TURNER – Town meeting voters may decide the fate of the Turner Center for the Arts.

Selectmen voted 4-1 to ask townspeople whether to keep the center running with an appointed board as an arm of the town or set it loose.

“It wouldn’t kill the center,” Selectman Jody Goodwin said Friday.

Not directly anyway.

Cutting it loose would force it to change into an independent nonprofit group. Thousands of dollars in grant money might be jeopardized. The center would also be forced to close its doors at the Leavitt Institute Building for months while its tax-exempt status is preserved, she said.

“I don’t know if it would survive,” said Goodwin, who also serves on the center’s board of directors.

That would be OK with Dennis Richardson, the former selectman who introduced the measure.

“They were going to pay their own way,” Richardson said of the center, which was created by town meeting voters in 2005. When the center began asking for money from the town, the deal was broken, he said.

“I felt disenfranchised,” he said.

It’s not the first whiff of controversy for the center, which opened in October 2005 in the former schoolhouse’s first floor beneath the town historical society and the library.

The center operates galleries, showing off the work of local and regional painters and sculptors.

The revenue created by the center, through memberships and grants, has been unable to keep up with the contributions requested by the committee overseeing the town building.

The Leavitt Institute Building Committee wanted $1,000 per month for the space in its first year and $1,250 after that. The center fell behind.

Last August, the arts center board voted to leave.

A month later, the building committee’s six members all signed a letter to selectmen requesting that they kick out the center if it didn’t pay up.

But the center remains. In October, selectmen unanimously voted to accept the center’s offer of $500 per month to occupy the building.

With a little help from the town, the center can continue, said Goodwin, who was the only dissenter in last week’s vote by selectmen.

The center hopes to create an endowment that would be able to keep it going long-term. In the short-term, the town would have to lend a hand on the maintenance of the historical building.

The alternative is to leave the space empty.

Goodwin believes few commercial tenants would be able to operate within the narrow parameters of a building that sits adjacent to two schools on land owned by SAD 52.

School officials must sign off on any tenant in the building. There is little parking, only six or eight spaces allotted to the whole place, and educators frown on any use that might cause lots of traffic.