'Great victory' for Dedham

At the height of election night, supporters of a new Avery School and a renovated Stone Park athletic complex crowded the lobby of the Dedham Community Theatre, watching as Selectman Sarah MacDonald marked down the results on white poster boards.

Then the last precinct came in, with an additional 790 voters for a new elementary school for East Dedham, and 670 against. The Avery victory was sealed. Whoops, cheers and whistles spread through the crowd.

“Yes! Yes!” shouted Charlie Krueger of the Mother Brook Community Group, thrusting his fist in the air and giving someone a high-five. He walked over to Margaret Matthews, another member of the steering committee for Friends of New Avery. Don’t tell me East Dedham doesn’t vote, he said.

“Isn’t that great?” she replied, pointing at the results. “That is so fabulous.”

By resounding margins, Dedham voted yes last Tuesday for a new Avery School and a revamped high school athletic complex, passing Proposition 2½ debt-exclusion property tax overrides tied to those projects.

Just over 60 percent of voters approved of a new Avery on Pottery Lane, with 6,231 people marking their ballots yes, and 4,105 no. The measure was backed across the town, with particularly strong support in precinct 1 – where 1,012 people voted yes, and 502 no – and precinct 3, where residents casting ballots at the 89-year-old Avery on High Street gave their approval by a count of 756 to 406.

Support was lower for the Stone Park athletic complex, at 54.3 percent – still an easy majority. A total of 5,577 people voted yes for that ballot question, compared to 4,686 who voted no.

“Both of them really had to happen, and the town agreed,” said Howard Ostroff, 63, of precinct 1, who was among several dozen people celebrating the wins at the Dedham Community Theatre. “Avery had to happen now, because the state money goes away.”

Now that Dedham voters have given their approval, the town can use an $11.1 million state grant it was awarded for a new Avery – covering 48 percent of the $21.3 million overall cost. The average homeowner will pay about $60 per year over 25 years toward the project, but there will not be a net tax increase in the short term, as the town lops off a similar amount of debt over the next 3 to 5 years.

As it moves ahead with plans to replace the old Avery – deemed by the state in 2007 as “one of the worst school buildings in Massachusetts” – the town will also proceed with a $3.1 million project to make over the athletic complex, building a synthetic turf field for football and multiple sports and a new full-sized track. That project will cost the average homeowner about $20 per year over 16 years.

“When you go to the surrounding towns, and you see their schools and their fields, we’re beginning to look like them,” Endicott resident Ruth Hamilton, 73, said proudly.

Hamilton said she thought many seniors voted against the Avery because they were “afraid their taxes will go up,” but did not fully comprehend what it meant.

“It protects us,” she said, noting that the town’s foundation is its schools. “If you don’t have good schools, people aren’t going to move in. This is a great victory.”

A new coalition, Project P.R.I.D.E. – which includes Friends of New Avery – campaigned for both projects.

“I’m really excited for the town, I’m really excited for the East Dedham community, I’m really excited for the high school,” said the School Committee’s Thomas Ryan, the main spokesman for the athletic complex effort. “These two projects are going to make a big difference for Dedham, and I’m really appreciative of the townspeople to support both of them. Plain and simple.”

“Turnout was so high, I was nervous, because I don’t think anyone really knew what it meant,” Ryan added. MacDonald agreed, saying, “That was a little nerve-wracking for us.”

Town Clerk Paul Munchbach said turnout was “phenomenal,” with 62 percent of Dedham voters coming out for the town election, and 64 percent participating in the U.S. Senate race. There were more than 1,200 absentee ballots between the two elections.

Munchbach said that for “the highest turnout, percentage turnout, for a debt-exclusion that this town’s ever seen, and the first dual election, I thought it went as smooth as can be.”

Dedham contributed to state Senator Scott Brown’s upset win over Attorney General Martha Coakley, with 5,979 voters (or 55.5 percent) going for the Republican, and 4,647 (or 43.1 percent) supporting the Democratic favorite. Independent candidate Joe Kennedy of Dedham received 147 votes locally, or 1.4 percent.

“Everything about him appeals to me,” said Marilyn Stuart, a medical records coordinator, after she voted for Brown at the Oakdale School. “His ideas, and he seems like a genuinely nice person.”

Stuart said she also voted for both local projects because she said they are both needed.

While there was no organized opposition, many in Dedham did vote no. At Oakdale, Michael Greenough, 27, a computer technician for the Army, said that raising taxes would hurt economically-distressed residents even more.

“You can’t get blood from a rock,” he said.

But the majority responded to the argument that a new Avery and athletic complex are important for Dedham’s future.

“At the end of the day, the town’s going to be very, very pleased with the results coming from these projects. It just raises Dedham to another level again,” said Town Administrator William Keegan. “People have become very civic-minded here, and they’re very interested in pushing the community forward, which is a great thing to see.”

Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.