Meeting transcript
Board of Selectmen - Regular Meeting
December 14, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Board of Selectmen on Monday, December 14 to order. Sit there and we actually don't have on there. Oh, do have Pledge of Allegiance. Well, do we have to do anything? We have a new setup. I'll call to order. Roll call. Everyone's here except Adrian. We're not going to do that. Let's do the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag flag The United States Of America
to republic for which it stands nation one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Excellent work. Okay.
We're going to go to public speak. Amanda, if you could go around and ask anyone who would like to participate to
give us their thoughts, that would be great. Yep. Respectfully, I thought you were doing the hearing at 07:00.
We have we we do not have to do that. The Okay. Building building inspector has submitted his resignation. Thank you. Sorry. No problem. Thanks, Shannon. Okay so Bill and Lorraine. You're muted. Bill and Lorraine you're muted. You are. Hi. Hello. Hello.
Would you like to say anything to our our meeting public speak? Nothing in particular for me. Not yet.
You can wait till the end of the meeting to get it all in. That's perfect. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Shannon Loudon.
So I wanna give a very somber acknowledgment, is belied by my hat, that eight years ago today, the town of Newtown, Connecticut was forever changed as their elementary school was invaded and shot up. And I wanna give an incredible expression of gratitude to everyone who has helped to make this a wonderful year at Andover Elementary School. So far we have gone fourteen weeks and we are almost unique in the state of Connecticut without having COVID come anywhere near our school building. And we have been able to go fourteen weeks of school with no interruptions due to COVID. And I am hopeful that we will continue to do that the rest of our school year. But I'm not going to shout out to everybody because I would inevitably forget someone. So I will just thank everyone from the administration to the teachers to the staff to the parents to the students and to our community for helping us to keep Andover Elementary School COVID free and and safe. Thank you.
Thanks, Shannon. That was very nice. Diane Grenier? That would be me.
I would just like to thank the Board of Selectmen and Paul in particular for putting together the roving carol sing last night. Good job, everybody. It was wonderful. I think everybody appreciated it. It looked good. Thank you very much for doing that for us. Thank you for coming out, Diane. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
All right so Nick Levine is from CBC. You're welcome to speak but he is here to broadcast live for us so we'll move on to Kurt Dowling if he is there.
There. Thank you. There you are, Kirk. Thank you, Amanda. First and foremost, I'd just like to, to ask the board of selectmen, as you know, we lost one of our nineteen year veterans of the fire department this past, last Wednesday due to COVID nineteen. And, Gary, Gary was an instrumental part of our of our department mainly during the day as he worked, pretty much third shift, most of his career, and, he was available. He'd even get up, from a sound sleep to come down and answer a call, whether it be a medical fire or anything else. But maybe a a letter from the board of selectmen thanking, his wife and his mother, who happens to be one of our bus drivers, you know, a thank you for his nineteen years of service to the town. It hit the department very, you know, very hard, and, you know, he's he's actually gonna be hard to replace. So, just just that note. Secondly, I'm wondering if the board of Sleppen received my letter regarding the the yellow line painting of our roads around town, especially the, Lake and Lakeside Drive area. As you know, I live on, 389 Lake Road. Got the most- most beautiful view in the world. A lot of cars go by and a lot of people stop, both in- you know, local and, out of state cars just to catch the view. The lines on the, older part of the road have- have worn down significantly to the- to the point where on a, on a very inclement night, it's hard to even see the road itself.
I think Jeff could attest to that living living here, Diane and everybody else that lives around the lake. The the traffic I mean, the safety first is my is my reason for asking to complete the lines. I was told by, by Eric that the, lines weren't going to be done around the, certain part. You know, they they come up, from Merritt Valley to a certain part of, I think, just before, Lakes the road to the dam there and stopped, and then there's no there's there'll be no more lines because of the bike traffic or the the biking route that's there. As far as as far as safety goes, I think the bicyclists come third. First is is the the amount of vehicle traffic that we get all around the lake,
all year long, especially in the, in the good weather, months. So vehicles. Number two is is pedestrians walk that road all the time. Everybody that that has ever walked around Andover Lake can attest the amount of people that that that walk, you know, take that route all the way around the lake. And, so we have a lot of pedestrian traffic, and then we we do have a lot of bicycle traffic also. I I had heard I I it hasn't been verified that the the new, our new, speed limit sign that's, been up the street for a while had clocked some vehicles doing over 80 miles per hour in the 25 zone around Andover Lake, and I just I just like to know if that's true or not. I had heard that, and but I do witness cars speeding by day in, day in, day out. I've even found myself going over the speed limit numerous times, and then inside It reminds me that, that I'm doing it when I'm coming up that way. Yellow lines mark the center of the road and are used for two way traffic everywhere. Any anywhere you go in the country, when you see, the double yellow lines or single yellow lines on some municipal roads, it's this it's to to show that, you know, traffic going one way and traffic going the other way. I happen to live on a very slight corner, and I witnessed cars on the wrong side of the road, on the corner, going against traffic.
And and they mostly kids. They're mostly younger younger people, and they're, they're hot rods. They're flying around the lake, not probably knowing that, a resident trooper is not working at that particular time. All the lines and mostly on Lake Road are worn due to the type of paint used. It's a very inexpensive paint that wears off probably after, two or three winters with plows and salt and sand and so on and so forth. I see we did paint, most of the roads in town, especially most of the newer roads, but then we have Lakeside Drive, which I think is part of the bike path. It's dark as heck, especially at night. There's no lines, anything else. It was, we spent money to chip seal. We spent, town tax dollars to do fog ceiling, come out beautiful, but it's missing one thing to complete it. That's the yellow line down the center. All the white markings I see, and I have no idea what they cost for the crosswalks, the new stop signs, the bike paths, Everything else is done with the epoxy type paint, which will probably last forever. Well, nothing lasts forever, but it'll last a lot longer than the, the least expensive paint that we use for the yellow lines. Like I said, it's just very, very dark, and and, I I wrote the letter, so I went I I saw the new, new, Facebook page for traffic safety around the town. I didn't want to hop on social media and make a big deal out of it,
yet. That's why I sent the, email letter to, to Jeff and the the rest of the board. But, I really still think that, something needs to be done, we need to finish those finish painting all the lines in the entire town not just a certain field. That's it. Thank you. You.
Thanks Kurt. We appreciate that. Joanne Hubbard? Joanne you're muted again. There you are. Can you hear that?
Yes, we can hear you. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, I don't have any comments at this time. Thank you.
All right, thank you. Okay, we done Amanda? I believe that's it, right? Who is S? That's Sloane. Sloane. Sloane, thank you for joining us. Okay,
Alexa, about Marina Pandolfi? Excuse me? We have Marina Pandolfi.
Hi, I'm the new, Assistant Finance Officer but I don't I don't have any comment yet so It's like we're part of the public. Yeah, I know.
Okay, let's get started with our agenda. Additions and deletions, any members of the board of selectmen have anything they'd like to add or delete? I'd like to delete seven c for a month. Okay. Anything else? I'd like to delete 8B, please.
Okay. Jeff, are you good with everything else? Okay. I'll second the motions to delete seven c hunting on town property and eight b a vote on employee dismissal proceeding. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Okay. So let's move on. Item four, boards and commissions presentations. Board of Selectmen, Board of Education, Combined Finance Department Committee.
Eric, would you like to put on this one or? Okay, so I have a very quick update for the software portion of that. We are going back and forth and answering some questions with Edmonds right now as part of that process they sent us a list of the next questions they needed to answer and Laura and I have taken on the task and Marina of completing those questions. So we're in progress with that.
Okay Then the finance director interviews have started. We had some interviews last Friday. We have more scheduled for this week, so we'll update the boards as we get more information and we evaluate candidates. 4B, Traffic Safety Committee. Eric, speed check sign, Island Street intersections and the new Facebook page. Okay, I'll tackle them in order.
We do currently have a single speed check sign. We are lucky enough to be granted two more from a federal grant that I inadvertently signed up for about six months ago and kind of put in for and didn't really even realize it but we're about to get two more speed control signs that are both solar powered. So that's going to be kind of cool. They're a little bigger than the ones we have but we'll be able to put them up. As far as Island Street intersections on one side of Island Street, Island Street and Lakeside, we installed the new crosswalk and on the other side we changed from a one way stop to a three way stop that riled the public up a little bit. There were some pluses, some people in favor and some people opposed to that. But anyway it's done it seems to be doing what it needs to do and that's pretty much that. There is a new Facebook page for the Traffic Safety Committee initiated its own social media page to gather more feedback from the public.
So that is underway even as we speak.
What are the stop signs installed? Have they been installed? The last time I walked in I didn't see it. They have in fact been installed. When did you get that done by the way? I don't know a couple weeks ago. Stop signs are there?
Yeah not at the crosswalk on the other end of Island Street, Island Street and Lake Road there are stop Well I'm walking on Lakeside so walking on Lakeside you have painted the the stop
symbol. Right. When do you anticipate an installation of stop signs there?
Oh, we don't technically need stop signs there. I mean, we could put stop signs there, but you're basically the state law says anytime there's somebody in the crosswalk, have to stop for it. And those little shark tooth thingies those are indication of where you're supposed to stop for the pedestrian in the crosswalk.
Okay all right now I'm understanding what you did. Gotcha. All right. Any other questions for Eric related to any of those issues? No? Okay. Let's move on to, Item five, appointments. 5A, Richard Began, Public Works Maintainer. We'll just go through it. Susan England, a regular member of the Planning and Zoning Commission. Ann Blanchard, an alternate member of the Planning and Zoning Commission. And Kevin Arneson, an alternate member of the Planning and Zoning Commission. We thank all of them for participating, and the volunteers especially. Eric, Richard, Beggin was his start date was when, just so we know that? I believe his start date was November 24. All right. Thank you. Now we'll go to Item six, Town Administrator Report. Eric? Okay.
I'm gonna share my screen here real quick. Amanda, can you give me the power and the glory? You've got the power.
All right. Okay, hopefully I get the right document. Okay, so again, this is my administrator's report. I'm not going to go over everything. I'm only going to go over again the things that have changed since we originally put this out. As Kurt has alluded to, unfortunately one of Andover's longtime volunteer firefighters, Gary Calvo passed away from a heart attack last week. He had been in the department for nineteen years and there is a GoFundMe page to help cover the cost of his funeral costs. If you want access to that you can find the information for that on the Andover support group. Next up, COVID-nineteen update and some really good news. The first delivery of vaccine in Connecticut has reached Connecticut today. That's a welcome breath of fair share in the year of kind of crappy news related to COVID. This is a rapidly evolving situation. As of today, Andover's had sixty positive COVID cases and the first death in Andover was reported last week. If you want to look at the graph of infection rates, we are currently at about sixty. And to put it in contrast on December 1, we were at about thirty for a town. So we've more than doubled our infection rate in the last two weeks, which mirrors kind of the national trends
and the state trends. We're still below the state average, but not by much anymore. So COVID is definitely taking a bite in the town. In the first fourteen days so far in December, we've had twenty four new COVID-nineteen infections in the town of Andover. In the first eight days of this month, we had more infections than in the first seven months of the COVID pandemic. Just so you kind of get a feel for where we are right now. Those are some graphs that don't really tell you a whole heck of a lot. So the other thing that is concerning is that the town currently has been hovering around twelve hundred
hospitalized patients with COVID-nineteen, which represents about two thirds of the capacity for patients in that range. So it's not critical in Connecticut like it is in some other states, but it's certainly worrisome. And you can look to our neighbor Rhode Island, which is already opening like field hospitals to handle the COVID overflow. It's a serious issue.
I interrupt? I just have a quick question. Sure. So I know you're you always get on these, Highland calls health calls. Arlen, do you know or have they said or I don't know. Can you give a little insight? Are our numbers rising because now more people are getting tested than in the beginning when things were going on because now there's more testing sites and more tests available? Do you know if that's reflected in our results here?
If you compare us now to the springtime, one of the differences is there's a lot more testing. So there's a much better understanding of the numbers. So but the positivity rates running about six percent in the state so that's saying for every 100 people that get tested six of them are positive which that's not a crazy high number like some states, there are states that have been running thirty plus percent positivity rates. So we're doing a lot better than that. But it's still, if you're really doing a good job of understanding community spread that number needs to be down around a couple of percent. So that's still a it's not a great trend. We've kind of known or been expected for a long time that there was going to be a significant surge this time.
And the reason is that all the other coronaviruses and the common flu, a large fraction of common flu are a form of coronavirus, tend to have seasonal spikes about now between now and January. So this flu or this disease is acting very much like those that are similar to it. And we can expect over the next month to two months, a pretty hard bite in the colder climates in The United States. So that's kind of what we're faced with. It's not anything that's not anticipated. It's just, it's something that we kind of need to be aware of because it does have some pretty negative consequences for a lot of people. We also have had the first town employee test positive as of today. So but fortunately only one, no evidence of community spread, but it is something we're keeping an eye on. Does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. Okay.
In other news we have a tropical storm expected in nor'easter for the middle of this week predictions for snow range somewhere between zero and eighteen inches of snow which doesn't really narrow it down. I you know came up with a new power word for it snowtastrophic. I thought it was an excellent word to describe the snowstorm. Since you know they've decided to name all the snowstorms now. I think it needs something a little more significant than Gale. Although nor'easter Gale, it is kind of amusing anyway. On other serious notes, we had several reportable incidents in the last month. One public works employee injured his hand. Basically they were removing bolts from the truck and a wrench slipped and he whacked his hand against the truck. In the end, it wasn't really a big deal, although his hand was impressively swollen. It turned out to be a fairly minor, it was just a couple of broken blood vessels in the hand making the swelling appear pretty dramatic. And there was one fire department member that had unfortunately in a series of broken teeth. So that person unfortunately was injured responding to a fire call. So that's kind of it for that. As we know, the first town hall employee has tested positive for COVID-nineteen.
And let me just scroll down a little bit. And I also wanted to talk a little bit about complaints just because I think it's good to kind of keep you apprised of the things that people are unhappy with. We had several cars too in fact that were unhappy after driving over the center line after we painted the lines and getting yellow paint on their cars. So one of them was quite unhappy. We've had several complaints, one for Lake Road, one for Bear Swamp Road about not striping their roads when we striped other roads. Have had a couple more complaints about potholes. We had some issues last week with our phone system getting stuck in, you know, stuck in the voicemail system. We've since corrected that but for a couple of days, the town clerk was unavailable on the phone system. We have had one complaint that we're no longer using sand for traction in the hills. We've had a complaint that, you know, political signs are still up on some roads and they find that offensive.
Several residents of Chesterbrook Drive have complained that the cul de sac was not fog sealed when the rest of the road was fog sealed. And we continue to have complaints about a person living in a trailer illegally on Shawty Mill Road that is being addressed as a zoning issue. And that's it for my report, unless you guys have specific questions about what I went over or anything else in the report.
A question for you, Eric, on the speed signs. Yep. Just to give everybody the correct information, what were those speeds recorded on the various locations?
So far, we've just done the two locations on Andover Lake, both of them on the end closer to Route 316. The maximum speed we recorded was 81 miles an hour. And on the side by your house, the maximum speed we recorded was 86 miles an hour. We're tending to get, you know, four to five cars a week that are traveling in, you know, basically at least one a day traveling over 60 miles an hour on those stretches of roads. So you can kind of, we have looked at the kind of binned data to determine when it's occurring. And I'm working with the resident state trooper on more targeted enforcement based on when we have the biggest problems with speeding. Now, like I said, we are going to get two more of those for free. And they're both going to be, instead of having to get the data off them manually, they will automatically upload to the cloud and they will be solar powered units. So that's a much more expensive unit than the one we bought. The only caveat is initially we have to put them on the roads where we've had significant crash data. So one of them will go on Gilead Road initially and one of them will go on Bunker Hill Road initially. And then after a couple of months we can move them around. So we all have basically three of them in the rotation. Will those units have cameras?
They will not have cameras. Unfortunately in this state using cameras is very questionable legally.
Well, I was more interested in finding a camera so that you could identify who the speeders are, not exactly target them with that data, but you would at least know who you're looking for. Right. That
would be nice. 86 miles an hour on that stretch of Lake Road is really fast. Mean, 81 miles an hour going up that hill in the opposite direction on Lake Road going to 316 is really fast.
Yes, yes. But I mean, we know all throughout town we have a significant problem, not just with ordinary speeding, but with really excessive rates of speed on a lot of our back roads. I mean we know it's a problem. I mean we can kind of quantify it and tell you exactly how big a problem it is but you know it's Any a other questions from any other members? No?
Okay. Let's move on to new business. Discuss and act upon the following 8A, the town meeting for land acquisition on Saturday, 01/09/2020. Eric, are we all set for this meeting? What do we need to do?
We are. I gave you a motion to pass. Basically you just right now you would just make a decision to adopt that and then you'll have to come in individually and sign and then we can put it out but we're not under any time rush so if you signed it in the next week or so we would be in great shape.
You know I have to apologize. That's my mistake. I skipped the business But Eric already did 7A. 7B was alarm monitoring for town buildings.
Yeah, so I don't have any updates. I emailed Wally yesterday to see whether he had an update and he told me he didn't have an update at this point. But we're not in any danger. I mean eventually Tolland, know, TN will get around to not monitoring the buildings anymore but they haven't even hinted at a date yet so we got plenty of time to worry about that.
Okay. Does someone have the motion that Eric is speaking about related to 8A the town meeting for land acquisition on Saturday, January 9, if they could sit there and propose that? Right.
The 8c, a resolution to approve the agreement with the town of Bolton. No? No. It's the bottom most one. Yeah I don't I'm looking for it but it's
kind of buried right? It's at the bottom of the document. It's the last thing in the document. Oh, let's find it. Part of what we're doing.
Is it the first paragraph where it says town and over special town meeting that's the motion right there. All right.
Go ahead. I brought it up, it should be up on your screen now.
Oh, there we go. Okay. I motion that we resolve that pursuant to the generals that that paragraph there, Yep.
To the general statute section seven dash three town charter sections three zero two and three zero four B and paragraphs one of executive order seven b and nine h of the governor of the state of Connecticut. A special town meeting is scheduled to be held in hybrid fashion starting remotely by telephone or computer at ten a. M. On Saturday 01/09/2021 and concluding with an in person drive up walk up vote at the Town Hall 17 School Road Andover beginning immediately after the remote portion of the meeting and ending after the last person in line has voted and therefore the electors and citizens qualified to vote in town meetings
in the town of Andover hereby notified. I'm reading this whole thing. This is the whole motion. Just keep going. Okay. I'm hereby notified the special town meeting for the town of Andover will be held via zoom application and drive up walk up vote on Saturday, 01/09/2021 beginning at 10AM for the following purposes. One to choose a moderator for said meeting. Two, for discussion to determine whether to accept gifts to the town of two vacant parcels of land consisting of 5.3 acres more or less on or near Shoddy Mill Road and 1.6 acre more or less on or near Oak Farms Road both recorded in Andover land records volume 75
page six one one. From the Northern Connecticut land trust and one vacant parcel of 7.84 to 8.2 acres of land more or less on or near Boston Post Road recorded in the Andover land records volume 25 page two sixty one from Thomas D Talbot and approve acquisition of these parcels by the town. Number three, recess for voting to determine whether to accept these proposed gifts of land and number four adjournment. Anyone intended to vote on this item must provide proper identification. Voting by absentee ballot is not permitted for this meeting.
Would someone like to second that? I'll second that. Further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. So we are going to move on from that to 8c, possible discussion and resolution no. Yes, for the appointment of an acting building official. Eric, where are we with information related to an acting building official? So right now,
I did appoint an acting building official, but you guys really need to resolve to approve that agreement. Basically, this is just a temporary one to get us through in the short term. We will make a determination in the next month or so what the long term solution is for the building official.
Okay. So do you have a name for the acting building official? Jim Rupert.
Jim Rupert. So I will make a motion. I hereby move to appoint Jim Rupert as the acting building official for the town of Andover. Effective date, Eric? December 1. 12/01/2020. I'll second.
Second. All those in favor or anyone wanna comment on it, but all those in favor, aye. All right. Item nine, approval of the minute meetings on 9A, Monday, November 9, the regular meeting, and a 9B, Wednesday, December 2, minute meetings. Does anyone have any comments related to the minutes that were provided to us? Nope. No?
Does anyone make that motion? Yep. I motion to approve the minutes from the Monday, 11/09/2020 Board of Selectman regular meeting. And I also motion to approve the meeting minutes from the Wednesday, 12/02/2020 Board of Selectmen Special Meeting. I'll second that. All those in favor? Aye. Aye.
Okay. Let's move on to item 10, the treasurer's report.
Okay, so first of all I would like to introduce, Marina, Pandolfi who is the new assistant finance officer for the town of Andover. If you haven't had a chance to meet her yet, now is your chance.
Very nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. When we get back into the office, we'll meet you in person. Yes.
Eric, one thing that you can do for us, can you buy the Treasurer's office, some type of PDF software? That would be helpful.
Yeah. I'm not sure why the PDFs come out this way now. I mean we've always been able to create PDFs but yes we need some non freeware.
They're telling you that your complimentary version has reached the end of its life existence. They want you to That's pay for exactly what they want. Are there any items within this report that anyone has any questions on? I'll I'll ask a couple questions. Are are we okay with Phoenix? Are we having any problems in the interim of running it? Well,
Marina, can answer that if you'd like. Feel free. Is it still working?
You experienced any questions? No, it's still working for the time being. So it gets done what we need to get done.
There are definitely some issues like we seem to only be able to print checks, from one, the oldest computer there. You know, other than that are, they come out with some pretty funny characters on them, you know, which is kind of unfortunate when you're trying to cache them. Yeah. It is. But so far we've been managing when I say we I'm using the royal we as in I'm not the person doing it but, so far it seems to be running reasonably well.
It doesn't seem so odd. Have we been paying our our RAM contributions? Yes. The numbers the numbers on the report in Phoenix just came off so I'm just questioning that. In terms of what?
Right now you have expended $4,000,000 out of a $12,000,000 budget. No. Ramp payment $9.00 1. We've expended, $1,681,000.
Okay, so I'm assuming we have no accounts that we're over budget on or that you're concerned about Eric?
The one I've been watching is public works, salary line item. We've gone way over and over time. We also went pretty considerably over in the temp, the part time help. Now the part time help was simply because we hadn't actually hired the full time replacement for the department waiting on a definitive date for Ed to retire. So we've been running the temp basically forty hours a week. So we have the money just by simply, if you look at the salary plus overtime plus temp and you look at where we are right now, we're expended about 39%. So we're pretty close to on track. We will spend some more money because we hired a more expensive replacement than Eddie going forward, but we can actually cover that out of my salary because as most of you remember, I got overpaid last year. And so I took a reduction in salary in the first half of this year for a tune of about $12,000 So my line item will be considerably under and that should just about balance out with public works. So that's the one that kind of I was concerned about.
Date, just so I'm looking at that department, you haven't bought any SALT yet this year?
We have not, no. The reason is we bought a fair bit of salt at the end of last year. And what I wanna do is I wanna use it up before we reorder. So I think this next storm on Wednesday, by the time we get through with that, I will want to order salt.
Okay. Anyone else have any other questions? Okay. Eric, a Town Road update. What do we have remaining in Town Aid Road? I
think we've got around 100,000 currently in Townade Road. Dollars 115,990 currently in Townade Road.
So we spent $155,000 during this fiscal year? Yep. Primarily on the shimming of the roads?
That was a lot of it but shimming and guardrails and yeah those were the major things shimming and guardrails. Roads are expensive. Guardrails are expensive. Guardrails are expensive.
Okay so we have our cash account or our cash report as it's currently dealt with. All right You know, for the amount of money that we have at the time, the amount of interest we get paid is ridiculous. We should not put any money into our bank accounts if we have debt. If we're paying any other interest, we should pay it off. It should be something we look at at the end of this budget cycle. All right. Okay.
So now we go on to our budget, item 11. I don't see anything there. Are we okay? Do you have anything you want to discuss, Eric?
No. I mean, there there were a couple I should have done, but frankly, I just didn't get to them. There's nothing that has to be done this month, certainly.
Okay. Tax collector's report for the month of November. Tax collector collected $283,858.29 during the month. We have a remaining balance to collect of $4,470,902.87 with the majority of it being in the last three years. Just as a question, Eric, that you probably should bring to somebody, some of the old items that are out there extend back to 2006, we should either look at, you know, if there's a credit agency that we can send those to or if they can be written off. It's probably not useful to keep looking at those. We should sit there and see what structurally needs to happen to get those removed or to get those to a collection agency.
Yes. As far as I know, we have everything from, like, 2015 back is with a collection agency, is out for collection. But you know But you're right if you look at everything from say 2,010 on back it's essentially it's a very small amount of money so it's probably not worth keeping that sitting on our books. You know you're talking about a couple thousand dollars for every year past you know before 2010.
Well the only thing that bothers me is this next report is prepared off of your oh, I forgot the name of the company that has our tax collection software Quality Data System. The total due on the quality data system does not agree to the report that's provided to us above directly from the tax collector. So can you ask the tax collector to try to get those to reconcile? Yep. Okay. Does anyone have any questions related to the tax collectors, reports? Nope. Someone want to make the motion regarding the tax refunds that are due?
This is 12 a motion, right? A motion to approve the following refunds for excess payments, board credit for $473.67, Linda Armstrong for $15.52, and KeyBank for $1,154.66, a total of $1,643.75. 75¢? One second. Did I add them up wrong?
It's $1,643.85 Sorry, can I make that change from 75¢ to 85¢? Paula? Say that again, I'm sorry, say that again.
The total is $16.43 85. It's incorrect in the motion that was presented to us. Alright. I'll reread it. Yeah.
Okay. I motion to approve the following refunds for excess payments forward credit for $473.67 Linda Armstrong for $15.52 and KeyBank for $1,154.66 for a total of $1,643.85
Do we have a second? No. Scott seconded. All right. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Steph, those are in your folder.
I will come in and grab those, Amanda. I'll get to assessors report, Eric, revaluation services,
where do we stand related to that? So right now as of last Friday they were 27% through completed in the town. They should be a little over 30% as of today, something like that.
And do you have a completion date for that group? I said about eight weeks barring anything unfortunate happening.
Okay. Alright. Departmental reports, Fire department. Fire department responded to 33 calls in November, 19 medical, one motor vehicle accident, two fire alarms, a structural fire, smoke investigation. Three of them, a wire related seven, seven items, and they had one meeting. Firehouse is currently closed to all public.
Yeah, the smoke investigation and the wire related are both basically the last windstorm we had again took down one of the main transmission lines along Route 6. It lay on the road burning for quite some time, filled a bunch of houses up with smoke. It apparently energized you know three or four residents houses like they had problems like getting in and out of their houses without getting zapped. The utility company was not particularly good about responding and eventually the fire chief got them to shut down that whole district and then you know cut it before they reenergized the line. But it was pretty problematic because it's the second time we've had that problem right in that same area. Know and a big part of it is we just have so many dead trees right now you know we're taking a beating every time we get a windstorm you know we're spending you know, we're closing roads and calling out public works to deal with it and Eversource.
So it's a problem and it's going to stay a problem for a while.
Okay, do you have any information that you want to provide us related to the resident state trooper from a departmental report?
No. I didn't actually see his report this month, I don't think.
The town clerk? No report from the town clerk this month?
No. The town clerk's in Hawaii. She did not produce her report before she left.
Okay. The building department, I see this new report in for, outstanding permits. Those were permits all issued in the month of October.
One of those so there's a list there of permits issued in November. You see on the list, there were 13 permits issued in the month of November.
She provided both October and November. It's quite a report. Just keep scrolling.
Lots of people trying to get their assessments nice and high just before the reval. Good. Good for the down.
Okay. Does anyone have any questions they want to ask related to the building department?
Did everybody see the information I provided to you, as part of the packet, which was basically a description of what the recommended fee schedule was for the building department? Yes, that was quite an extensive report.
Okay. If anybody has any questions that Adrian and I spent a couple hours today going over it, and comparing it. We're basically using the RS means construction estimator as the guide. So in trying to do that as accurately as we can so we fairly assess people. Did you check it against other towns?
Yes, yes. So the major thing is that town of Andover has typically charged basically $10 for every thousand dollars worth of work done and most towns are somewhere between twelve and fifteen. So we're leaning more towards the 15 end as opposed to the 12 end. But a final decision on that hasn't really been made yet. What I would like to do is present that to you at the next meeting because I think the Board of Selectmen will want to actually approve that before it goes into effect. And then we're going to have to do a little campaign so builders know about it. Because one of the problems you get with something like this is because a lot of builders build this into their costs for jobs. You can't just drop it on them if they build it out with one set of costs and then all of a sudden we come back and we ask for a different amount. So we're going to have to do it
over the next month and a half or so if we want to do it without pissing off a lot of people. I mean we're going to piss some people off anyway but the object would be to piss off as few as we can. Right.
But our these are in line with what other towns are doing. We're certainly not, charging excessive amounts.
Any information that you want to pass along for the town garage?
No, not at the moment. The new, public works supervisor starts on Monday, which would be good because I'm more than happy to pawn a lot of the decision making off on him from me. So far everything's been going reasonably well with Eddie not here. We are obviously short one body at the moment. We had one public works employee that had a potential exposure to COVID-nineteen, but his test has now come back negative. So we're back fully staffed at this point. And we're doing everything we can to separate them so that we, you know, if one does get come back COVID positive, we don't wipe out the whole public works crew. And we also have a backup driver in Mark Williams.
And Ed has agreed, you know, on an emergency basis, if we really were had a, you know, a couple of people down with COVID-nineteen, he would consider driving as a backup too. So we kind of got two backup drivers right now, plus the public works supervisors fully capable of driving. So we should be okay for the winter, even if we get one or two public works employees out of commission.
All right. To stay at the town garage for a second, Ed Kasasik did retire from employed by the town for an excess of thirty years, I believe, is the number. Thirty three years. Thirty three years. I do think it's appropriate for this board to recognize that level of service, so I would ask, Eric and Amanda that we have some type of plaque that Ed can put into his house when he's hunting here and he can put it right next to it that sits there and recognizes his level of service and how appreciative the residents of this town are for all his hard work.
That's a great idea. Eric suggested that and we have ordered one from the Engraving Company in Andover.
Perfect. Coming soon. The board of, selectmen would like to sit there and make sure that he gets recognized appropriately. The
library has provided us a list of their contacts and what they've been distributing, so that's available for us in our reports. I would ask, Eric, the library is also closed to the public at this time? So no.
We have made a decision that the library will stay open, but the library will only allow one customer basically in at a time. And then the employees stay behind the shields. They had tried the book cart and book delivery, but there's too many residents, too many of their standard patrons really like to kind of browse and you know given the mental health crisis along with COVID you know Amy and I talked about it a lot and I think we kind of decided the risks you know are outweighed by the benefits of leaving it open and just as minimally staffed as possible and as you know absolute minimizing the interactions but allowing patrons into the building. Okay that's good enough. Senior transportation.
So we are running senior transportation. We're running it on as skeleton again as we can. We are still providing food delivery from FruitShareFood Pantry. We are still providing emergency medical and we are still providing trips to the grocery store for those residents that don't really have the ability to get there other than with senior transportation. So other than that no real trips, no fun stuff, just the very basics at this point.
And have we sat there and had any feedback from the potential grants that were going to be applied for by transportation?
We haven't got those back yet, but I don't think we were expecting that till sometime around next April. Okay. Alrighty. The registrar's reports.
So at this point, we're in pretty good shape. We got off a successful election. We did run a bunch of extra expenses, but we also got some extra money from the state secretary of state that covered a lot of the additional costs. However, the way the voting restrictions are now due to COVID-nineteen, it takes a much heavier staffing level than what we've budgeted for and allotted. So if we end up doing, if we're still under COVID protocol when we do the RAM budget and the town budget, presuming we're actually allowed to do budget meetings this year. We're probably going to go over somewhat in the registrar's budget, but again it's a small enough fraction of the overall budget that I don't think we can absorb it pretty easily, but Wally has made it very clear that that's likely to be the case.
Well, just from my perspective, I would give a shout out to Wally and to Linda. They did an excellent job during the last election. I thought it ran extremely smoothly for, the residents and, I'd like to commend them on a job well done.
I concur and I'd like to commend the voting public. You know I mean the turnout this year was you know huge compared to a normal even a normal presidential year so regardless of what side of the aisle they were on a lot of people came out and voted and you know did their civic duty. So it was a great showing all the way around.
Okay, nothing related to their I know we had something come through from Was that
Yeah. Amanda, you want to talk about that? Because you went to that instead of me.
Well, what was provided last month was just their annual report. So I just kept and RAM on there in case we want to, you know, if they have reports to provide in the future, but we can always take it off the agenda.
No problem. Well, since I have two students, Ram, I'll give a Ram update. They had some problems this morning. Cannot wait to get them back to school. Doing schoolwork in bed is not working for me. We've got to get back to vaccines as quickly as possible. Before we move correspondence and public speech, I just want to recognize, that we had a passing in town. Jean Persson, Scott's mother, passed away November 30. She was deeply committed to the town of Andover. She participated in a significant number of boards and commissions and you always saw her around when we had public meetings or anything that concerned her in the town of Andover. So my deepest sympathies to Scott and his family and hopefully the way Scott remembered his mother at ceremony or her vigil, was, deeply moving, Scott, so our sympathies again. Thank you. Now we move on to, correspondence. I'm sure we don't have any of that. Anybody? No? No. And then we'll go to public speak for the end of our meeting. Shannon, I love your background, Shannon. It's quite entertaining, we're going to give you the first opportunity to speak. Nothing. All right. Nothing from me?
You shook your head. I mean, I thought you were Fox ticking. Tick tock, tick tock.
I know. Mean, I don't know you noticed Hold on. Adrian is not All I wanna say is we're trying to get a record out. So Okay. I'm
trying to go. Will you just let me talk already? So really quickly, thank you to the Board of Selectmen for all that you do for Andover. I really appreciate all of you. Eric, you're awesome. Amanda, you're awesome. Dennis, don't know you, but appreciate your work also. Just thank you very much. Have a wonderful holiday season. Can't wait to get 2020 behind us and I'll see you in the New Year if not before. Thank you. Thank you, Shannon. Thanks, Shannon. Thanks, Shannon. Diane, you're next. I
just want to speak a minute about the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving and their Greater Together grant program. I think I hope everybody got the email that I sent out last week or so. I just wanted to let you know that basically the same thing that I've wrote in the email that the committee has been formed. We're working on the process. Again, this is for the $100,000 grant that the Hartford Foundation is giving each of their towns. And we're looking at $100,000 It comes in two pots. One is $50,000 that we can spend immediately. And the other $50,000 is put in an endowment, and we'll get
interest from it every year. They're averaging like 5%, so that's $2,500 every year. We do have a nine person committee, people here in town. I'm one of the co chairmans. I'm also on the outreach committee for that. So if there's any questions or things, please send people to me. I can answer all the questions. Or if not, I'll make it up. And like I say, it's going to be a great opportunity for Andover. Hopefully we'll get some things done in town that are beyond the regular budget. And we've been meeting twice a month, every two weeks. And it's coming along. It's a committee of nine, so it takes a little while for all the process. But I'm looking at maybe February or so, we'll be looking for RFPs from the community as to what kind of projects that they would like to have some funding from. And we will evaluate it and get some things done here in town that are, again, beyond the regular budget. So I encourage all members of boards and commissions or residents in town in general to think about what kinds of help you could what kind of projects you want that we could help you with financially. And we'll be looking for them in the spring. So don't you love free money? All right. Thank you.
Kurt? I'm all set. Thank you.
Alright. Thank you for sticking out the entire meeting. I don't believe we have anyone else. Do we? I just wanted to pop on on behalf of the Farmers Market Committee and also share how sad we were to hear of our lifetime committee member, Jean Persson, who has passed away. And, I think we made her proud this year and we're excited to continue that and have her watch over our committee. She never stopped thinking about the market until the very end and we appreciate her. She did a lot for us. Thank you Amanda.
Is there anything else from any of the other members of the board? Eric?
I would just like to say Jeff that I think you do win the ugly sweater contest for the record that's my my own personal humble opinion but. What was the prize? Did we ever talk about a prize? I'll
come up with something because it was my You're surprised that
I spent $7 to come up with something really ugly? Thank you, Eric. I greatly appreciate that. Have to I have to before we go, Dennis O'Brien, I don't necessarily know that I've heard you speak today. Are you okay? You good? I usually say too little or too much. I'll
say too little. I think the meeting was very exciting yet uneventful. Dennis. It was a pleasure to be here. I I could tell a story about Diane talked about going out caroling. I've never experienced that in Willamantic. But yesterday, I was watching my Philadelphia Eagles football game. A knock came to the door. Was wearing my Eagles hat and peep and I opened the door and there were 25 people in my front yard singing jingle bells. And I could have used Eric there. Like I would have had him substitute for me because I wanted to get back in and watch the game. I'm afraid I didn't handle it too well. You know, was taken aback. I have to speak to If Diane showed up as Mrs. Claus then it would have been different, I would have understood. I was surprised and everybody said, gee, wish Susan were here instead of you. I said, so, you know, I'm right up there with Eric.
I'm so sorry I forgot to wear a sweater. Dennis, as a side note, Dennis, the
caroling committee led by Paula King was sat there and we did go out and we did go to Eric's house and he kept the lights off and he did a full Bah humbug.
Exactly. And Gary didn't drive down my driveway. Full Bah humbug. I am not at all surprised.
All right. Well I think I did better than he would have but not too I'm extremely excited. This meeting is, you know, one hour and fifteen minutes long. I think Yeah, that's why I'm so excited. Before the holidays to to do this I'd like to wish everyone a happy and merry holiday season no matter what your your belief is or what you're celebrating I wish you all the best and the best with your families and enjoy your time. So, would someone like to make a motion to adjourn? I make a motion to adjourn our meeting. I'll second that.
All right. All those in favor. Aye. Aye. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Merry Christmas to everyone. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas, Eric. Happy Festivus. Merry Christmas. Yay. Happy New Year. Yes. Happy snowplowing. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. Spring will come soon enough.