S-T: January 09, 2011 12:00 AM

Different communities have different priorities, developed and overseen by local Community Preservation Committees. Wareham, for example, has spent 59 percent of its revenue on open space preservation.

A few fumbles

While the vast majority of local CPA projects would be considered successful, some haven't been completed as projected.

For example, Wareham spent $369,792 to develop two baseball and two soccer fields in its Westfield neighborhood. The soccer fields were never finished, the diamonds have not been maintained and no one has emptied the trash containers since the summer. The town now is hoping to get the developer of proposed nearby affordable housing to rehabilitate and maintain the fields.

"Without a doubt, that was a real problem project," said Nancy Miller, chairman of Wareham's CPC. After the project was approved by town meeting in 2004, "the town administrator (Michael Hartman) said he was going to have oversight. At the time, we didn't feel that we should be challenging the town administrator.

"CPC has been one long learning process," Miller said. "We learned a lot with Westfield. As the CPC evolved in Wareham, you began to see us following through on these projects more and more."

Wareham, like most other local communities, gives little or no staff support to its CPC.

"We're just volunteers," said Worthen of Wareham's committee. "We don't have paid staff."

And Dunham, her colleague on the committee, added, "We're only the facilitator for CPC projects. We're not policy makers."

Wrestling with issues

Local CPCs also wrestle with questions of publicly financing work on private structures and providing public access to property they have restricted, even though ownership may remain in private hands.

At its fall Town Meeting, Wareham rejected a public-private partnership to renovate historic Webster Hall, a loss lamented by the CPC.

"We have to look at the big picture," member Sherbie Worthen said. "We want businesses to be successful. We want people to stop here."

Wareham and Acushnet have spent less than the required 10 percent of their CPA revenue on affordable housing, although they're allowed to set the money aside to use for suitable projects in the future.