Fayette voters will decide Nov. 5 whether to sell historic Starling Hall, pictured in August. The final hearing on the referendum question will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Fayette Central School gymnasium.  Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal file

FAYETTE — A week out from the referendum — and on the eve of the final public hearing about the vote — leaders on both sides of the debate over selling Starling Hall hope they can make a final push in the yearslong fight over the historic building.

The public hearing, at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Fayette Central School gymnasium, serves as a final chance for those campaigning for and against the sale of Starling Hall to attempt to sway voters in a deeply divided town and inform those who don’t know much about the issue.

Fayette voters will be asked Nov. 5 on a separate local ballot whether they support forcing a sale of Starling Hall by the end of 2025. Tuesday’s public hearing is the fourth on the issue since August.

But Brent St. Clair, who organized the petition to sell Starling Hall this summer, said the public hearings so far haven’t been particularly helpful.

The same group of people have shown up to each of the three previous public hearings, he said — almost all speaking in support of the town keeping ownership of the hall. He said residents who would speak in favor of the sale are staying home because they already know how they’ll vote.

“Everyone that gets up says the hall is great for this reason, the hall is great for this reason,” St. Clair said. “There’s no question and answer. So why would you want to go to a hearing when you know how you feel about it, how you’re going to vote?”

St. Clair has argued Fayette’s taxpayers have spent far too much maintaining, restoring and renovating the hall — the oldest building in Maine purpose-built as a Grange Hall and a new addition to Maine Preservation’s Most Endangered Historic Places list. St. Clair successfully led a petition effort to limit taxpayer spending on the hall to just $5,000 per year in 2022, but failed to prevent the approval of $15,000 in town surplus for an engineering study at this summer’s town meeting.

Almost all restoration work on the hall has been funded by the Friends of Starling Hall, a nonprofit group founded in 2014 in response to an effort to sell the hall. In those 10 years, the group has raised and spent more than $300,000 on renovations. Recently, the nonprofit has funded “Save Starling Hall” signs that have shown up across Fayette urging residents to vote no on the referendum.

Taxpayers have contributed, by comparison, just $55,000 to capital improvements on Starling Hall since 1985 and about $5,000 per year on average for regular maintenance and utilities.

Jon Beekman, a member of Friends of Starling Hall, adjusts a Grange ribbon on an old copy of the Bible on the second floor of Starling Hall in Fayette during a tour in August. The wood-paneled room was the meeting area when the building was a Grange. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal file

Jon Beekman, a member of the Friends of Starling Hall and a leader in the effort to keep Starling Hall in town hands, said during the first public hearing that the $15,000 engineering study approved this summer is central to securing future outside funding for the hall’s restoration. Without the study to back up the grant applications, he said, agencies are far less likely to give the nonprofit any funding.

“I’ve written many of the grants we’ve received for Starling Hall over the last 10 years, and without that study, you can’t write the grant,” Beekman said during the August public hearing. “Because the first thing they ask is, ‘What do you have to support that need?’ ‘Well, it’s OK.’ That doesn’t cut it.”

That’s part of the reason Beekman initially attempted to delay the referendum: The engineering study will not be complete by the Nov. 5 vote, and the town may be on the hook for paying back grants the Friends of Starling Hall has received to restore the building. And the grant money may be in addition to the more than $60,000 the town still owes on a bond aimed at improving the hall — which the Friends of Starling Hall have paid every cent on so far.

The Board of Selectmen approved a statement during an August meeting officially opposing St. Clair’s referendum question while committing to not spending any taxpayer money on further renovations, leaving that responsibility to the Friends of Starling Hall.

“Simply put, the future benefits that Starling Hall provides to the town are of greater value than the proceeds from its potential sale,” the statement said.

But Chairperson Lacy Badeau said during the August public hearing that she acknowledged the commitment was temporary. Future boards and petitions could easily change taxpayer funding — that’s the nature of the town’s form of government, she said.

And if residents vote Nov. 5 to force a sale of Starling Hall by the end of next year, the building and its restoration will be out of the control of the town entirely.