Meeting transcript
Andover IWWC Zoom Meeting
January 10, 2023 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
So, oh, and, Commissioner or, Alternate Commissioner Smith, is not present. We have one change in the order to the agenda. I want to add agenda item 9B, which is a fiscal year 'twenty three-'twenty four budget request. We've received word. We need to get that in to the town so that the, and have it approved, so that the Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance can begin working on the town budget. So, I'll make a motion to the effect that we add that, again, out of 9B FY 'twenty three-'twenty four budget request. I'll second. I have a second. Okay, I got a second. I'll just ask for a show of hands. So, those in favor of motion signify by raising your right hand. Okay, motion carries unanimously. Items number well, okay, item number four, approval of minutes. Our last meeting was on 10/03/2023. I'll give you 10/03/2022, excuse me, and I'll give you a moment to review those. They were distributed. I hope you have them handy enough to review, and then I'll ask for a motion to approve those minutes whenever you feel comfortable.
I'll make a motion to approve the minutes from the October 3 Inland Wetlands Watercourse Commission meeting. I'll second that.
Okay, we've got a motion and second. All in favor? Well, no, let's do this by roll call. Commissioner Larson. Well, did have a couple of comments before Go ahead. Folk
there. On the first page, the fourth little paragraph up from the bottom, says, what we can to preserve the length of the lake that should be the life of the lake. Although we can preserve the length too. Okay,
so substituting life for length in that sentence. Anything else? Nope, all I had.
Think them none again, we'll proceed with the vote. Commissioner
Larson. Oh, hold on. A minute. There it was. I found page two. I knew I had that. So on page three, about halfway down where it starts, George Elliott spoke about last month's report in the cleanup of tires and wheels in the vernal pit. I think we're looking for vernal pool there. I think you're right there. Good catch. That's it.
No, I'm ready to vote. Oh, that's all right. Going once, going twice. Once again, Commissioner Morrison. Aye. Commissioner Masky. Aye. And Commissioner Monroe. Aye.
And I also vote aye, so the motion carries four-zero-zero. And I can close that. Okay, items five, six, and seven are not germane since there's no public, no new business, and no old business. Item eight, agent report enforcement actions. You mentioned one thing about a permanent extension. So, agent one. I think we incorporated that in our regulations as some grandfathering of it's complicated, but yeah. Okay, yeah, so so much for two and five year permit. Yeah, Okay. Right. I'll make a note of that. We can work that out and maybe take it up at the next meeting. Okay, it doesn't look like there's been any action on that permit. So Right. Yeah, that was the big piece. Okay. Any other questions about agent activities? I had one. I wondered if there's been any, action on, let's see, it was permit 20. It's on Lake Road, Lock 22, the driveway and culvert installation. Been in contact from the permit holder for the for the applicant or an engineer. Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. Okay. I just wanna follow-up, like, as as commissioner Larson, pointed out at previous meetings, there's sometimes a slip in terms of communication on what gets done versus what gets approved. Okay. Well, moving on then, we have, I see, Mr. Tuttle, from Public Works Department on the call now. And, Item 9A on the agenda is discussion for policy for projects in wetlands or upland review areas by public works, especially roadworks. So, Mr. Tuttle, if you could give us a brief description of what you're trying to accomplish here, of what you'd like the Commission to do to facilitate
your work.
All right, good evening. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm come to you guys tonight for discussion tonight, further meetings, you know, future meetings. What can we do at Public Works basically to make it a little bit easier for routine maintenance for catch basins, the water courses that immediately enter and exit cross culverts. Routine maintenance that needs to be done around structures and the waterways off the road, you know, the little ditch lines that go to a culvert, things like that. Is it such a, know, we got to present a plan for each and every one of these things, or can I just go along or we, you know, as we're doing road work, we need to do some maintenance, and we just take care of what our needs are within the towns right away?
Okay. You mentioned I got a copy of your email, to Agent Wagner and forwarded that. You also mentioned, specifically, brush and tree woody plant maintenance in the vicinity, as well as the, and separately, kind of the hardware, the hardscaping part of it, the actual structures, and as you say, the waterways that exist on the town roadways, Right, road rider
so to that, I didn't get to that part yet, but, you know, for instance, I'm going to bring up the bridge over the Hop River at Hendee. So when the water levels down, there's a couple of sandbars or whatever, just areas where the trees growing underneath the bridge or they're up against the wing walls and that stuff needs to be removed. Otherwise, it's going to cause damage as the trees grow bigger to those structures. Know, so and that stuff typically needs to be clear 25 feet away from the structures. That's, know, same thing with our catch basins. We've got some old head walls that are stone. You know, I've already had to do a couple of trees that were just about ready to be uprooted. They are almost down anyway. Can speak of two trees on Townsend at that cross culvert there. You know, if the tree falls over and it takes the stone abutments out, you know, that's a problem. Yeah, but it didn't affect, you know, that was an emergency thing, I had to get it done. So I guess my question is, what is the best way that
at Public Works that we can accomplish these tasks without basically making it, it puts these jobs off for could be months at a time. I mean, it simple or just we have a policy and then I can call, know, Joe, the inland wetland agent and let them know what's going on. I know other towns do similar situations. You know, may have a catch basin that's crumbling that we have to rebuild. You know, so it's simple projects like that. I mean, I call them simple. It's nothing more than repairing, replacing maintenance of existing structures and existing waterways.
Okay. Well, thanks for that. I'd like the opportunity for commissioners to ask questions or clarification on this. Obviously, we can't take any action on this tonight, but it would require some revision to policy or regulations or both, And I'll speak to that in a little bit, but first I want to get again back to the Commissioners to see if anybody has any questions or concerns or comments regarding, again, your basic objective is to streamline the process for, again, what we'll call for the sake of discussion, routine maintenance and repairs. We could also perhaps look at emergency repairs and how we handle those. So, first of all, Commissioner Larson, do you have any questions, comments?
Well, an observation, I go back to, I think it was a year or two ago that Jeff Murray was interested in pulling some branches out of, I think it's Chamberlain Pond. Yes. And it seemed like a pretty benign thing to do, but we concluded that he could not do that without a permit, although if a private property owner were doing that, he could. That was maintenance. But since it was town work, and that might not be the right term, he had to go through getting a permit to pull branches out of the out of the pond.
And I'm sort of in favor of streamlining the process as Jay's talking about. I just I didn't I didn't recall that until I was reading through the proposal trying to think about different things and how that went there. So that was one concern. Are we precluded from doing that because our regulations might prohibit it? I guess the other thing that that would is always a concern to me on these different items is, you know, have we identified the wetlands boundary or the upland review area boundary and where we're actually adding that? And that's probably, I don't know if that's a holdover from previous, not having it done or not, but you would think you know it's always going to be maintenance on these same kind of systems. We're always doing the roadwork in the same areas, so it might be nice if you know and Jay, you know way in advance what you're going to be doing. We could you know start building the portfolio of actually having the wetlands delineated so that when we know what what you're asking to do, we can know whether it's in the wetlands itself or in the Upland review area and that kind of thing.
Yeah, if I may, Jed, just make a quick comment. So that's not always the case that we know way in advance. Now I'm kind of speaking to you know general routine maintenance. Now the project that we did last year and I'm going to speak to that a little bit over on Birch not Birch, Shottie Mill and Birch. So that was both routine maintenance and we had some improvements there. So yeah, that was a project. There were some things where we added on, but ultimately we didn't change anything where the water courses specifically were except for we redirected. I gotta shut my phones off. Gotta keep my phones close by because you never know when you gotta get interrupted. Anyway, one specifically, jeez, I forget the address. I think it was 21 down before the rail trail, the one where we redirected the outlet. So, that was due to the water was going in the person's backyard. Sediment had built up so much over the years that it was going in the wrong direction. And we find these situations in many locations as we're scraping the edges of the road, doing the little waterways to where the water goes off the side of the road and leads to a cross culvert whatnot.
So these culverts, some of them that are half full, it's as simple of reestablishing the flow line at flow line of the pipe, taking the sediment out, and then building a little plunge pool at the end of the pipe that we can maintain. Ultimately, that should be the goal for our department, public works. We don't want sediment or things building up so much because we ignore them because it's difficult to get a job done. And I don't mean to sound like that's a problem, but sometimes it's difficult for us to get things done. And maybe we put a blind eye to it. Well, we'll get to it someday when we have time. But we really need to take action on some of these things and this the simpler things. It's easy for me because I can just go in and do it because I know what I need to do. If it's a matter of just reshaping that little water course at the end of the pipe where it comes out so it flows like it's supposed to, like it was designed to do. Whoever built the road and the lay of the land years ago to make it go where it goes, but now the sediments build up. That's not a good thing. Let me take care of it and move on. It's not always a because a lot of those things we can do is we're going along cleaning our ditch lines. You know, we take, I want to take the trees out away from head walls. I want to open them up so I can see them as I'm driving by and inspecting them. So it's more of
a notification that we're doing it. You know, I called or send Joe or the wetlands agent a note, say, hey, we're going to be working over here. And it's not like I'm affecting anything, but I'm working immediately right there. Those are the kind of things that I'm talking about. Not so much a full blown project like we did on Shotty Mill Road. That's a little bit more in-depth. Yes, it should have some review questions asked, but I'm more on the side of just routine maintenance.
Okay. I'm certainly not opposed to that. Know, the first paragraph in the draft, and you know, it's a draft, talks about any repairs, maintenance, or replacement of structures or drainage systems. Can be, there's a significant difference between what that says in pulling leaves and trees that are growing in sediment out of your little pools. You've designed it. I guess maybe one of the things you could do is when we approve a permit, we could approve restoring it to design conditions at your discretion or something I don't know.
Yeah, mean if we if I come across a collapsed pipe you know you know let's just say a 15 inches 18 inches pipe that's I'm not looking to change it. I just need to replace it. So that's a cross cover. Couple days worth of work. We just dig it up and put in a new one. Fix the head walls, know, ends of the pipe. That's is is that is that something that we have to go for a permit or can it be just a notification and we get the job done? Because the per you know, if we're doing permit stuff like that, then then that that all takes time And it's kind of accumulative of things.
I guess, you know, I'm looking for feedback from Joe or George on the Chamberlain Pond analogy. Were we too strict, you know, in that? Or how does what Jay's asking for compared to that one we went through?
I think your point was cogent. There is a little difference there. They were asking to do activities directly in a water course, you know, not just around or peripheral to, and it amounted to removal of material. So it was pretty clear from our regulations that that was a regulated activity. Some of the things that Mr. Tuttle is talking about might not necessarily be regulated activities, or we could revise our regulations to accommodate those kind of activities. I've got some examples from Joe Wagner came up with some examples from other towns that we can take up in a minute. But as I say, first, I wanted to get your immediate reactions, comments, concerns, and sort of to guide us in whether we think that this is an area where we could make some headway in terms of looking at how we could accomplish facilitating that process for public works projects. So, Jud, let me give the other commissioners a chance to weigh in here.
Commissioner Mashke, did you have any questions, comments, concerns about this sort of line of inquiry here?
A question would be, and I'm new, so forgive me if this is, you know, inappropriate, but I'm wondering, could those, so what you're saying about the places that are regular maintenance, could those places be identified? Like, could you just, you know, put a group of 20 different places where you'd like to not have to do a permit, but you could go in and regularly do those maintenance?
I mean, anything could be identified. It depends on, you know, when you're going to do it. So if I identify 20 places and it takes me two years to get it done or three, you know, it just it's part of you know, we do our routine maintenance every year on the sides of our roads. So, in anywhere there's a catch basin, anywhere there's a cross culvert, as we're going by, we try to inspect them and it might make, you know, specifically the catch basin repairs. Is there a list in my head of where we need to do catch basins? Yes, there is. Those would be kind of projects, but sometimes we just need to do a catch basin right away because it fell apart,
you know. And would you do that? I mean, you were saying something about if you had an emergency,
I don't think you would wait for a permit, correct? You would just I would note, I would make notification and we just got to go to it. But generally, if we're doing a lot of catch basin repairs or a specific area, people would be notified about it and it'd be, would I have time to go through a whole permitting process and spend the time doing that and having meetings and maybe,
you know, you would be wasting time. And I, I get it, you know, like you were saying on Hendi, I live off of Hendi, so I know exactly what you're talking about. Yep. Me, if that's something that you're doing that you have to do or have to review on a regular basis, then that that makes sense that you don't need a permit for that, that you could just notify this commission to say, Yep, we're going to be doing it. Or yes, we did do it, but not to have to go do a permanent every time.
And to me, it makes sense. Correct. I'm just trying to find a way that is works for all of us that I can streamline the routine, the simple maintenance really. Mean, the Hendy Road going up the hill, there's a whole bunch of cross culverts that need to be cleaned and you know, the pipes are almost full. So, but that takes, you know, it's going to take some time and some coordination just to get that work done. Right. But that's, that's
just a, that's just a waterway when it rains. That's why I was asking if you know, like if you can list that list the, you know, and you know, just make a general list that you know, is agreed upon. As long as you're just doing maintenance and no major changes, that those would be excluded from needing a permit.
Yes, those things, yeah, that's kind of what I'm asking for is, you know, but you know, is it gonna happen not every time, it just might be a phone call and say, hey, I gotta get this done, you know, but it is a, you know, a cleaning maintenance thing, not a change. Right.
No, I think that's a good idea because obviously paperwork is can take forever. It's time consuming. You're right. Yeah. No, that's the only thing I had to say. Okay. Commissioner Monroe.
Oh, I I've been thinking about this, especially while you're talking about it. The only thing I could see where there might be a problem without getting a permit is if there's a homeowner or a landowner or that complains about something that's being done and there's no, like, I don't know, permit to do it. I guess that would be the only thing that I'd be concerned about. I agree with what you were talking about with Jan there. If if you if you have hotspots throughout town, which sounds like we do, and you know what where they are, and you know you're gonna have a problem, and it's not on that somebody else's property, I would think that it would be reasonable to expect the crew to go out there and do it and not need a permit.
So the towns and the state and I can't speak to the statute at the moment, but they do have a right to drain and to properties. Of course, we're not supposed to have any impact to them. You know, there's there's water courses that were designed on these roads that go to somewhere. We're not supposed to put additional impact on those areas unless it's permitted and you know reviewed and whatnot, but the routine maintenance of those that exist, you have a right to maintain those. You got to protect the public. The water has to go where it was designed to go. So again, it just I hate, you know, I hate keeping repeating, you know, that it's a simple thing, but it's not. It's, you know, and it's common sense you think would apply in a lot of things and it's it's kind of a what's sad to say is that there's a lot of lack of maintenance and that that's difficult to work through when there's so much of it. And some of these things are just easy to do when we're going by. It's a few scoops here and there. It's a, you know, get the leaves out of the trench that are all piled up and make a plunge pool at the end so the sediment falls right there on the side of the road and not going into one's property.
It's the little things. Replacing a pipe, a couple of catch basins that are crumbling, that's routine. It's when you start building new stuff, yeah, now you've got to have formal plans and you know things get this discussion.
What he was saying, sorry, what he was saying before about if it was on some private property, I mean, would think that if you ever touch that person's property, yes, it needs a permit, know, but if it's something that happens every five years, then, you know, it should probably be.
Yeah, well, all the water courses go to somebody's property. They all lead into somebody's property. And if there's a, you know, a pile of sediment that's right there off the side of the road, you know, I don't want that sediment going into that person's property. I want to capture it on my So, if I can correct that easily right then and there, you know, at the time that we're there, that's what I would like to do.
But currently, would currently, if you saw that that had happened, you see that someone's got a lot of sediment, you would currently, you would have to do a permit? Correct. Okay. Yep.
And you know, it's a lot of a lot of times when there's something, you know, like that, I'll just go knock on the person's door and and I said, hey, there's a lot of sediment. I'll walk them out there. I did that on shotty mill to the gentleman that had, I call it the swoosh way where we moved everything off the edge of the road to get the water. You know, that was quite entailed to get that done. And he had a lot of sediment in his property that was actually in the wetlands. So, and we went in and removed that. And basically, think we restored the wetland, got rid of all that old old sediment. Something like that, you're going in a little bit further than, you know, the town right yeah, it needs to be reviewed make sure we're doing the right thing knock on the person's door make sure and but I want to try to prevent that right that's what I that's my goal.
What do you do with the sediment that you pull out of all these places?
We take it to our pit and we have I'm we're starting to build a loan pile of dirty loan so we can screen it and reuse it. So the different materials that we take off the sides of our roads, as long as there's no invasives in it, we're separating it from the stuff that has invasives, which we do not want to put that back on the edge of the road. We try to reuse it where we can and get vegetation back on the sides of our roads so we try to prevent the erosion.
I mean, I would be comfortable with a semi detailed list of all the things that you would like to do that maybe, you know, we expect to be done on a routine basis. I know every year the vacuum truck comes down your Lake Road here and sucks all the muck out of all the catch basins. Yep. I would have never thought that that was something we needed a permit for. It's just something that you do and I would have liked to say and I'd actually thought about it in the past, but I hadn't and I just expected it to be done. That's good. So I certainly want to encourage more of that, not less of it. I think by approving those kinds of things, you know, list maybe nothing more is needed than that. Guess that would be between you and Joe to figure out what Joe wants, but I think it's a good thing to be done. We just need to know where does the sediment go so we're not just dumping it back in end over lake or something. No, no, no. And I know you're not doing that. But you know, I think we owe it to know what the basic process is. And then we say, yeah, just we expect you to go out and do those things.
Yeah. How's your wife going? Yeah. We've we've never had a permit for something like that. Right, I was going to comment on that. I have that. Yeah, I think that the couple of points that have arisen here. One is, of course, the scope of work, And it seems that we have to tread a line between the kinds of activities, Jay, you're talking about, where you're coming along, you're doing some cleanup, and you say, Oh, there's a situation there. It will be simple, straightforward if we just deal with it now, okay? But at some point, that project is going to take some planning, all right? You're going to have to back up. And looking at the permits that we've issued for public works over the past few years, we have the drainage at the intersection of Shawty Mill and Wales Road, okay, that was adjacent to a wetland. We permitted it, and it was the kind of project where you had to put some planning into it because you were going to be digging up a big section of road and replacing
a pipe, okay? It was not a trivial matter. We approved the work on Hop River Bridge at Bunker Hill Road. Well, Ta'o, you know, that was an emergency situation. Nobody anticipated that that bridge was going to blow out, and, you know, you had to do something. We gave you the permit to do that. And then there was the work on Shawty Mill and Birch Lane that was, again, that you just alluded to. There was some serious planning that went into, and the extent of the work went beyond the immediate vicinity of the roadway, and it involved redirecting water courses. So, those are clearly situations where permits were in order, it seems to me, and that, you know, that with the planning process that had to go into that, the addition of a permit application wasn't a huge burden. No, you know, driving along Shawnee Mill and, you know, cleaning out the drainways and come to a plunge pool that's, oh, how did that get so full? Let's clean it out right now. That makes sense. And, you know, we, I think, what I'm hearing from the commissioner is that policy and or regulations that would give you the latitude to do that without having to apply for a permit makes perfectly good sense.
I think that we need to think about, you know, what the dividing line is, okay? If you're tearing up a road to install a new length of pipe? Maybe, you know, because that's one example you use. It would be, you know, a couple of days work, and let's do it while we're working in this area. But, you know, thatbut certainly projects like the, you know, the Shawnee Mill improvements, again, it seems to me that a permit would definitely be in order. And looking at the policies and regulations for other towns, at least the Ledyard one and the Mansfield one that Joe had brought to my attention, you know, they make that distinction. The Ledyard regulation says that you can do things like appropriate measures to mitigate erosion, maintenance drainage culverts and cleanouts the first 25 feet, reopening a culvert discharge, as well as emergency procedures determined by the mayor. Well, we don't have one or a designated official. Emergency work for the safety of town residents may be performed under the purview of the director of public works. A permit for the emergency work may be requested after the activity. Okay? So, that's kind of what we did with Bunker Hill Bridge. We weren't forcing you to wait until we got through the process to get to work on the situation, and I don't think any reasonable person would want to do that. So the question then for the Commission, given the, again, a sense of general agreement on principle that you should be able to go ahead and do that kind of routine maintenance without having to file a separate permit for every
activity, but at the same time reserving the right to require a permit for planned activities of a certain scope, you know, we've got to figure out how to implement that. And you say we could do it partly through regulations, which is the Mansfield approach. We could do it through our regulations, which has the advantage of, how shall I say it, giving it some permanence. You know, if it's in the regulations, it's clear cut. Yeah. You would have that, you know, you would have certain abilities as of right, and nobody's going to change that without some effort. Whereas policies, you know, can be interpreted differently. There's a little more leeway with policy. And again, given the size of the town, the fact that we don't have, you know, a lot of people working either for public works or for the land use and building departments, we do need to streamline, the process as much as we can. So, what I'd like to do at this point is to kind of take this under advisement, look a little bit more at the policies, you know, and thanks for providing, Agent Wagner with more
examples that we can look at, so that we can then draft a policy or regulations, that will get us towards that goal. And we could certainly take that up at our next meeting. We can, you know, make sure that that's on the agenda. If it's a change in the regulations, it's going to take a little more time because, well, we have to notify the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. We have to have a hearing on any amendments to our regulations. But, you know, we'll try to to work this out. And I think, Jenny, if you could come back to us too with a more, shall I say, fleshed out list of, you know, things that you've done recently or that you may anticipate doing in the near future that would fall under the kinds of activities that you think would be that could be permitted either as of right or as a standing policy.
Okay. Yeah, Just just to that quick and I hate to take up more of your time. There there is one thing we talked about the trees removing around abutments and whatnot. Add well, who knows if we're going get any deep freezes or so. If the water levels are down and you know, I've been looking at a few of our bridges and and whatnot. I try to keep up on that stuff. And that Bunker Hill, not Bunker Hill, the Hendy Bridge and this is the other one escapes me at the minute moment. But anyway, there's some trees at the one on Hendy over the Hop River. I really do want to clear those out. And if it's feasible for us to get down there, I would like, you know, I don't know if I need to file a permit or anything. I would like to get that those done over the course of the winter. You know, because getting down in there is good when the ground's frozen and crunchy a little bit, we're not really disturbing anything and then we can get them up out, get, you know, everything out of there.
Right, this involves, I think this is vegetation that's actually in the water course, not just in the Upland area. Yeah. You've got stuff that's in the channel as it were. Well, would be if the water level
rise. Yeah. Yeah. So that's something that if I need to file a permit or you can discuss it and let me know. But the other things as far as, you know, I got a few ideas in my head. Can certainly put a list together as we start going around and scraping our roads, because eventually we'll be doing a little bit of some drainage maintenance.
Yeah, off the top of my head, would say that under the current circumstance, under the current situation, it would be a good idea for you to apply for a permit for the Hendy Road clearance work because, you know, as I read our regulations now, you know, that would not be an as of right activity. That's an activity that would require a permit. No, that's one of the things we want to address. But as you say, it's going to take some time for us to either formulate a policy and or amend our regulations to get us to the point where we're satisfied that we've met your needs while still adhering to the statutes and regulations regarding activities in watercourses especially. And, you know, some of this is, you know, clearly the removal of vegetation in the upland review area. Joe can approve that, and I don't think we even need a particular permit or policy or permit for that kind of work. That should be something you could do as right. And some of the other things you mentioned certainly seem reasonable to do as if right. But like I say, we have to come up with the dividing line between what's as of right or allowed by policy versus what's going to require a permit. Okay, I'll get together with Joe.
Okay, yeah, do that. And as I say, we'll share that information about other towns so that we can, you know, I always like to work from worked examples because that means that somebody else has done the really heavy work of figuring out how to make a policy or regulation, to fit the needs. Okay? Go. You know, that's an interesting way of approaching it. And I think that might, yeah, I would definitely be interested in seeing, again, all the different alternatives that have been developed to address. This is obviously a common need. I'm sure every public works department director in the state of Connecticut is faced with the issue of, you know, what do we do about wetlands permits? You know, and clearly, as he said, at some point you're going to have to ask for permits for certain kinds of work. But, you know, we've got to find a way to allow you to do the work that, you know, immediately needs to be done. Any other comments from commissioners? Okay. Well, then, again, pending further information, we'll make sure that this is on the agenda for our next meeting. We may have some concrete proposals by that time for, you know, again, a means to that end. Really? Okay?
Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for your time and presentation. Let you go on to your next item of business that you have to do. Okay. Have
a good night. Alright. Thank you. Okay. So moving on then, we have the budget. Again, we have to take action on this tonight because it's due in town hall by the end of the week, I think. And of course, we didn't have meetings in November and December, so we couldn't talk about it at that time. The budget proposal, I think I shared to you, I sent it around, I don't know if everybody got it, but I sent an email this afternoon with a PDF of the current year budget and the expenditures so far. I'll just quickly walk through. Of course, the major item on the budget is the stipend fees for the board clerk. Hooray. I'm so glad that we have a board clerk.
And I'm sure Joe is also very relieved not to be having to take minutes. So, the fact is that, you know, I don't know if $14.50 is adequate. Normally we have about 10 meetings, you know, there's 12 regular meetings scheduled. We may have a couple special meetings, and then we'll probably have a couple of cancellations because we don't have any business. So, you know, I have no idea, and I only hope that the $14.50 that we currently have budget is adequate. And I know your services are shared with other land use departments, so I figured that we could probably work it out between us and the building department as needed. We have a little bit of money in there for training. Basically, that would cover if, well, if Agent Wagner or if any member of the Commission wanted to attend meetings or training sessions relevant, for example, the Connecticut Association of Conservation of Inland Wetlands and Conservation Commissions, CACIWIC, as it's known, has an annual meeting, and if members wanted to attend, that would cover their registration and mileage for attendance. The past couple of years, of course, those conferences have been virtual, which makes them less attractive in terms of opportunities for networking and professional development. So, I don't know. I think we should maintain that line in the budget just in case,
in particular for A. J. Wagner's benefit should he have the opportunity to attend meetings of such like. We have $65 in the budget for, well, it's for membership in the Connecticut Association of Conservation Commission and Enlightenment Commission, so we'll continue with that. And we have a line item for office supplies. Now, Agent Wagner suggested to the town manager that we could or town administrator that we could perhaps combine that budget, with the, building department because basically they share their sharing office supplies as it is now. I don't know from a budgetary point whether it makes a good, makes sense to align part of it to one commission and another part to another commission. That's beyond my purview, as long as Joe can get the office supplies that he needs to do the job. And I don't know whether it amounts to $250 worth or not. Yeah, it is. Printer paper, a couple of toner cartridges. Yeah, that's right. You have a lot of legal filings, don't you? You have to send out official,
correspondence. So, in any event, what I'll do, I'll make a motion to approve a budget request of $19.65 dollars as noted in the provisional budget supplied by the TAB. I'll second. Okay, so we got a motion and a second. Any further discussion? Any ideas about where money could be spent or where, God forbid, money is not needed?
A couple of comments. One, I like Joe's idea of, having the consolidated office supplies thing. Think it must be kind of consolidated already. I can't imagine Joe having his own stash of pens and paper down there.
I haven't, I noticed we haven't spent any of that money so far this year, so you know. Well, tell them if they need money, you can hit them up for you, okay?
I think there was a comment in the spreadsheet that came out with the budget that for the board clerk amount, Eric was looking for the number of meetings we expect to have in the average duration. Then he would put in the figure out the dollar based on that. But he was looking for a number of meetings and for planning and zoning, I put 15 meetings, two and a quarter hours each, you know, put in on that.
Yeah, I guess we could do that. We obviously, it's quite variable how much time we spend per meeting. This one tonight, I'm hoping will be fairly short and sweet. Sometimes we have more extensive But permit yeah, we can certainly supply. As I say, a ballpark of about 12 meetings should cover us, maybe two hours a meeting on average.
Then the third comment I just wanted to make was, and you're probably aware, but we do have a shared pot of money with planning and zoning for professional and legal services. So whenever the Inland Wetlands uses the town engineer or attorney branch, that comes out of the planning and zoning budget. It is accounted for in there. I think last year we went over a fair amount. This year, from what I saw, we were under budget so far, but we always have potential to run up a bill at the last minute. Right. Anyhow, we should be aware that, you know, that stuff is coming out of I have to budget for that with planning and zoning. Okay.
Well, thanks for keeping us in mind, keeping this commission in mind as well when you formulate that budget. Absolutely.
Yeah, Eric had explained to me that that was on, you know, I mean, obviously, the attorney's on retainer, and then we have to pay up by billable hours when they are accrued. Okay, so any other comments about the budget? Okay, seeing none, I'll ask for a vote on motion. Commissioner Larson? Aye.
Commissioner Mashke? Yeah. Aye. And Commissioner Monroe? Aye. I also vote aye, so the motion carries four-zero. Jed, I'll convey this to the administrative assistant, you know, the budget request, and I will add that information about time and number of meetings. Okay. Let me get my agenda back up on my screen. Okay, yeah, we finished with the business. Our next regular meeting is scheduled for February 6, a Monday, at 7PM, same time, same place, and maybe even the same Zoom address and everything. So, with that, I will entertain a motion for adjournment. I second.
Okay. We got a motion and second. No objection? Without objection, then the meeting stands adjourned. Thanks to everybody. Happy New Year to you all. Look forward to filling out our terms, which end at the end of this fiscal year, June 2023, in good order and with interesting business to take care of. That's good. Thank you. You Have a nice
too. I guess we're all permitted now to click on the little red leave button in the lower right hand corner of your screen, And again, I'll see you, Joe, of course, I'll be in touch with you about policy stuff. Good night, everybody. Good night.