Selectwoman Anne O'Connor, right, was the only one to cast two votes in favor of the proposed amended Mount Greylock Regional School Agreement. The second time, she was in the majority.

Mount Greylock School Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Greene and Superintendent Douglas Dias address the Williamstown Board of Selectmen.

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Selectmen on Monday voted to approve a single-article special town meeting seeking the town's approval to amend the Mount Greylock Regional School agreement.

But that approval came only after a lengthy discussion during which three members of the five-person board expressed frustration with town officials in Mount Greylock's other member town.

At issue was a proposal by the Mount Greylock School Committee to amend the agreement to change the apportionment of capital expenses.

With a vote on an addition/renovation project likely coming this spring, the town of Lanesborough asked the School Committee to look at changing the agreement to make capital apportionment look more like the mechanism the district uses to apportion annual operating expenses.

Currently, the agreement locks in the apportionment at the time a project is bonded with a formula that gives equal weight to the resident student population and property value in each town of the two-town district.

Lanesborough asked — and the School Committee agreed — that the language should be changed to allow that formula to adjust over the life of a bond, utilizing a five-year rolling average for student population like the one the school uses to apportion operating costs.

That was the proposal that came to Williamstown on Monday.

Before the meeting was over, three of the four members in attendance argued against sending that proposal to the town's voters — though for slightly different reasons. And a 3-1 vote ultimately sent the question to a special town meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 7 p.m. at Williamstown Elementary School.

The evening began with Chairwoman Jane Patton and Selectman Andrew Hogeland arguing that Williamstown should not give up the "circuit breaker" provision it discussed at its Oct. 13 meeting — at the same time the School Committee was deciding to pull that provision out of the proposed agreement.

The circuit breaker would have established a bottom limit to either town's contribution to the building project. Currently, Lanesborough's share is about 33 percent. The Williamstown town officials were happy setting the floor at 25 percent.

Selectman Hugh Daley, who described himself as the author of the circuit breaker idea, tried to convince Patton and Hogeland that it was not really needed, particularly now that discussion of pulling Lanesborough students out of Mount Greylock and creating a tuition agreement with a neighboring district appears to be a dead issue.

"This is as clean an apportionment agreement as we could get between the two towns," Daley said. "There is less risk today of Lanesborough trying to break up the region than there was two weeks ago."

Patton and Hogeland wanted the board not to accept the warrant article as drafted by the School Committee and instead enter into negotiations with Lanesborough.

They argued that Williamstown already was giving Lanesborough a "win" by altering the agreement as it originally asked. And they felt Lanesborough should similarly make a concession.

"I am conflicted," Patton said. "I want to do the right thing. I care about the school. I just don't like feeling like I'm being pushed around in the school yard when there is not enough good-faith negotiation."

Mount Greylock School Committee Chairwoman Greene told the board that the idea of using rolling enrollment averages to apportion long-term debt is standard for other regional agreements she has seen. She also encouraged it to set the special town meeting in order to allow the School Committee to get a new regional agreement in place before the end of the year.

The School Committee wants the new apportionment language to take effect in time to impact the financial projections that would accompany a bond vote for the high school project in the spring.

"If we're not able to vote [on the agreement] this fall ... we're not going to vote in the spring because to conflate the two would be disastrous for the building project," Greene said. "However, will Lanesborough support a building project if they don't know the regional agreement will change the following year?

"We're dealing with a fairly narrow window ourselves. We have been working on this for quite a long time. If the Selectmen do want to get together, that's great, but we won't be voting this fall."

Daley cautioned that if the Williamstown board decided to negotiate with Lanesborough, it would open up other ideas that have been pushed by members of Lanesborough's town government and Lanesborough representatives on the Mount Greylock School Committee, including a provision in the agreement to take into account the value of tax-exempt land in each town. That proposal is targeted at increasing Williamstown's share of the building project because of the town's two largest non-profits: Williams College and the Clark Art Institute.

In the end, Daley and Selectwoman Anne O'Connor voted against Hogeland's motion calling for negotiations with Lanesborough's Selectmen. The motion failed on a vote of 2-2.

And it appeared the Williamstown board was ready to unanimously approve the warrant article.

Then, Greene stepped up to the podium.

"In the interest of full disclosure, Lanesborough's Board of Selectmen voted [tonight] to wait and discuss items," Greene said, relaying information from a School Committee member attending a Lanesborough Selectmen's meeting held concurrently with Williamstown's.

"They have members who want to continue to look at things the Mount Greylock School Committee has said it's not going to entertain."

That news elicited a visible display of frustration from Daley, who flung some papers down on the table and immediately switched sides in the debate.

"My assumption going into this was that that Select Board in Lanesborough would see this as the win that it was and adopt it," Daley said. "If I had known at the beginning of this meeting that they said no, I'd have voted to put the circuit breaker in. ... There's no reciprocation."

In spite of the news from Lanesborough, O'Connor remained steadfast in her support of the proposed amendment to the regional agreement.

"I'm ready to approve this tonight because I want our town to be enthusiastically on board with it," she said.

Patton retorted.

"Our town has done nothing but show total and complete enthusiasm," she said. "We have bent over backwards. We have gone flying down rabbit holes. At some point, enough is enough.

"We're sitting here trying to do the right thing, and they don't pass it?"

Greene told the Williamstown board that the Lanesborough Board of Selectmen does not necessarily reflect the will of the voters, who approved Mount Greylock's school building feasability study in near unanimous fashion at town meeting two years ago.

And she reminded the Williamstown Selectmen that selectmen are not the only ones who can call a special town meeting in Massachusetts.

"Anyone in Lanesborough can bring a citizen's petition and call a town meeting," Greene said. "If you approve a regional agreement amendment, that's what would go on a citizen's petition. Then the voters would decide."

While Daley and Patton took turns expressing their frustration, Hogeland argued for approval of the agreement as drafted by the School Committee — the second time around.

"I'd rather at this point approve the agreement and not tolerate any other changes and get it done," Hogeland said. "As much as it pains me, I'd rather approve it and have it done. If a majority of the board is OK with approving this, we should do it and not leave ourselves open to spending time and money talking about things we don't approve of."

O'Connor moved approval of the warrant article as drafted, and Hogeland seconded. They, along with Patton, voted in favor of the motion with Daley voting "Nay."

In other business on Monday:

• The board approved a new malt and wine license for Williams' renovated Log restaurant on Spring Street (with Patton recusing herself as a partner in Hops & Vines, which will manage the operation at the Log), OK'd a 5K run at the Pine Cobble School on Nov. 14 as part of its Family Food Day and learned that Town Manager Jason Hoch plans to form a working group to look at extending Walden Street to South Street to create a connection between the Village Business District and the Clark.

• O'Connor also broke a bit of news, sharing with the meeting's public access television audience that the attorney general's office had informed the town that its 2015 bylaw banning single-use plastic bags was approved, but had striken language requiring a 10-cent fee.

Hoch said he neeeded to consult with town counsel about the AG's decision, which reached the town at 4:30 Monday afternoon.

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