By Thane Grauel

WESTPORT — The Long Lots School Building Committee on Thursday night began looking at possible ways to fit as much of what’s needed onto the campus as possible.

One of the committee’s tasks is to recommend whether the school, which dates to the 1950s, should be renovated in place, renovated with additions, or replaced with a new building. There are many moving parts — classroom requirements, bus loops, ballfields, a preschool and more.

Committee Chair Jay Keenan, who also is a Representative Town Meeting member from District 2, said that there would likely be variations of those broad strokes.

For instance, the renovate-in-place option still would require additional space on the Hyde Lane property.

“We’ve been finding over the course of this work that 687 kids plus Stepping Stones [preschool] would be a very difficult task to fit into the existing building,” Keenan said. “And it’s really not going to happen so it’s a slightly modified renovate-as-existing.”

The standing-room-only crowd consisted of people active in the Westport Community Gardens, neighbors concerned about the project’s effects on troublesome Muddy Brook, and several members of town boards and commissions.

The meeting began with public comment.

Sally Kleinman asked what Keenan meant when he said recently the gardens might be modified.

“Would there be any portion of the gardens that would remain in the current footprint?” she asked.

“When we talked about modify, modify was something to the effect of, if we had to take say a first row of plots that are closest to the parking to fit something in,” Keenan said. He said that had been discussed at previous meetings.

“It meant keeping most of it, but maybe shuffling a few pieces,” he said. “Right now, we don’t have a scenario where we’re doing that.”

Toni Simonetti, an advocate for the gardens, said the public didn’t attend many of the earlier meetings, and that the committee’s minutes had scant information.

“I would say the minutes do not reflect the texture of the discussion,” she said. “For example, the public discussion is given no descriptive notation in the minutes.”

She said that may be why people didn’t know Keenan had mentioned modifying the gardens before.

Simonetti said she’d filed a second Freedom of Information request to obtain the draft feasibility study.

“The [Town] Attorney’s Office is deliberating that, and I would imagine they will deliberate it until it is final, when it will become public, but I will persist on that,” she said.

“The town does not take verbatim minutes except for the full RTM, so minutes are sparce,” Keenan said. “We don’t pay someone to sit here and take minutes like that.”

“We give our minutes to the town, we give our information to the town, the Town Attorney’s Office decides what is FOIA-able,” Keenan said. “We don’t have any control over it.”

Marissa Dionne Mead of the architecture firm Svigal and Partners went over three possible scenarios for the project. Two more are in the works and will be discussed at a future meeting.

A renovate-in-place scheme would still need an additional 6,500 square feet for more classrooms and a small building in front for administrative functions and, somewhere on the site, a standalone structure of about 18,000 square feet for the Stepping Stones preschool, Mead said.

This scenario, she said, would leave the gardens where they are.

The renovate with additions scheme, she said, still is being worked on and was not detailed Thursday.

Two schemes for a new school were discussed. One would leave the gardens intact, the other would relocate them with about 25 percent more space.

Keenan has said the committee hopes to make a final recommendation on a plan by the end of the month.

“We are going to make a recommendation, and if it takes two weeks longer, we’re taking two weeks longer,” Keenan said in response to a question. “We’d rather get it right than rush it.”

Simonetti, after the meeting, said she was not hopeful after hearing two of the possibilities discussed Thursday would leave the gardens where they are.

“No, I’m not encouraged at all,” she said. She said her sense of the committee’s preference appears to favor the plan that would transplant the gardens.

Thane Grauel grew up in Westport and has been a journalist in Fairfield County and beyond for 35 years. Reach him at editor@westportjournal.com. Learn more about us here.