The Marion Board of Selectmen approved the usage of a little more than $14,000 for the Town House Building Committee.

The committee asked the board for the money at Tuesday night’s meeting so that they could continue to explore options for Town House renovation plans.

The money will come from the more than $100,000 that was already appropriated to the committee from the Community Preservation funds.

After seemingly coming up with a plan to move forward with over the summer, the committee has had to reevaluate after backlash from residents about cost and with the acquisition of the VFW property.

“We have listened to considerable criticism on the cost of our project, and several things have changed since we started out work,” committee member Bill Saltonstall said. “It left us with a hard problem because this is going to be an expensive job.”

Ultimately, the committee has four option it is considering. The first, is the $12 million total renovation plan that was originally planned to be voted on at Town Meeting, the second is to reduce the size and only renovate the original 1876 part of the building and remove the back section, the third would be similar to the second but with an added area in the back for a meeting room and the fourth option is the possibility of building a new building on the VFW site.

“We have a design from our architects from a building on the ball field [next to the Town House] that we discarded, but that design could be used to explore the possibly of the VFW site,” Saltonstall said. “We have four clear directions that we think need to be explored.”

The money approved at the meeting will go toward exploring the options further.

The committee also suggested to the Selectmen the possibility of adding a few questions onto the annual town census about the project to get a better feel of residents’ feelings, particularly about cost and location.

Resident Chris Collings thought the survey was a great idea, and suggested that the committee use cost estimates for the survey questions to get the most accurate idea of what residents want.

“We should be able to give people a reasonable scope,” he said. “Ask people if they want to spend $500,000, or $4 million or $10 million. It’s not about quality of the idea, it’s about can we pay for it?”

The Selectmen agreed that the survey questions should be included in the census.