Whately and Sunderland Boards Plan Joint Letter to Deerfield After IMA Withdrawal Threat Passes

WHATELY -- June 29, 2026, Whately and Sunderland select boards coordinated their response to the South County Senior Center dispute after Deerfield's Selectboard declined Monday evening to submit a withdrawal notice from the tri-town inter-municipal agreement before the June 30 deadline. A Whately board member who attended Deerfield's 5 p.m. meeting by Zoom reported that by missing the deadline, any Deerfield withdrawal is now pushed at least two years out. The boards agreed their town administrators would jointly draft a letter to Deerfield asking it to honor the Board of Oversight's authority in any new site search. Joyce Ponderfortune, chair of the Board of Oversight, called in from Stockholm to tell the boards that the oversight body had received explicit encouragement from Deerfield Finance Committee members as recently as last June before Deerfield's alternative 8 Conway Street proposal appeared this past winter. The boards' short-term plan is to confirm whether the Amherst Road site, whose lease expires March 1, can be renewed for a year, ideally with an early-termination clause if a permanent solution emerges sooner; the longer-term task of finding a new permanent home remains with the Board of Oversight, which members noted had already spent roughly $100,000 in prior studies recommending the 112 Amherst Road site that Deerfield's town meeting rejected.