The best answers come from reading the notes from the June 17th FPC meeting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tHtl6Ps7PcOOnC_idXa5NYTKt1fWV2wwmao_IG9EczU/edit
The short answer is that while this position was open for a long time, there is a huge backlog of work. Particularly with the addition of Covid retrofitting, there is a lot of complexity for Facilities to manage.
In the discussion, the tradeoff for this role was only put against additional custodians needed to open town hall and do summer programming. That raises the additional questions:
Do we need to rush to open town hall outside of public facing services?
How does the town weigh the benefits (eg. childcare) of short-term summer programming against being ready for school in the fall?
Are there other areas of the municipal budget that can be evaluated, such as figuring out if there is really a $140K mistake in the public safety budget?
