The Howes House renovation project in West Tisbury is clearly faltering.

Still in the early stages of planning, the proposed $10 million upgrade to the building which serves as a senior center for the three up-Island towns already has a growing chorus of critics.

Concerned about the cost, Aquinnah and Chilmark have had a tepid response. Meanwhile, the West Tisbury historic district commission is calling the plan out of scale and character with village historic district guidelines.

No wonder the Howes House building committee that has been working on the project for several years is feeling frustrated. But rather than digging in its heels or hiring a public relations firm to sell the plan, the building committee would be wise to take a step back and re-evaluate.

The West Tisbury select board has already paused the project once, last February, in an attempt to make the funding formula palatable to Chilmark and Aquinnah. That didn’t work.

From the outset the building committee has had to wrestle with complicated issues over how best to renovate a building that dates to the mid-19th century and was once an inn. Compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act is one issue. Any renovation work on the old building, however small, will trigger a requirement that the entire building be brought up to present-day building codes, including access for people with handicaps.

On top of that, construction costs are through the roof these days, and there are competing needs, with major capital projects either planned or in various stages of completion in every up-Island town.

But there are also philosophical questions that bear more discussion. What do we really need as we age, especially with people living longer these days, thanks in part to healthier lifestyles and so many advances in medicine? And what might our senior centers of the future look like?

The brick and mortar senior centers of today on Martha’s Vineyard were designed and built before the digital age, and before most Island towns had rebuilt and repurposed their libraries essentially as small community centers, with outdoor gardens and expanded indoor space to host art shows, lectures and other events in addition to books and videos on loan. In West Tisbury the free public library, which shares a campus with Howes House, even has a community refrigerator on its porch, stocked with emergency supplies for people in need.

In 2022, as planning got under way for the Howes House renovation, a focus group survey led by the Island nonprofit Healthy Aging posed a wide range of questions to a hand-picked group of up-Island seniors. The report from the survey is available on the town website.

If the building committee hopes to garner financial and community support for this project, it needs to listen to its critics and reconsider what is needed and at what cost.