the Surf Club’s one room during the week.
  • Surf Club utilization drops precipitously to near-zero (approximately 4%) in the offseason (sample from December).
  • Private rentals on weekends were 2 nights out of 8, meaning that the Surf Club is operating at 25% utilization during peak season for private rentals for weddings and parties and things like that.
  • The Surf Club almost certainly does not pay for itself from its rental revenue.
  • These are not great numbers.
  • This suggests that the Surf Club is a barely adequate event venue and is being outcompeted by other options available at privately-owned facilities.
  • That notwithstanding, it serves a “community center” type function and is largely unused for most of the calendar year.
    
• Senior Center: no records, but meeting room space is likely operating at 10% or less utilization
  • No hourly usage data was available for the Senior Center.
  • Assuming the Senior Center has nine rooms, there are a total of 18,072 room-hours per year available for booking in the Senior Center.
  • Because the town’s data was available as a CSV file (thank you, whoever in the tech team supplied it!) I ran the data through an AI engine, ChatGPT-4o, which established that there were the following number of bookings for space in the Senior Center. The Senior Center is actually a surprisingly well-utilized public facility – as we can see, some spaces like the Senior Center Lobby were in use practically all the time.
  • Note that AI can be wrong and I haven’t double checked the numbers but these seem reasonable and a visual inspection of the logs reveals that the Senior Center is a very busy place.
  • There is, however, still plenty of excess space.
  • Other spaces, such as the Class Room, Activity Rooms 1 and 2, regularly run at extremely low utilization rates – the below is bookings per year, not days occupied. If we assume for example that the Activity Room 3 space booking is one day per booking, you still only max out at 15% utilization. If you’re averaging 1.5 hours per booking it’s closer to 4%.
  • It is therefore likely that much of the “community center” style space in the Senior Center is idle 85-90% of the time. I am unable to prove it because the town doesn’t maintain the proper records.

Senior Center Lobby	802
Cafe	699
Exercise Room	539
Senior Center	530
Library	223
Game Room	262
Conference Room	219
Activity Room 2	184
Doctors Office	210
Class Room	103
Activity Room 1	81
Activity Room 3	58
Alcove	58
Computer Room	109

• Memorial Town Hall: 23%
  • Memorial Town Hall is the best proxy for what we might expect from the Academy Community Center as it is located approximately 100 feet from the Academy building and provides identical meeting room facilities as the town proposes to construct immediately next door.
  • MTH has two rooms. This gives the facility an available hours budget of 4,016 room-hours/year for a normal working week. As, like other facilities, it is available for rent on Saturdays and Sundays, this facility, too, is available 355 days/year meaning it has a total available room-hours per year of 5,680, or 473 hours/month assuming an 8-hour day (keeping in mind the real number is closer to 12).
  • Running the analysis for November – which, visually, looked to be one of the busier months of the year – yields an hourly usage of 113.5 hours.
  • This indicates a facility usage rate of somewhere in the neighborhood of 23%. Remember, we’re using an 8-hour day to calculate that rate because we don’t want people to say we’re being unfair.
  • If we use the real numbers and assume a 12-hour day the facility usage rate is considerably lower than that: 113.5/710 hours per month or a utilization rate of 15.9%.
  • MTH would therefore need to see usage increase by a staggering 630% before it ran out of capacity.
    
• Town Campus Gym: 61%
  • For November 2024, the gym was booked for 133.5 hours, apart from fitness center hours which do not require bookings for use. It was also closed for business on 3 out of 30 days, giving us 27 days of operations to work with. There was also an unusual gap in bookings in the dataset from November 1st through 8th where no external bookings were recorded and we just see the fitness center on the calendar.
  • 133.5/27 = 4.9 hours per day, or using an 8 hour calendar, yielding an average utilization rate of 61%.
  • We also find multiple days, approximately 10 of them, which are at effectively 100% utilization.

QUERY #4:

• As I got a raw calendar dump I have this data. The town has it too, so if you want to look at it they should be able to supply it. It wound up not being relevant for my analysis.

QUERY #5:

• The town declined to provide a written confirmation, which suggests they don’t have a responsive record. It is probably reasonable to infer, for a 12-month period, that the Town Gym is effectively fully booked approximately 30% of the time and the Surf Club is probably booked about 3/4ths of the time during peak season.
• It is also probably reasonable to infer that the town’s other facilities are fully booked – as in, booked to capacity – close to 0% of the time.
• This is before we count the Scranton Library facilities, which (if memory serves) have seen usage plummet in recent years and are massively overprovisioned.

Conclusion #1: The town doesn’t actually know how its existing “community center”-style facilities are used.

The town’s “community center” style spaces run from 4% to 25% utilization depending on the building and the time of year. These are terrible utilization numbers.

However, the fact that I had to review raw calendars to figure out usage statistics, and that this data was not immediately available in a spreadsheet, provides me with, frankly, an even more troubling data point than the terrible numbers: it tells me that the Board of Selectmen does not currently know how Madison’s public spaces are used.

If they had the summary data, they were required by law to disclose it. The fact that they didn’t disclose it means they don’t have it.

If they don’t track the data, there is absolutely no way they can honestly make the argument that we need more space, because they don’t even know whether the need exists (though, as we’ve seen, it doesn’t). Moreover, given that we don’t have any hourly data for the Senior Center there is literally no way to find out the actual utilization numbers until the town starts collecting that data.

The fact that the town doesn’t have any data on this means that any assertions anyone has made for the past year about what the town “needs” in terms of extra community space are fictional. They’re completely made up. Nobody talking about this issue in any part of the town’s administration has any factual basis for claiming that we need more community center-style space, unless of course these people have also pulled the records and conducted a manual examination of the calendars.

Which, of course, they haven’t. They’re just posturing.

It’s honestly incredible that amid all the sound and fury of this debate here in Madison, at no point in the last four years has anyone bothered to pull the actual usage records of public facilities and examine how they are used in reality. Proponents of the Academy Community Center sold a dream; opponents sold a nightmare. Perhaps everyone was afraid of what they’d find.

Now we know.

Conclusion #2: the usage data does not support building a community center. It does support expanding the gym.

Here is what we find in the actual data:

• We definitely could use more gyms and indoor athletic space.
• We have lots of that kind of space already. We could make the gyms at Polson (which are already dual-purposed for things like elections) available on nights and weekends for pre-booked public use. In the alternative constructing an extension or annex to the existing town gym could likely be explored for far less than $24,000,000.
• Noting all of those pickleball bookings in the data, we could get a tennis court-sized inflatable dome and double the gym’s capacity for about $150,000.
• This means that doubling the gym capacity to free up space for the pickleballers and occasional tennis players, or virtually any other daytime or nighttime programming the town could want to host, would cost 6/1000th (0.6%) of the cost of the proposed community center.
• We possibly could use more space at the Surf Club during peak season, and perhaps it would be worth improving the space to make it more usable during the off-season, when the Surf Club is virtually empty all day, every day.
• We really don’t need more meeting rooms or theater stages or spaces for daytime classes. We already have plenty of them across numerous buildings and they’re hardly ever used.

Conclusion #3: the Academy project will not “pay for itself” in any meaningful sense.

On the topic of whether the Academy Community Center can “pay for itself,” a claim made by a former chairman of the Academy Advisory Committee at a January 7th meeting of the Board of Selectmen (noting for the record that this claim also went unchallenged by the Board of Selectmen), the data answers that question too:

• The claim that the Academy Community Center can “pay for itself” is bullshit.
• Based on actual usage patterns of municipal space, there is no way to make the math work so that this claim becomes true.
• Take the total rental numbers for Memorial Town Hall. Assume we get an average usage of 113.5 hours per month. Assume also that 100% of renters paid the $25/hour projector fee. (Not everyone will, but we’re being charitable here to the people who want to build this thing to avoid accusations of unfairness.) In that scenario revenues from MTH rentals annually would be $33,000.
• If 100% of those rentals moved to the Community Center, the revenues raised would pay for the Community Center’s $24 million upfront construction cost in 727 (seven hundred twenty seven) years.
• Even if the Community Center’s revenue 10Xed from that level, the facility would not pay the cost of construction until the year 2100.
• A breakeven date of 2100 would require, at current prices, 40 or more hours of room rental time to be booked and paid for, every day, seven days a week, for 73 years straight, without interruption, following the ribbon-cutting ceremony in 2027 or so.
• For context, a 2100 break-even date would require five rooms to be booked solid from 9AM to 5PM, with no breaks or cancellations, every single day for three quarters of a century.
• Contrast this with the condition of the town’s existing property, Memorial Town Hall, which struggles to keep two rooms booked to 15% capacity. A 2100 break-even would require something like a 3,000% increase in use. That simply isn’t going to happen.
• Regardless of how you calculate it, if this thing does ever pay for itself, it will only do so after everyone reading this post, and most of our current living descendants, are long since dead.
• Factor in an estimated $800,000/year carry cost, and it’s clear that the community center will never come close to turning a profit.
• This building will instead rack up tremendous operating losses for the entirety of its operating life.

To the extent people voted for the project because they were told it would pay for itself in any meaningful way, they were lied to.

Conclusion #4: the 2022 referendum’s budget is totally blown, the data doesn’t support holding another referendum, and the Board of Selectmen should cancel the project.

We can infer from what we already know that a community center, if we build it, will largely sit empty – as it is competing with existing meeting space which is, for the most part, currently also mostly empty. Community center-style spaces in a given month run at anywhere from 4% to 25% utilization rates.

The project’s budget has increased 50% since 2022. The BOS blames inflation, which has been high – but it hasn’t been that high. The issue is that the 2022 referendum committed the town to build an impossible project, for the price. After winning the referendum, the politicians jacked up the price and now they seek to use the old referendum as justification for proceeding to advance forward with the new, more expansive project – a classic bait-and-switch. The reality is that the politicians over-promised and under-budgeted. The voters’ consent was given on the basis of what is at best a fantasy, at worst a lie.

What to do, then? Should we sell the land? I don’t think so; it’s rare that a spot like that can exist near a downtown which isn’t in private hands. But just because we can’t sell it doesn’t mean we need to rack up $20 million or more of bond debt to redevelop it for something no one will use.

If the town doesn’t want to sell Academy, there are plenty of other options – ranging from commercial long-leases to simply razing the building and turning it into green, open space – which keep the property held for the public’s benefit in the long-term without imposing a huge burden on town budgets for a generation.

The reality here is that space usage should be easy to quantify and communicate to the public on a monthly basis. Practically every modern business these days has a dashboard that gives them an up-to-the-minute picture of how their infrastructure is being used. The Town of Madison does not.

The BOS should do two things.

• First, hire someone to get a handle on your public facility usage data so you can figure out what the town you’re running actually needs. Manually thumbing through calendars to figure out how your revenue-generating assets are used is amateur hour, Stone Age stuff for an organization with a $100 million P&L. Startups with a hundredth of your revenue have better analytics. It also makes me wonder what other wastefulness lies undiscovered in the town’s budget.
  
• Second, to the extent that analysis bears out what my brief analysis has set out (and it will), you should shut down the Academy project. The data suggest Madison’s current indoor community center-style spaces are dramatically under-used. If we build more meeting spaces to add to our current stockpile of meeting space, they, and the center which houses them, will largely sit empty.

Issuing even a penny of debt – to say nothing of $24 million of it – to build a space that will sit empty is, definitionally, a waste of money.

The BOS has the audacity to call for another referendum to ask for even more money without knowing their own facility utilization numbers, which are abysmal.

If the Board of Selectmen won’t call time on this project, I hope the town’s voters will.

Postscript: