TURNER – The Turner Center for the Arts was dissolved by a two-to-one margin at the Turner town meeting Saturday.

By a vote of 105 to 47, voters said the Turner Center for the Arts is no longer an entity under the municipal umbrella and Jennifer Wadsworth, co-executive director of the organization, which has been housed in the Leavitt Institute Building since 2005, said the doors of the gallery will be closed immediately.

“We’re going away,” Wadsworth said as she told voters that the end of the local art gallery and performance venue would be the consequence of cutting off TCA’s current relationship with Turner.

She said the arts center does not have the resources to establish a non-profit organization independent of the town. Information distributed by TCA at the town meeting stated the organization has contributed $24,000 to the Leavitt Institute Building Fund and that TCA pays its share of utilities and heating costs.

The vote was clearly a bitter disappointment to Wadsworth and several other representatives of the arts center.

“There is no next step,” Wadsworth said following the secret ballot on the issue. “Our responsibility is to the artists,” she emphasized. She said arrangements will be made to return works of art at the gallery to the contributing artists.

The perception that TCA unreasonably expanded its advantages as a town entity led to strong language in a presentation by John Zocchi, a member of the Leavitt Institute Board of Directors. He said, “Because serious problems have arisen, the board would like that status to come to an end.”

Zocchi said it wasn’t originally understood “that town entity status could also be used coercively to force the Leavitt Institute Building Board to accept a drastically reduced rent.” He said TCA actions “have led to unfortunate and outrageous outcomes” and he added that “it has consumed a lot of goodwill.”

Ike Goodwin, serving as moderator of the Turner town meeting, relinquished the moderator’s gavel so he could speak on the TCA issue. He agreed with Zocchi and others that “an atmosphere of hostility” has developed, but he expressed a different approach.

“A vote to approve this article is clearly a vote to continue the current hostility,” Goodwin said, “with the likely result that the TCA will cease to exist, and we will again be in a situation where we have no outside revenue stream to support the building until we find a commercial tenant or come up with some other solution.”

Although he praised the Leavitt Institute Building Board’s intent to avoid saddling the town with a financial burden, he said, “It is my opinion that having one town board take aggressive actions to terminate the existence of another town board will not help us out of the current financial difficulties.”

Eva Leavitt, Turner town manager, said action on monetary items in the town meeting warrant resulted in a total of $2,445,010 being raised by voters. That is $10,353 less than last year.

Leavitt said some of the savings come from surplus and transfers from various accounts, and she said that means there is a total of $75,455 which will not be reflected in taxpayer obligation.

Elizabeth Bullard, chair of the SAD 52 Board of Directors, reported on current school budget deliberations, and she called it “a perfect storm kind of year.” She told Turner residents that past budgets have aimed for flat funding, but she added, “That will not be the case this year.”

About 170 Turner residents attended the town meeting at Leavitt Area High School.