Meeting transcript
Board of Selectmen - Regular Meeting
July 12, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Okay, I'll do that again. We're going to get started for our Board of Selectmen Monday, 07/12/2020 meeting at 07:00. We're going to call the meeting to order, and we're going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America,
to the republic, it stands, nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all.
Okay, public speak. Jeff Murray is with us. That's great. Mike and Kathy Palazzo, you are first. I couldn't unmute. That's okay. We have time.
Here, I do have something tonight. The Andover Sustainable Connecticut will hold a presentation on Saturday, July 17 at 3PM for the community to explain what Sustainable Connecticut is and our community garden plan for spring twenty twenty two. Abby Winter is working on creating a garden now with the assistance of donations by many people and volunteers like Megan Lolly who is showing Abby how to grow and preserve a garden. We will invite the public to sign up for a plot for next spring and show slides of our intended garden for the future. Each member of our committee will present five minutes of background information on their own projects that they are working on for us to try and be certified in August or next April for our bronze certification And I am issuing an invitation to our board of selectmen and inviting you to attend. And of course our town administrator. Thank you, Kathy Pulasi, Chairman. Thank you. Louise Goodwin. I'm good, thank you. I'm good, thanks. Grace G. Nothing from us, thanks. Okay. Joanne Ebert.
Thank you. I have a phone number that ends in, 2345. Jeff?
Oh, Dennis O'Brien. Okay. I'm all set. No public comment for you. Amy Knox. No comment. Okay. All right. Additions and deletions to the agenda.
I would like to add the item replacement of signed kiosk at Veterans Parks. Veterans Mine At Park, sorry, excuse me. So 9J.
We still need to finalize Eric's contract. He did send us over some stuff, but that hasn't been hashed out. Do we want executive session on that or how do you wanna do it?
Sure. Let's put an executive session on that. Okay, anything else?
Jeff, I have a couple things. I think we probably ought to add as you requested nine J, discussion of town IT support. 9BI, which would be storm damage assessment since Jay is with us. One second. Where did you want to put that one? 5 where? So I would add that as 9J. 9J was the signage at Veterans Memorial.
Well, in the interest of getting Jay out of here as quickly as possible, given the number of hours, I'm sure he worked over the weekend. Can we move him up to wherever the front of the line is? Sure. Let's put him at 4A. Thank you. Yeah. I agree. Welcome, Jay. I think you need to sleep.
So storm damage and public works report, we'll put that up there.
Okay, and then two others, one under nine also. I would add discussion of use of senior transportation vehicles.
Anything else for anybody? We're going to vote on total. I'll sit there and just make a motion. Make a motion to add 4A storm damage and public works report, 9J Veterans Memorial Park signage discussion and nine ks senior transportation vehicle usage. Okay. And. I want to add. Executive
session to. Seventeen a. To discuss a town administrator's contract. Is there anything else? Okay, does somebody want to second that? I second it. Scott seconded that. We'll vote all in favor. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Aye. We're not going through that. Eric, are there any boards and commission presentations for this meeting? Doesn't appear to be any. I didn't see any in our packet. Nope. We're going to move on to 4A, storm damage and the public works report. Jay, thank you for joining us today and all your hard work cleaning up after that storm. One other thing before we get started was the tree trimming in there. Can we move that up also to this discussion point? Does anyone on the board have a problem with that? No, it applies to Jay as well. Okay. So Jay, we're going to cover storm damage public works report and the discussion on tree trimming. You have everything.
All right. Thank you everybody. Thanks Adrian for moving me up. Appreciate that. So, let's start with the most recent would be the storm damage. As you all know, I guess we got close been on who you talk to six, seven inches of rain in total, which for what I saw out there and what I've experienced, we didn't fare all that well but we didn't do all that bad either. So Bunker Hill Bridge, we met out with the engineer Eric and I today Brandon Hanfield and everybody knows that we lost that area again where the road caved in around that third pipe. I guess you guys experienced that a couple times in the past. So we're going to wait for the water to settle out of there, let the water go down, and then we'll expose that area again. And we're talking about putting flowable fill in there, And then put it back, put the road back together again. And we're going to be waiting. We haven't finalized, but we'll probably meet with the state inspectors on that too. So, we got to final on that. As far as the roads are concerned, the areas of major erosion, we were able to do on Saturday, Gilead, Jarravati, and Lake Road. We got those, so they're filled back in and as well as bunker on the side, on the opposite side, on the other side of the bridge. And we put about eleven hours in on Saturday to get things secured and safe. As you drive around town, there's a lot of areas of wash and some erosion on the sides of the roads. And we're going to have to look into using a more suitable
material on the side that rather than just putting gravel in the road, something that washes out easy. So, my hope is that we can put something combined with some stone, some loam, something that will grow grass and organics to hold those road edges better rather than the old just using what we have at hand sweepings and millings and things that erode pretty easy. And the root systems don't bind to that all too well either. So that'll be an ongoing thing to patch.
Do we I just asked a couple of quick questions. So, are doing like a small riprap, like, you know, two and a half minus or something like that, looming over that or what are we using for a base in these holes? Right now we're using in the large areas
stuff that's on the edge of the road and not under the pavement. We're putting two inch stone with loam. We're mixing it with loam.
So, a two and a half minus or straight two? Straight two. Okay. Straight two. And if
we get to an area where there's somebody's lawn or something like that, can always top it with a little finer material. But right now I want something that's gonna be, you know, somebody pulls off the edge of the road in these places where there's unsuitable materials, they sink out of sight or they, you know, bottom out, whatever. So we got to start thinking about putting a more stable material on our roads on the sides of our shoulders. And we have to, as we go along like we started this year where we're doing our edging, we got to reshape those shoulders so they not just only take the water in specific areas, but we want to get a more shedding of the water throughout the area rather than just concentrating into one waterway all the time. Yeah. You know, So, and a lot of that I've already tried, I've knocked on a few doors today, especially on Bunker Hill on the other side going down. Left my card, they contact me, but got to find out where this water goes if we start putting it just on the side of the road. We're trying to use the whole hill to get rid of the water rather than just these concentrated spots.
Know, we want to try to spread it out. So I got to look into those things.
Are we concentrating into basins currently? Is that what we're doing?
Well, both. You know, you got water courses that go into the woods, an old water course that's been there right along that they've used. You know, you make a little cut on the side and that's where the water goes. But what we don't know always is where does that water end up? Know, somebody buys a new house lot or they made an addition on their house or put a garage out and back, is that right where the water course used to be? You know, a lot of these things are unknown, so we don't know. So I have to try to kind of investigate things. I just don't want to cut a waterway
where it makes sense and then have it go into the, you know, back to somebody's foundation. So it's, those are the things we're looking at. Okay.
Any other questions on the erosion? Nope, no. So you're, so you're doing, you're going to reshape the sides as much as you can. And you're looking into do we have do we have a do we have a have we looked into contracting maybe somebody come in that could do a drive by spraying so once we get loom up, we can get grass in as quick as possible?
To be honest with you, I've always just as soon as we do it, I just seed it by hand and the grass grows within you know use a contractor's and do it as we go. It grows fast you know. I'm not too worried about that as far as getting somebody to hide your seed or something like that. Okay. Just spread
it out. Long as we're having good outcomes, don't really care. I'm just trying to it sounded like this was something more involved than we've done in the past, that's why I'm asking.
Well it can be. It just, you know, you got to do it as these things arise or part of the planning when you're reshaping a road and getting ready to do some work on it. But the investigating behind of where this water is going to go or end up, those are the things that you really have to find out. We got waterways that are been plugged or are plugged that need to be exposed again. So, and I don't know a lot if there's, and you know how many easements are out there or we just you know that's where the water used to go that's where we're putting it. Just got to be careful where you're putting that water Jay. Oh I know but the town and like all towns except you know areas where you have formal drainage and curbing it's a watershed and you know towns have the right to drain but you can't just put it anywhere without it investigating where it goes so that's going to take time.
In the past, there was a problem on the Route 6 side of Bunker Hill Road that the town was, you know, involved with litigation draining water onto someone's property.
Yeah. Yeah, that's why it has to you know when you have these areas of high concentration you got to do your due diligence and try to make it all work. But fixing the roads, It's you know, we got some areas we got a patch Jirabadi we lost a you know small area it's not got to wait for things to dry out but things are safe right now.
Do we have an outside company to patch the underside of the culvert before we do the flowable? Are we gonna Well,
have a contractor we can use, yes. We can use the same contractor we're using right now, but we're not ready for that yet. So, we can, you know, I expect to have, I'm hoping anyway, the rest of the shimming done, get ready for chip seal. Hopefully, as long as the weather holds out within another week, I hopefully done with the shimming. I will not be chip sealing over the bridge itself at bunker. Yeah. We'll do either side of it.
Now just a structural question for Eric. Do we need or does the public works need to request from board of finance an exemption so we can do whether it's time and material, whatever on this repair? Because I'm gathering it's gonna be over the standard
of what we would normally spend without going out to bid. I actually don't think so. And I don't think we need to bid work we do in house anyway when we're supplying the labor and we're just getting materials.
Are we doing the patch though? I would gather that you Are we gonna do the patch in house?
Well, there's some question about whether we can even practically get to the patch. So that's gonna be until we start digging down and see how much we can expose, We're not going to know that, frankly. Okay. Jay,
you were shaking your head, Jay, like you want public works to do that batch? Well, we can patch it just again, it's going to be a matter of timing. I mean, we're you know, we can we're, get all the prep work done and and we can we got some other patches that we need to do. We're Eric and I've been talking about bringing the paving company back in to do those areas because we're going to we're still trying to get drainage work done on
started on shoddy. Yeah, no, and I wasn't talking about doing the patchwork on the bridge on the top of the bridge. I'm talking about patching for the flowable so you don't lose it underneath,
you know. Right. Yeah, that's what I was talking about.
Because we've got to obviously we have to patch underneath the bridge. So you do as you pour in the flowable, it doesn't just come out and drop into the river, right? Well, but you can put some materials down there that will hold because if there's an area for
that flowable fill to go through such as what it's doing, got That's some why I was asking. I areas where the
know if that was a public works type thing if we needed to cough or one of those pipes or something to, you know, or to get access to it.
Yeah. Again, like Eric says, we won't really know until we get at it. Water goes down. I suspect we can do something to keep that from happening. Okay. And the good thing is we're not looking for a permanent fix here. No, I understand We're looking for one year
to two year fix. Yep. But that's better than our last stuff it full of process and go fix. Yep.
The holes in that pipe are the ones that are underwater, right?
Currently. More than likely, yes. Yeah, at the bottom of the pipe. As the water's, the water, when it gets up that and you got that much pressure, it's like a vacuum. It just sucks all the fines right out from underneath. Right, right.
That'd be good if you could find out where it was going but I don't know if we looked the last time it was like that we couldn't find that we just filled it back in I think.
Yeah unfortunately if you got a lot of perforations down there And they're all underwater.
Yeah, you're not going to find it. So the other road work that we've had going on, that's going along Right now, last time I checked, tallied up my totals were right around 800 ton of asphalt for shimmy. I'm trying to keep it at a thousand ton. I think we're going to go over a little bit, but What are we a ton
right now? 75 a ton. So I got them from 78 to 75. So they cut us a little bit because we're having a rather than just a few truckloads, even though it's over a period of time. And we're getting that material from AEN out in Franklin. Okay.
That's going along pretty good. Just need better weather to finish it up. And that's really all I have on roads.
Other than we're I guess what I would say Jay is, on my own personal take, I don't know if the board feels the same way. But I'm you know, obviously, have repairs to do and we have other stuff that keeps popping up here. I don't want us to get into a situation where public works is becomes the dropping point for everything. You know, if we need to bring in outside contractors to do stuff, you know, or whatever, then we need to do that. I mean, you know, we graciously lean on you guys for everything, whether it's, you know, helping out to get the, you know, the Veterans Memorial Park going or whatever, whatever, there's always something that we're dropping on your doorstep. Unfortunately, all of that becomes time taken away from, you know, actually doing roadwork. So if you get overwhelmed with those types of things, we need to hear that feedback that you're getting taken away from things that you need to be doing as well. And don't get overwhelmed down there. Don't wait till it's too late, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah. You need to go back to us as a board, come back to Eric and say, hey, I need to I need to contract this stuff out because we're not going to be where we need to be and where we where we want to be. So, okay. Yep, no, understood. You know, gets,
you know, the storm, one of the things that I hope to improve on over the next year is being better prepared for when we have these call them emergencies, these storms. Mean, because they come up and you know the little things that seem to cost us money if we can you know signage. All right, we're scrambling. Okay, what sign do we have? What can we make work? You know, just having those tools set aside, ready to go for a specific event. Yeah. And you know, you make those up and it, so those are things we're trying to improve upon so we can act. Yeah. And
I'm having rip rap in the yard as well. You know, things like that. Yep. I mean, well, I was able to, you know, was able to get some material on Saturday. Yeah. You know, cup and it wasn't a lot of material but I got you know we got enough to do what we needed to do. We had some. We need to restock which we will. But it's it's a matter of getting organized. You know, I've been slowly pecking away without Outback and trying to clean it up so we have material back there when we need it. Well, the town appreciates your hard work. Amen. And the crew.
Thanks, Jack. Those guys did a good job. I I told them, you know, thanked them and, you know, we pulled together and we got it knocked out.
I mentioned to Eric that you guys need to find some find money in the budget somewhere we need to buy them lunch or dinner or something to say thank you, you know, so.
Okay. I'm sure they would appreciate that. Yes, thank you. Thank you to you and the crew.
Tree trimming, you want to bring that up? Yep. So you got my email in respect to the tree trimming on Lake Road, I'm assuming that I passed that along. I did have a conversation with the resident out there on Matheson regarding the trees out there, which I'm sure everybody is aware, most everybody's aware of what took place out there. I don't know any better way of getting these things done other than Eric and I've had the discussion to try to better inform the public and I got to do better at getting information to Amanda, to Eric so it can be put on the website things you know try to have a better plan. But, you know, I also fall back to when there's, you know, an immediate hazard in what what I'm charged with as far as being able to remove a tree within the town right away. And if it's a hazard, a public hazard, Can I afford to really spend the time to contact everybody and go through all those hoops to remove a dead tree?
I think our question as a board becomes, have you done what is required by statute or by, have you done what we legally need to do?
As far as removing the dead trees? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in my opinion, somebody else could have it. Know, I've gone through this before and so as my previous supervisors and you know, when you have a dead tree and it poses a threat to public safety we have the right to remove that tree. And as I stated in my
email Unfortunately, I'm not seeing that email. I hadn't seen it. I went looking. I'm still not seeing it. It's in the packet.
It's in the packet, Adrian. Jay, the packet itself. I just have to sit there and say that, I mean, you took down over 200 trees. There has to be some flexibility with what we're doing because of the current circumstances of this dead tree problem. So I read your email and I'm going to sit there and tell you that I know Scott has a significant amount of experience with trees and he would like to sit there and see it potentially done in a way that might give a little bit more exposure. I sit there and think we have to do that as a town. Eric, I would sit there and say it's on the administrator's office that when we have to go out and do these mass tree removals, that we have to do a good job communicating to the residents in those areas that we're coming, the trees that are in the right of way, if they're dead, they may and probably will be taken down. I mean, the only thing for me, Jay, that when I read it was that side road that you had extra time and you moved to that side road, which is really the problem. Yeah.
That's just something maybe a ride around before the work got started might have solved the problem and it probably wouldn't have. If you flagged your overflows, even if you don't get to them,
you know, maybe we have a different card that says, know, you're on our overflow list, you know,
something. Yeah, I mean, those, you know, we did identify those trees, we just didn't notify because we didn't really expect that we'd be able to get to those areas and that
falls on us as far as not. Yeah, but it's a lesson learned. You'll do next time you try to notify those people that there's a possibility that if we have time we'll get there, right? Yeah.
The other concern that I have, and that is, you know, once you announce that a series of trees are hazardous and need to be removed, you kind of own that. And if we don't run out of money or we can't get to that or address that, that's really kind of problematic. And that's why we tend to mark the road, not the tree itself. Because, you know, as soon as you go up and start putting big red X's, you know, if a week later that thing comes down on a car, the town has a lot more liability than if there's no marking whatsoever. And I don't know exactly how to get around it. I mean, you want to tell people what you're doing. And I think there are some cases where
you're definitely going to want to go and mark trees individually. And then I think there are other cases we're going to kind of want to proceed how we've been proceeding, you know, in the past, which is just going down the road and systematically pretty much running down and whacking out all the dead ash, you know, we can get to.
I think in this case, was an issue, there was more than just Dennis.
I'm At on the some point in time, not in this meeting, can you get with Jay and Eric and sit there and work out a program that will limit the liability for the town as they move forward with these mass cuttings? And work
with Yeah. To that. Mean, I may, I won't take more than an hour and a half here. No, don't want it today. No, I'm just kidding. I'll take two minutes. I did read your excellent memo Jay. I thought you did a wonderful job of explaining what happened. I have been involved many times in many towns with issues regarding taking down the trees but never in a situation where so many trees have been taken down. And I'm all for doing this, believe me. Public safety is paramount. You got to deal with public safety. But you know, I'm also very familiar with the statute. And I think the statute gives you, it makes it a judgment call for you Jay as you know because you've had training and whatnot and experience. And you and your judgment, if you think the tree presents an immediate danger then you don't have to mark you don't have to, you know, put that notice on there that gives people a right to ask for a hearing. You know what I'm talking about? Yes. But yep. Yes. And that's I mean, Jay, in my experience, all the cases I've ever dealt with, and this is in like four or five towns including my own,
have involved cases in which the tree wardens actually put that notice on the tree. And you know and I have attended several hearings in that regard and I and I you know I think you're right obviously that you know if you if you and your judgment with your experience and your training believe that a tree is a danger, a public danger, then you can take it down without marking it. And I think Eric's point is well taken too. If you market in some way by, know, with a, not with a notice like I suggested in a situation where the tree is not dangerous but with a big red x and if it does fall down in the interim you know there could be a problem. Yeah. I don't know about you know the public relations part of this. That's a tough call if you're going to do that many trees. Know perhaps it should be at least notice notice somehow on the town website or any kind of town vehicle you have for communicating with the general public.
But as far as I'm concerned Jay, you're well within your authority to make a decision on each individual tree as to whether if it whether it is an imminent danger. And if you do that then you're you know you're as a as a public official you are you know you're immune and the town is immune from liability because it's a judgment call. And if you make when you're making a judgment call, you have limit you have a municipal immunity. So I'm comfortable with what you've done. You've explained it quite well and I'm very impressed with the way you've done it. It's a big job. It's obviously a difficult job and my concern I don't have any concerns. I'll be happy to sit down with you and Eric and come up with some sort of a a plan for making this happen if we have to do this again,
which it seems that we will, and to do it with a minimum of public distress, let's say. Okay. All right. Thank you, Dennis. Thank
you. You had something you wanted to bring before that. No, I You know, unfortunately,
I just got internet back. So I haven't got a chance to read that packet.
You just you just have to be very careful about whose trees they are.
No, I know. And, know, again I hate to say it you know I mean I like to keep the trees too. I completely understand people's opinion on that.
You have every right to cut those trees if they're on the towns right away, that's a danger, but if it's on somebody else's property then you know, if you don't know, even if you don't know, it's best to stay away from them. No. You don't know if they're on the town right away then you'd have to stay away from them. Yep, and to Eric's point
earlier, know, as soon as we identify trees or I get a complaint on a tree, I have to take some kind of action and investigate it. And it has to, something has to be done one way or another in a timely fashion. It can't just be ignored. And that's difficult to do too. Okay. Does anyone have any additional questions for Jay?
No, I just I'm reading them Melina. So I think that the secondary issue for that resident, whether it was addressed directly or not was that, and I, I had multiple lengthy conversations as well with the resident. And their other issue was that the trees were left there, you know, for a while that weren't picked up right away after they were dropped. And that was a concern for her. So, you know, especially what I would I would just implore you that especially when we're in a gray area, not necessarily a gray area, but when we're doing something maybe we haven't notified, because you cut something and saw a dead tree behind it or whatever, that we do our due diligence to at the very least get that off of their property as quick as possible. So we're not creating a hazard on the property, you know, for their kids or whatever, you know, so. Yeah, it
was cleaned up the next day or second day I forget exactly. But no, actually no, it was taken down and cleaned up the next day.
Yeah, that's not the resident relayed to me to be honest, I don't know if it wasn't there. Part of the problem.
I'll tell you one of the other problems is when they come by with the chipper and they chip into the woods. Yeah, and that was an issue there too. So chipping the way we chip or where we chip when we do that type of work. That's going to have to we'll have to scrutinize that more, know, the type of the type of work we did how we did it. You know, you guys did it last year.
And we did it again this year. It's it's new to me. Is chipping a problem like that? Is chipping a problem like that?
Well, you just you know, you got an area with that was green has some underbrush in it. Now you got a bunch of wood chips that are sitting there rotten for a half a year until it turns green again. Yeah. Some property owners don't like to see that some other people may not care so much.
That's the same thing Jay, if you don't get permission to chip onto their property, then that's a problem. Yep. I was over the other side of the lake over by Jeff's house and I called the landowners so they could chip into the woods, knew who it was and be chipped into the woods. But you gotta be careful about that dupiness, you know, it's somebody else's property. Yep. They have all the right in the world to completely. But the chipper's on a box, isn't it?
I was talking about a chipping into the woods. No, but
aren't we pulling it with a box? Aren't they pulling it with? No, no, that didn't have a box with it. And we and they weren't chipping into the trailer there.
So, you know, we we can certainly request that they chip everything into the trailer, the problem just becomes that makes a lot more chips that we got to deal with. I'm not suggesting you do it everywhere,
but right. It would at the very least behoove us to have a box on-site if we need it, you know? Certainly
around the lake, a box on-site would be the way to go.
Well, mean, we did chip probably the vast majority of the trees in the Lake District got chipped into a box truck and then dumped at the public works pit. Were some areas we felt we could chip into the woods. And we did because that is faster and cuts down our time because, you know, the problem is that when once you fill up a tractor trailer with the box, there's a round trip time where you're basically sitting around. Eric, we're not suggesting
that you not ship into the woods at all. We're simply saying we pick and choose, right? Sure. But on that same note, did we run ships up to the Sportsman's Club like we talked about? No, not this time.
Okay. They will still take as many as you will give them. So it's an option.
Yeah, and I think if we had been closer to where the Sportsman's Club is, but since we were running straight down Lake Road, running it straight down Lake Road to the pit is a shorter round trip, which is what we kind of opted for there. But I do agree that, I think by sometime this summer when we have at the trees again, we probably ought to end up with being able to dump quite a bit at the Sportsman's Club if they still want it. Sounds like they do cover the job.
Last time I heard they wanted, all we could give them, they want to cover the ski field with it.
So rather than us stockpiling at the transfers or at the facility and then having to run them again, it might make sense to try to coordinate with somebody up there. Filling in Parker Bridge. We'll make it float.
The only thing I would like to recommend is that we maybe run the tractor trailer up there empty to make sure we can maneuver it in that location before we brought a load of chips up. We wanna run like a test run possibly.
You thinking we're gonna bring them all the way up to the ski field or just dump them in that middle parking area?
Pretty much that field up, you'd have to cross the rail trail to get up there. So there's a little steep pitch there and if we can make that, it wouldn't be a problem. So we may wanna do a test run just to make sure we can make it and I could coordinate that if we want to. I don't think the pitch is gonna be your issue as long as you got a place to turn around. Turn around is the problem with it. Yeah, we got plenty of room up there to turn around. It's wide open.
Okay. Any additional questions for Jay? And by the way, Jay, I think you did a great job on Lake Road with the trees and I have no problem with the chips in the woods. That's because you don't have any woods by your house. Excellent work, yeah I do. I walk by it every day. It looks phenomenal. Any other So questions for
last thing while we're on public works, which was also an agenda item that was part of this was public works staffing and promotion. So I'm going to recommend that we promote Tommy to lead maintainer. So basically the way it's working now is on a pretty regular basis, we're running kind of two independent crews with Tommy leading one of them. You know, he's been a public works employee for fifteen years at this point. He's been a maintainer too for fourteen years. We should promote him the lead maintainer. It's by union contract about a buck and a quarter or a buck 30 more an hour to do it. There is room in that budget to do it in this cycle if you're willing to. But that's a board decision, not just an Eric decision.
I think my own personal take on that is that's a Jay decision.
I concur. Tom's been extremely helpful. And he's taken the lead many times I asked him to go out and do stuff take the crew out get stuff done. Him and I have been working together and trying to plan on different things and you know there's going to be times if I'm not around somebody's got to take on the role of lead. And I completely support Tom in that. What do you think Jeff? I have no problem with that.
Yep. Mean, I asked you Jay, I think it's, if you're telling us that's what you want to do then and Eric says there's room in the budget that's, you know, I think that's the way to go.
You know, it's your department. The total dollar increase was a dollar 38. I believe it was in Eric's.
Yeah, I put in my report all the exact details on it.
So, I have no problem. I would make a motion to, and actually, is Tom's last name? Pearl.
Pearl. Pearl. That's right. I knew it. I'll make a motion to promote Tom Pearl to lead maintainer. I'll second that. All right.
Further discussion on the issue? No. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Abstains? All right, we're good. Anything else for Jay before we let him go? Oh, wait a second. Did he win his game today? Yes, good job. All right. Any further questions for Tom? Yep, take your hat off. Give us a little, give us a little thing. Okay.
Actually, I do have one more thing I want to ask the board. Memorial Field, Veterans Memorial Field is, you know, we had a little bit of damage down there. And that corner to the left when you pull in the parking lot with the chain link fence
wraps around and meets the wood guardrail. I would like to have you guys consider eliminating that chain link going to the wood rail and make a gate there. Something that you know if you ever have to get on the field you can, but having a gate and removing that section of fence will allow any debris to you know flow through and we won't have to keep repairing fence all the time in that spot.
I agree, we should actually have something that's handicap accessible so we can allow a wheelchair onto the field or something along that lines. It wasn't something that was really considered when we
Well, let's start with switching out the chain link to a gate and whatever Jay thinks appropriate. Can you get us a number for that and get it to Eric?
Yep, we can, you know, the fence company. I'll talk to Scott about, you know, who you guys use for a fence company down there and maybe reach out to another fence company. I don't if you use Fenceman out of Colchester. I know they're still in business or Yep, Fenceman's good, Eagle Fence. Yep, you know, we'll get some prices and go from there. That way we don't have all those repairs going on. And I think, probably tomorrow morning I'll probably send Tom down there and, one of the other guys and we'll put a couple of waste block in that area to prevent people from looking at like they could try to drive on to the field.
So until things are repaired. A couple of holes on the side there Jay that could use some stone also.
Around the parking lot? Yeah. Yeah, we did that just today. Oh good. Yeah, catch up Scott.
Let me scrape that up and get that. What's that, Adrian? It's a catch up Scott here behind. So, Trey, one of the things I was looking at with that parking lot is because we continue to lose the top layer of chip every year. So, would it be worthwhile chip sealing that whole parking lot? If not this year, the next year? Just to legalize it? Do a double chip on it.
Inexpensive and it'll seal right, you know, seal real good to the millings.
I'm not sure we can slide that in this year, but let's plan on doing that next year as part of the chip sale program. Okay.
Yeah, so just to be clear, you're not going to repair the chain link until you get an estimate on the switching it out, right? Correct.
Thank you. Correct. We'll make you know, we'll make get things safe down there. We don't want anybody get hurt. But and we'll make it so people can't access the field because I don't want to have anybody driving out on the field like they're not supposed to.
Any additional questions? Jay, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate you joining us and giving us all that value. Thank you. All right. Thanks Jay. Have a good night. Thank you, Jay. Welcome. Thanks, Jay.
We're going to move on to item five appointments of the library board of directors. The members to be appointed are Kathleen DeRosier as a regular member Linda Fish, regular member Diane Greiner, regular member Lisa Kurtz, regular member Julie Victoria, regular member Jeffrey Ballard, alternate member and Sharon Shevchenko, alternate member. Want to make a motion to appoint those individuals? So moved. Okay. Second. I'll second. All those
any discussion related to them? No? All those in favor? Aye. Okay. We're going to move on to item six, resignations. Our Region VIII RAM Board of Education member Stephanie Bancroft has submitted her resignation. Probably need to make motion to accept that resignation. So I'll make a motion that we accept Stephanie's resignation. Second. Further
discussion, we want to thank Stephanie for her service and appreciate all the time she dedicated. She was the chairperson of that committee last year. So all those in favor of accepting her resignation, aye. All All those opposed, there's none. Eric, we're moving on to item seven.
Okay. Before we do that real quick, we've advertised for the position, we've notified the chairman of both parties. So we're in the works. My suggestion is that we plan on a town meeting because we have to replace via a town meeting. And we do that in early September. And we see whether we can get one or two of the ordinances that you have been considering fully drafted by Dennis and on for the same meeting. We multitask since we have to send out a mailer and pay for the meeting anyway.
So do we need to do that at this meeting? Or can we set a date that might work and do it at our next meeting?
I think you can I don't think you even need to set a meeting date at this point? You can set a meeting date at your next meeting. Because I don't think because the budget is pretty much in place. So this is a somewhat slower time when we still have one representative representing us at this point.
And so your thought is the beginning of September for a meeting to appoint a new person to that position? Correct.
And do we know when their meetings are scheduled for? No, I don't.
Does anyone else have any issues if we just hold off until next meeting to schedule it? No. Okay. Then we'll do that. Eric, your administrator's report, item seven.
Okay. So first of all, in terms of personnel back, Marina Pandolfi is back. She had had some surgery, so she's back and in good shape. John Chipponis is back in the office. He's back after having shoulder replacement service. Service. So they're both back working now. We did get notified we're getting a refund from Kerma of $5,300
Scott, can you just stop? I appreciate you're telling us that people are back, but I don't know if we're supposed to be telling why people were out. So just like if that comes up again, we don't need to know why John was out. He's back, right? But you know what I mean?
So I don't think John has an issue with you knowing that
that's why we only discussed one reason for a person being out. Yeah, I'm just saying it just, I don't feel appropriate as a public servant that we're putting that out there. So someone should tell everyone, let's not do that. Yep, fair enough. What
else? We're back pretty well fully staffed for senior services. So that's been going well. We're doing a bunch of luncheons. We're starting up the indoor and outdoor activities. So far, that's been going very well. So no issues there. We've talked about separately with Jay, both public works and pre work and the road work, so I'm not going to go over that. There's nothing really to be said about the snow plowing. There was an incident at the transfer station with a resident accusing that one of the transfer station attendants of theft. That was totally bogus. The resident later found the items that he swore the attendants stole at home. And at the same time that resident had admitted to me and Scott that he was pretty inappropriate with Dominic when Dominic asked him to park on the side. So at some point I need to get around to sending him a letter and warning him that that kind of behavior is not
appropriate at the transfer station. And I do have anything to add to that one?
Oh, think Dom's job is kind of tough up there at times. Yeah, kudos to Dominic though for becoming
a great employee down there. You're always done well. So far so good. What's going on with our permit process and all that fun stuff?
So you're talking about the building department? Yep. So right now, Kathy Luneta is still working somewhere around fifteen to nineteen hours a week. I'm trying to get more overlap with her. In the office. The backlog has been worked off. And we did sign another six month contract with Bolton to provide building official services. We've now sent all the information to Permit Link. They were supposed to start training this week. I reached out to them today, I've not heard a response back yet, but they seem to be slower in implementing than I would like.
Can I interrupt? You said that all the backlog from the office is caught up, so meaning we're current to date.
As far as I know, we're current to date. There's a large stack of people that have been notified that there's stuff missing. There's a fairly large stack of building permits that are awaiting complete documentation before they can be processed. But as far as I understand, all those homeowners have been notified officially what they're missing and that they need to supply that information.
Okay. That's great to hear, good job. So you're saying you're having an issue with overlap. Now that the station stickers are starting to wind off and we're not so crazy with election stuff, Is that something we're gonna move forward with?
Yeah, I've said to both Carol and Matteo that at least at this point right now, what we need to do is shift Matteo's hours. The part of the problem is that because we've gone ahead now and announced what our hours are, I'm hesitant to just shift her into the middle of the day. Basically, Kathy doesn't really wanna work early in the morning and she doesn't wanna work late at night, which is fine. I mean, because she's helping out and we really appreciate everything she does for us. So, but I can't just not have Matea in the building department when we've announced that there's going to be somebody covering in the building department. So since I think Wednesdays was the by appointment only time, we're going to use that for now as the cover and switch her to the town clerk's office during that period. And then with the understanding that if somebody does call and want to come in, she'll have to switch and go help them out in the building department. So I guess what I'm saying is we're working on it. It is still a work in progress.
And are you going to get some sort of progress reports from Kathy as to how Matej is doing so we know if this is gonna come to some sort of solution?
Well, I mean, I have been talking to Kathy about it. I mean, we've had that conversation several times. Okay. But
be aware that right now we're still not talking about an awful lot of hours in the building department. So with Kathy gone, and with Permit Link in place, we probably can survive, but it's still going to be a difficult, there's still not going to be a ton of time assigned to that position. And there's still a lot of people that need handholding.
Well, let's figure that out when get there. Just as long as we're getting, if Kathy feels like Potea is coming along and we're going in the right direction then that's what we need to hear so. And if not then we need to come up with another solution. When
I spoke with Bolton this past week for an inspection, the secretary had told me that nobody answers the phone very well, they're suffering with bad emails also. So I don't know what we can do about working on that. What do mean by that?
That's just from town to town. That's from town to town. It's not even our customers. Nobody's So and phone calls. Our department, Scott? In the land use department, yep.
No, I don't, what do you mean by bad emails? Can you give me more? Well they're not,
they don't This return the is just, this is what just somebody told me up there, okay? Permits That's exactly aren't filled out correctly and emails, they don't return the emails as fast as they should be. And the telephone, they try to call down to handover and talk to nobody and they never get through.
But do they know, that that department someone's not going to be there answering the phone all the time, right? I mean, I would think they would know that. Well, they try
a lot, Paul, and nobody's answering the phone down there. Well, I mean, listen, I I will gladly defend that only in the sense right now that, you know, in the last in the last month and a half, we've been doing transfer station stickers. So we've gotten to the point where even had no, we even had the, you know, and thankfully to Roberta for actually stepping in and helping out, she was actually helping, you know, the clerk's office get go out and put transfer station stickers on cars because they were so buried. So, you know, not for nothing but they've been unfortunately out of the building a lot with that. Right. Yeah. And I get it. I'm just transferring some information. That's all, you know. Yeah.
I mean, what I would say is I'm still really concerned about what happens when Kathy leaves again and we're back down to a single person covering both those offices. You know, it's still going to be problematic. I'm not trying to sugarcoat that.
And so have you had any idea what you could do if that comes up again, Eric?
I mean, you know, the practical solution is to hire a full time person to cover that office. The problem is we just don't have the budgetary ability practically
to do that. Yeah, but the reality is this too. And no offense, but you sit and think about it. How long has Kathy Lunce been on that office helping out? Two weeks, three weeks? Three weeks. Right. And so in three weeks of give or take nineteen hour weeks, the office is caught up. Right? It still proves our theory that it's not a full time position, no matter how you look at it. Adrian, you and Jeff are not supposed to be talking about this. Okay? I'm just saying. Jeff McGuire.
So, I think the problem is just that it's gonna take whoever's in that spot
is gonna take a long time before they really understand because there's an awful lot to do that. The only thing that you're gonna have to do it, you're gonna have to keep on that office really closely to make sure all the permits are done correctly and they're getting a good talk, the emails are good back and forth from Bolton to town here and making sure that it all works. And if it doesn't work, then we're gonna have to come back to the board and get more hours possibly.
Yeah, mean, is Scott 100% right that we need to know. You should be getting at the very least a biweekly update as to what the report status is. Where are we with permits? Is there anybody behind? Are we having a problem with getting? I know we have some staffing situations going on down there with land stuff, but in general, you know, are we keeping up with the workload? And if not, where are our stumbling blocks? Because if we don't know that, then we don't know how to address it. Right, we don't
know if working hours is gonna work. My personal opinion is it's impossible to work at fourteen hours. I'm sorry, Adrian and Jeff, but can't. Bolton has forty hours, forty hours. Okay,
I'm gonna take a drink because I can't say anything. Okay, good. Thank you.
Do we have any further discussion on this topic? I'll just say something really quick. I've been dealing with the office in Salem, which is about the same size as our town. And they're only open Mondays and Thursdays and from three to 07:00. So just take it for what it is. Have limited hours as well. Most of the towns are so. Right.
Everybody knows when to go into Salem. Gotta go at that time to, if you need anything in the
down in wetlands or land use in Salem, we got to go during those hours. Yeah, like the zoning agent was there today from three to seven. That's when I knew I could contact him. Then they're clearly posted on the website. That's the time to contact them.
You want any action down there, that's when you go.
Right. And, you know, and same thing with, you know, I've gone up and pulled the permit in union one time for Tesla Energy and they're only open one day a week. And they require all permits pulled in person, which is kind of an annoyance because you can't even mail them the appointment. You have to show up in person the one day they're they're open. So you know it's definitely a trade off the the problem is just the number of permits we're getting right now and part of it is we are in a real we have been in a real building you know, boom right now. Boom. You know, after a long period of relatively little, you know, I think if we were trying to do this and it was two years ago, this probably would not be the issue it is right now. But the reality is we have a lot more permits. So glad this meeting is recorded. Yep. So.
Okay. So do we have any issues to really address other than watching the building department and to sit there and see where it goes? No, I just I know we had gotten some email updates, but I thought it was important that the public be aware as well. Mean, do we have established hours?
We do. And they're posted on the website and they're posted on the front of the building for the building department.
Okay, so maybe we do a Facebook post as a reminder, just put it out there because there are a lot a lot of people obviously looking for that information. The more we get it out there the better. And we're in we're in a little growing pains right now so
more communication is better. Maybe do it as a pinned announcement and tie it, you know, dovetail it into the town hall being back open, you know, transfer station stickers still available for those that haven't gotten them, new building department hours and availability.
And I would put it even at the bottom of these reminders, you know, a great resource is our website. You can visit our website at blah, blah, blah for updates and you know that can be like your little boilerplate at the bottom all the time. And just pin it so it stays at the top. Is that Eric? Yep.
Okay, Eric, do you have anything remaining on your report?
Nothing important. Well, not that it's not important, but nothing I wanna talk about unless you have questions for me.
Have the gutters been fixed on the front of the town hall? If not, are we getting somebody there? The gutters have been fixed on the front of the town hall.
Okay. Eric, how about the moss on the roof? The moss on the roof has been sprayed with spray and forget.
Eric, what's your those should be town report things. We love hearing about things even if they're small being done. That's awesome.
Eric, was there any significant damage to the culverts that we have to deal with?
No, I did not see any further deterioration of the three that we're really working, worried about that are poor failing. The only one we had the real problem was Bunker Hill.
Okay. And have we closed out the Times Farm Bridge project?
We have not closed out the Times Farm Bridge program. Right now, I'm trying to carve out enough time to sit down with Sherry and go over the final documentation on that. Because I have some question about what we're paying the engineering company that's representing us. We've paid off the final contractor who did the work has been paid, and that was approved by DEP. There's basically one invoice we still got to approve for the contractor and then we got to apply back to the federal government to get 80% of the money we're paying back from that. We are close, but we're not there yet. Can I ask that
somehow, I mean, I know it's probably Mike Palazzi's fault for the Time Swarms Bridge and all that project, but can we get that closed out? I mean, honestly, we have to get that thing done. Mike, I'm only kidding you. Don't worry about it. What does Mike have to do with this? It's on his road he This road. That happened and he was the guy watching the project and it took so long to get done. So Eric, please close that out. I'm really tired of seeing that on agendas. It's been on my entire six years of involvement. It's got to go. I understand.
I would very much like to clear that off my plate for a final also. Okay.
All right. Any other questions for Eric on his report? No? Okay. Let's move on to old business, 8A alarm monitoring for town buildings. Sir,
go ahead. So we have done the transition. We are all working off the new monitoring company that has been so far running very well. We have not had any issues with it. I reached out to the company again last week and said we need to schedule now the inspections for all the buildings and get that in. So we get the final work plan for public works and ensure that all the buildings are actually working since most of these systems haven't been inspected for, say, seven years, six years.
Okay. What is the status of the old Town Hall?
The old Town Hall is just kind of sitting there.
So, I mean, that was one of the items that you didn't address in your report, in your written report. So, I'm asking, are we doing anything with that or is there nothing that's going to get done with that building?
No, until we find some place to store the vehicles, I mean, think we're going to keep it just as overhead protection for the senior transportation vehicles.
Isn't that the old firehouse? I was talking about the town. You mean the museum? The museum. Right.
No, I haven't. Honestly, I'm not quite sure how to address the museum. I think at this point, I'm going to ask them to come in and inspect what is there. But I don't think they felt the last time like they could really upgrade that portion of the system. So I guess we're gonna have to try to figure out what that's there is even usable, if we're not gonna upgrade the whole thing. So that's kind of my plan of attack. I don't have a good solution for it.
We went over this the last meeting, didn't we? What we were going to do at the museum?
Yeah, but we didn't really come to a conclusion. The only thing you said is you wanted it done cheaper. If we didn't,
if we were gonna ask Scott Yeomans what he wanted, I guess. If we couldn't get it done cheaper, we're just gonna ask him what he wanted. Wasn't that it, Adrian?
Yeah, I thought there was a talk about using something like just simple safe or something like that. Right. Yeah, yeah. But he said that's fair I thought. Right, but I mean, there is already a homeowner special system that's there.
So I mean, we don't actually have to. I mean, there is kind of a half baked burglar alarm and half baked fire alarm there. But it's not turned on?
It's turned on I mean it goes off I get random alerts on my phone from time to time that you know it's alarmed you know or somebody set the alarm off.
So let's actually look, let's finalize that for our next meeting, even if we have to call Comcast or one of the other
potential service providers and we have to get internet in there, something to sit there and make this work. Well, a simple, safe one just works on a cell network. So you pick like in this area, generally Verizon, you plug it into the wall and tell them how many doors and windows you need and they send it to you and you put the stuff up. It's not that hard. But I mean, that's basically what we have now. So if that's acceptable, we just don't do anything, right? I mean
As long as we're getting notifications and as long as, you know, because we already know we're not going to stop a fire in there if it gets running because it's so full at this point, you know?
I'm okay with a system like that, Eric, because the most important thing there are the museum pieces of the old remnants of a band over and it's
think if Adrian's right, if it burns, it's going. There's not. Yeah, you couldn't safely go in there and fight a fire and you can, you know, it's structurally trying to stop one from the outside, especially with that building would be a nightmare. So, you know, basically you're worried about theft and getting there as quickly as possible. So,
you know. Okay. So to me, if you're running that, Eric, then as long as you can get it so you don't get faulty notifications all the time and it's not irritating,
then I'm okay with that level of service. And if you can't address that, then let's look at doing something a little simpler, you know, not simpler, but more reliable and simple, should say simpler than the other. I thought at the last meeting we said we were gonna get somebody in there to look at it. The company that we picked for the fire alarms, we're gonna get them in there and to look at it. There was one panel they, yeah, the question is whether they could, they said they could reuse a lot of the sensors. It was the panel was the issue and they wanted a ton of money for a new panel. So, you know. Scott, I mean, listen, had Bob put SimpliSafe in
five years ago. It's not SimpliSafe, it's called Frontpoint, but it's the same thing. It's the same kind of
cellular based service because at that point in time, you didn't want to have a phone line in that building.
Maybe that's it. The phone line, we were going to put a new phone line in or something. Yeah. But it doesn't make sense to do that.
If that system think the problem in my mind, the problem was that Eric was getting too many faulty phone calls. He was getting phone calls at different points in time. If you can solve that. Well,
I mean, I guess the bigger problem from mine is that they don't necessarily call dispatch, you know, they call Scott or myself, you know, and first they ask you whether they you think there's a problem there and then they'll call dispatch. I mean, to me, those kinds of things, if you have a burglar alarm, you call the state police, you don't call me. I mean,
to prevent false alarms when somebody walks into the building. And listen, even in commercial applications, that's still the same. Generally, when I walked in and unlocked the building, if I put in the wrong code or one of my salespeople or one of my staff put in the wrong code, it was gonna notify a manager first, And then we would reach out to whoever's supposed to be opening the buildings, hey, did you screw up or something going on? Or just based on the time of day, we may ignore it. But even a commercial system has that in place. So I don't see what the issue is with that. You know? Right. Yeah. So Okay. So Scott Can
I just ask this, Jeff? Sure. Eric, do we have a problem with false alerts at this point? No. Are Are you okay okay with false alerts? So we have a functioning system, it's just not a dispatch based system.
Correct. And it's a fairly primitive system, but you know It's a fairly primitive building. That is true, that is true.
I would hate to be the person voted not look into it and fire and Scott, we've already looked I know we have Ethan. Already looked into this and We have to follow-up with all these things and make sure that it's working correctly. Think that we need to get a guy in there to make sure that it's adequate. That's all.
Scott, your position is adequate as a fire suppression or fire system.
The burglar ran out a fire alarm in there. It has. As long as it's working, I would say that we did our job.
Well, Jay set it off the other day because he opened the door to turn on the water and I got a call at 06:00 in the morning. And I stumbled my arms out of bed and drove down there and looked around and nothing was happening so I called them back because Jade already left by that point and Jade told me later, hey, think I tripped the alarm at the museum? I'm like, yes you did. So I mean that's the kind of stuff that's happened. Not the end of the world. It works. Okay so hey it worked.
That particular situation though, it sounds like we don't have an internal audible alarm. So maybe we need to reach out to Frontpoint and get an internal audible, right? So like most of the time on those systems, you can have an internal decibel alarm. It's like 130 decibels or something ridiculous. And it tells the person when the alarm's off that's there, hey, I screwed up. The alarm's going off. And it's, it's a, it is so that he knows to call you, whether it's Mr. Yeomans or Jay or whoever, you know? Right. And that way, that way they can go in and address, they can just code out the alarm and you won't get bothered that way. You know?
Scott, just because I want to make sure that you are satisfied with where we go with this issue. Thank you, Jeff. Please let me know because I would hate to like be called out for not caring. That's
what I'm worried about. That's why we're going to leave it in the administrator's hands. He's going to report back to us what he found out next month. We're going to head down for new business, old business for this next month here.
What is it, can we just be specific and what is Fully functioning fire and burglar alarm. Like homeowner style or professional commercial He
just wants to make sure the one that's in there is functioning and has all the things we need. Things that, right. All the windows, the fire alarms are good. All the alarms
inside are good. I mean, there's no window sensors or anything like that. I think there's one motion sensor, you know, in the building for that thing, maybe two. But, you know, eventually it will trip if somebody is roaming around in there.
Okay, so Eric, what we're going to do, what Scott and I are going to come down for a test run of the system.
See if you can break in and get away with it.
How about that? We won't try that, but we'll have you there and see if you get a ring on your phone and we'll do that at some point in time between now and the next meeting. That's Does anyone else have a problem with that? No? Okay, excellent. Then maybe we can get this off of our old business list.
Eric, not for nothing, but we could even just do something as simple as, if we need to add a audible alarm or we need to even have a camera setup, can throw in down there so that you can see, instead of just you getting an alert, you would get a picture on your phone, you know, that says, Hey, this is the person that set it off, you know. There you go. So if you go to contact Frontpoint directly, they have that stuff available. It looks like so. Okay. Okay. So 8B COVID funding.
Nothing. We're still intending to use some of the COVID funding to fix, to do the trenching for the sprinkler system for the monument. You know that that's it at this point for the COVID funding.
I spoke with a guy that is possibly well he did finally talk to me today, called me back after months, but talked about the irrigation and I set up some preliminary dates that for, because Matt Kordner has to also be there to talk about the irrigation. Anyways, I've got it down to two dates and then I'll call you Eric and we can all meet down there. And he said that you know he was interested in you know a partial funding and Matt's probably going to do a partial funding and so that's where that stands. I finally got a hold of these guys they're all busy. Okay. Okay, so just tell me
as far ahead. I'll let you know if they I
just I want to get Rick from Lenco, Rick Langley there also.
I think it's gonna be the thirtieth, early in the morning. On vacation. You're gonna be ice boating?
No, but I'm gonna be gone. I thought that was the thirty first you started.
No, I was taking the thirtieth off. But you know what? If I have to be there the morning of, I'll make it work.
No. Scott needs Scott needs to move it. You need a vacation. Or Scott can handle meeting up with Lenco and just record the meeting on your phone or something and
Amanda is the one off on the thirtieth. Eric wrote it down on his list. It has to be true.
That's what I thought. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was taking off the 07/30 through 08/08
unless I put that wrong on my, sheet. Put that wrong, you put the thirty first. Scott, change change your date. Let the guy go.
Or if you need to have the meeting, can Scott have the meeting with Lancome and just record it? Yeah, that's fine. Okay. I
don't need to be there unless you absolutely need me to be there. And if there's any specific questions, just get them to Scott. Scott will take care of it. He's the man. Yeah, I trust Scott. Yeah. He doesn't trust me, but I do trust him. He doesn't trust either of us. He He's mean like doesn't. Not with any money. We're not old enough. We haven't any money things. We haven't earned our stripes. Scott,
it's not that you don't trust us about money, you just think that we're mean. That too. All right.
Okay. We're going to go to the next item on Oh, no. Eric, what I would ask you to do on the COVID funding, could you come to us all with the list of things that you think would be appropriate for the town and the other members of the board of selectmen by the next meeting. Can we all get together and discuss what we think spending that money on would be appropriate for? And then Well, what's the status with Crogg at this point?
Are they doing any guidance that we know of any further guidance?
I have not heard anything back from Crogg lately regarding that. Okay. So not since the last meeting.
Okay. I mean, I read what Eric provided us in this package and it doesn't appear like there's a lot of flexibility, but we're going to have to be creative by how we say we're going to spend it. I'm sure the rules are going to change again and again and again, because I think all of the communities are going come back with the same issues as to what the money can be spent on, especially rural communities like ours. Let's all come up with things that we believe those dollars could be utilized for and let's try to make it work out for the best interest of the town.
I will just say I will encourage everyone to consider God and especially given how hard it was to pass this budget and we'd still not even passed that maybe that the blessing would be to use those funds for the community center. You know, really could put us where we want to be and get that project finally over the finish line. Again, we can all list out things that might No, I know. I just want people to think about that in the interim. And if they haven't to take the time to go and look on the website, Amanda's put up some of the stuff, go and look at the bid packet and what we're looking at. We're getting closer.
You know. Right. The only other thing I would say is that we have had a specific request for Eastern Highlands Health District. The Health District didn't get any money through that pool of funds, although they got other additional funds for various things. And they have asked for an allotment from the town. Was under $2, right? The request is $1,200 Yeah. Just the money.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I would be happy to do that, but I didn't feel like I could do that without your blessing.
No, just kick it over to Board of Finance, you know.
Okay. It was, I didn't even think it was $1,200 I thought it was a thousand and $28 I was like, fine. Dollars $12.00 6 to be exact.
Okay. That's why Scott doesn't trust you with money Jeff.
I didn't think I was mean with that. I want them to have the money. They've done a great job. But you've tried to under give them the money. It's $1,200. You only want to give a $10.28.
Yes, you're right. You're right. Under give. Do we need to make a motion for that? No, just needs to go to Board of Finance. We'll gladly make a motion to sit there and get Eastern Highlands Health District that funding. Well, how much scrutiny there is on
the board spending that money, I think you probably should make a motion as a board. I make a motion that we forward the matter of the Eastern Howard Health District request for COVID supplemental funds to the Board of Finance. I'll second. All those in favor? Aye. Okay, thank you.
HC community senior community Senior Center Building Committee update. Funding discussion request for proposal. I saw the RFP and package. Does any of the other members want to talk about it? Scott? No, I'm Jeff
Murray, we're all good? Okay. So I just would say one thing. I've done sidewalks at this point with BSC Group, BL companies, Anchor Engineering, Capital Studio Architects and Design Professionals. So there have been five companies that have done sidewalks
you know for that RFP. Well, that's awesome to hear.
Okay, it is. And thanks Amanda for reaching out to all the companies that were on the list to try to drum up as many as we could.
Okay. 8D, the Veterans Monument Park updates. I know the brick sales are still going on. I know we got an email from Jerry during the meeting. We're gonna have to address after this meeting. Anything else?
No. Real quick though, can I just make a suggestion to Amanda? When we do these RFPs and we do these bids, when we're putting a list together of contractors to reach out to, we should have a running file that both you and Eric, have a copy of, of a list of contractors, whether it's paving contractors, engineers, anytime we're doing this, what even if somebody applies and they're not on our list, we need to add them to it. Should have a running list, running folder with all this contact information. So as we go forward with projects, whatever they are, we can go and drum up those proposals because as a small town, that's the most important part. That is a fabulous solution. 8E, the public library chimney repointing quotes.
Okay, so this will be really quick. You as a board kicked this to CIP, CIP met and kicked it back to me and said, find somebody to do an independent evaluation. We did find somebody to come in and do an independent evaluation. I sent that whole packet to CIP for review and to make a determination.
We need not Thursday. Then we'll go from there. What? We meet on Thursday, right? Yep.
Yep. Okay. So hopefully we'll, CIP will, you know, tell me how to proceed based on the information in the report. We can discuss that and we're moving on with that. Request for qualifications 8F for affordable housing plan.
So I threw that in your packet, you had signed or gave me permission at the last meeting to sign or to put the grant in for the affordable housing plan. So that has been submitted, and we put in a request for proposals back. And it's designed to come out about the same time. We'll know one way or the other whether we got the grant, and we'll make a decision at that time whether we proceed or not.
Okay. Before we move on in our packet, we had like a library grant, if I remember correctly. That supposed to be on our agenda? Do we have to approve that? Connecticut State Library grant?
No, I don't think you need to approve that. That was signed directly by the director of the library. There's no because it's not a matching grant, it's just flat out money. And it doesn't come from the town's pool of money. It comes from a separate pool of money eligible only to libraries. So they're just notifying you that they've applied for that grant. And those are the things they're asking for. Yeah, hope they get it. Yep, me too.
Okay. Section nine, new business, discuss and act upon the following. 9A is tree trimming, we talked about it. 9B is roadwork progress report, we talked about it. 9C is public work staffing and promotion. We talked about it. 9D, mowing along Route 6 in the rail track. We didn't talk about that item, Eric.
Oh, okay. Real quick, a couple of things happened. One, I challenged Jay a little bit and said, you got to figure out to mow this faster. So, he basically came back to me and said, well, what we can do is instead of having somebody in the chase vehicle, we can just park the chase vehicle with the lights on so that eliminates one staff person. It's not quite as safe, doesn't quite meet the state rules, but it's close enough. And then they had two guys with the trimmer and one guy with the mower, But that still only gets it down to like two and a half hours. So as Scott, you know, went out and talked to both Hebron Parks and Recs and I had put a call in to Matt Kordner, although he never actually referred my call, decided to deal with Scott, which is fine. And the smart thing to do is just put the whole top section on our normal mowing, two week mowing schedule. So that gets the whole top portion
taken care of by Andover Landscaping. And then now we just have to deal with the banked roadside mowing. So that cuts the total time public works and distraction of public works pretty considerably. And then, you know, again, if you want it mowed twice, you know, twice a month, we mow it twice a month.
And I finally got the email from him, dollars 70.
Yep. You get in touch with the DOT or the DEP individual from the state that's really responsible for that property?
I know we so I talked to Dave Buckley about it, and he said basically from the DEEP half, the best they're going to do is get enough manpower to mow it once in the fall. He said, If you want mowing it more than that, you're going to have to do it yourself. The DOT does not do most of their roadside mowing with a sidearm mower, or they use a sidearm, not a boom flail, which is what we need to do to get the upper slope portion. So they have been mowing in town. I know because I've got multiple complaints about them mowing on 316 and Route 6, but I don't think they're not gonna mow, they're in the same mode. They're gonna try to get one pass, maybe two passes per year, you know, and they're only going one mower width deep. So, from an aesthetic, from a functional point of view, that would work, but what you're trying to do is something aesthetic. So, we're not going to get the DOT to do that.
We're going to have to come up with a solution that doesn't involve mowing long term. So we need to get in touch with that, with DOT or DEP. We need to get them to find a solution for us because that's unacceptable for me. It looks terrible. It's not our property and yet it impacts us. So I want a meeting with somebody. We're going to have to talk Robin Green or Kasano or somebody because that's not going to work.
Mean, honestly, that's the kind of things towns do their own mowing for that reason. I mean, pretty much all the towns on the rail trail do their own mowing of the rail trail.
City doesn't really do any of that. Then what I'm saying is let's be creative. Let's get rid of the grass. Let's do something else. Figure it out, get the money from them, get the supplies from them, and let's do something that eliminates the grass. Jeff, it's 1,400 feet long.
Yeah. Well, we got to figure it out. It's 1,400 feet of ugly.
We can buy a zero turn and mow it for cheap. Well, we could also have them put something else on there. You're not going to get anywhere with the TEP, anything to do with the statement. They're not going to mow that for you. Okay. Those are the facts. Yeah, but listen,
if that's the case, then we put it on the we put it on the on the mowing schedule, it's cheaper to have someone else do it on a mowing schedule than us to go get a zero turn and throw a guy back. Exactly. Yeah, very definitely.
No, I mean, the most economical solution we have is to mow the whole top with end of our landscaping, just as part of our normal, you know, mowing schedule, we just add one more area to our mowing, which we're probably going to add part of that next year anyway, because once we do the connectivity grant, and we make an official trailhead at Center Street, we take on the responsibility for mowing that section more regularly anyway. So, I don't see that part as being a big deal. And it just means because we're basically using one guy full time mowing all summer right now with the roadside mower whenever the thing's working. So, we just mow that with greater frequency. I mean, it's all doable.
And Jeff and Adrian, Matt Cordner also told me that he would stop charging the town for doing a veterans park to save us a little money. So it's not going to be such a big hit it's going to be I think what did they charge us 35 at the next park? So it's you're getting it done for $35 actually.
Why are you single Jeff and I out on this? Just
don't want to spend any money ever you know especially
Jeff Maguire he I just suggested I would like to see it nice he doesn't want to spend $35
to make it look nice. I just suggested that you hire someone to take care of Jeff's Hill, which when he finally gives up his spot, we're gonna put a plaque over there to call the Jeff's Hill. You know, I mean, I just suggested that we do that. I can't win, Scott.
Scott, I'll have to come back to you. I think I agreed that we would give a one year reprieve on discussing all internal workings for staff and you keep attacking me. I feel offended. You don't have to go after Jeff Murray or Paula. Keep coming after Adrian and I like we did something bad. Never said the last name, it could be me.
You were asleep. Wasn't going after you. Okay. So But I'm always laughing about it, Jeff McGuire. Okay? I take it. But you're laughing at us, not with us. That's the part that hurts Scott. I don't know about you, but I take all of this personally. I
prefer McGuire Mound to myself. It's not really hill. Is a mound. It's a mound with something.
Yes. Mound, yeah. Yes, mound. Okay, 9E, town budget discussion. We have a vote tomorrow. Does anyone want to discuss it? Scott, do you want to discuss it? Thank you, sir. Okay. No. We'll move on to 9F, the complaint log system. Eric included the complaint log and how we're going to try to identify complaints in the system. Does anybody have any comments on the protocol?
Okay. Yeah, and I meant to include, sorry, that did not make the packet. I will send you offline my last three weeks of complaint logs from me So you guys can all see what, you know, kind of what the complaints have been, at least through my office. How many pages are there? Not more than four or five. It's not super long.
There a Legal space there. Is there a complaint per page? No, God no. Tell you what,
let's have Scott go through those. He's good at Yeah, know what, Scott's great at handling this and Scott will spend money to solve that problem too. So that's a Scott job. Okay, that's good. Good Good, I'm gonna spend your money Adrian. Don't have it. Listen,
far as it is our money. I mean, is Mandeville and Maguire's money, M and M money, you're going to spend that. That's right. You haven't been at Jeff Murray's house lately or Paula's then have you? No.
All right, let's go. Anybody else on the complaint log system? I want
to kind of say something about that. So Eric, you're getting a lot of nice comments on Facebook opposed to the complaint log. You're getting a lot of nice comments and thank yous on Facebook for your updates. Your comments don't count Paula. I'm not talking to you so please be quiet. Eric, thank you for your updates and people are appreciative of it. So just wanted to recognize that. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think that has been going very well.
And you know, it's not just me, Amanda's responsible for a lot of that. I know you guys two years ago made it a priority of mine to do whatever we can to keep town residents informed of what's going on and we work pretty hard at that. And people appreciate the dialogue. Mean like there was a to do about
you know tax, the tax bills going out and how people were being taxed and you were very quick to address that. And that's
what residents need, you know, so. Yeah, so I know we're getting these complaints in, but we're also getting some good feedback too. So not everybody's going to be happy. We can't please everybody, but I just want to say we are getting some good stuff. Scott's never going to be happy, so. Well, yeah.
Paula, thank you very much for that. I appreciate that. And Eric, I do appreciate getting texts and emails and understanding that roads are closed and that we have issues. It is very good and I think it's proactive. It shows that we're actually looking at things and trying to keep our residents informed. So, you. Nine gs, legislation regarding SB twelve oh one, which is the adult use of cannabis in Connecticut. I had sent out some information that we had gotten from the state regarding the law. I sit there and look at this as a rural extension of our town. There are opportunities here for a town like ours to sit there and potentially have some development and some retail that'll actually assist in the town. So I sit there and think that we should support some type of development around this new law. So I brought it to the board, and I think we should sit there and do something, because I think it 3% of total sales payable to a community is a very positive. And we could use Route 6 as a vehicle to allow us to make some money. Do have a motion?
I know there is a motion in our package. If somebody would like to make it, that would be great. If you'd just like to discuss the issue, that would also be fine.
We talking a resolution. Should we discuss a resolution if we're going to do that? I think that what was put in our package. Right. He already made a resolution.
But there was two right at one point, which one? Right. So there's a longer version and a shorter version
kind of in your packet. Dennis has produced a grand total of six versions of this. I didn't show you all of his versions. I had asked him after the initial resolution, I thought it was a bit on the wordy side. And he came back with several other versions, the last of which is the first one in your packet, which is what I think probably says what you want it to say. But if you want the resolution changed in any way, we're happy to change it. I mean, it's your resolution. So you may resolve whatever you resolve to resolve.
I just want to make sure we're making the motion on the right resolution. That's all.
If I may, I, you know, looking at the sixth, sixth draft, I could actually see cutting out the fourth whereas to make it, you know, Eric thought it should be done in the form of a haiku. I couldn't I couldn't do that. I started out with throwing everything in but the kitchen sink and then cutting it down because it's it's a legal document but it's not, you know, that kind of legal document. Just wanted to add for your, just in case you're interested, my daughter is the, legislative director for the Department of, Consumer Protection. She had a lot to do with drafting the legislation, all 300 pages. So if anybody is really interested in talking to her maybe off the record about what any suggestions she might have as to how to approach this because I'm sure it's gonna be very competitive. That would be I would ask her and I'm sure she'd be willing to do that or I could do that myself
but you know anyway I like this resolution. I think you know like I said you could dump the longer whereas paragraph and still you know it would be more like a haiku.
Would she approve it Dennis? Would she approve Andover? No approve the resolution that you drew up. Oh oh I I'm sure she would.
I'm sure she would. What what would she, you know, she, I I don't know what the process is going to be, for for funding it, but, you know, maybe I could find out some more and report back to you. But I think it would be a good idea to pass a resolution like this even if you cut out one more paragraph and then send it with a cover letter to you know, anybody you can think of just to let, you know, let let people know that you're speaking for the board of selectmen anyway. I mean you can't speak for the zoning commission because, you know, if if you do have a facility like this or plan one in this town it's probably going to have to go through zoning. I just wanted to add that caveat.
Does anybody have a problem with the resolution, the short resolution
that is in front of us? No, the short one is the only one.
No, we have two. But does anyone have a problem with the short resolution? No. I don't.
Any comments on it? Nothing? Okay. I just wanna add that there was a discussion on Facebook and around the town and the reception and the opinions on this are about 90, say 98 ish positive. So it's an overwhelming majority that supports this resolution. I think we should pass it.
Right. Well, we will have residents that are not in favor of this and that's why this is
a democratic Everybody's in favor of it until you go to put it next to their house.
But that's for the Economic Development Commission and our zoning board. But we just want to get the message out that we're receptive to this kind of enterprise.
Jeff Murray, you did a really nice job of that letter. I didn't do it.
What do you mean letter? I didn't do any letter. You didn't? No, that's Dennis Craft. Oh, Dennis Craft did that? Yep. Oh, good. Nice job, Took
me a whole week. Parts of a whole week. But anyway, I think
Someone want to make a motion to get this resolution.
I just want to hear from Dennis real quick. What were you going to say, Dennis? I just want to thank you, Jeff Murray,
kind of started the ball rolling. And from my experience as a as a politician the state and local level I think it's a great idea. I'm not I don't know if it'll work but if it does and the people are behind it it's a great thing
so I'm so I think at some point if we do it tonight or in the future just to ease the minds of the people that are concerned about this. I know a lot of people are concerned because of, you know, maybe for safety reasons and if they don't understand that, you know, there's gonna be some security at a, at this facility. I think we have to have a discussion so that they can understand if it goes forward, how it would look in town, like a high level. Because right now I think their concerns are well, it's going to be, I know the bill was passed and it's legal, but there's just something in the back of people's minds and thinking it's just going to bring a different look into town. I don't know if we want to have that conversation now or in the future, but if nobody's been to a dispensary or kind of looked into this, they might have reservations because they don't understand how they work.
I could answer some of that Paul. Before I even brought this up, I went to one in Southampton I believe it's called Green Meadows And I also went to North Hampton to one called NEDA and both of them have a security attendant at both entrances with a separate room and they check your ID, they scan your license and before they even allow you into the store itself. So the security is pretty tight. It's pretty, and if people have misconceptions about it or have concerns, I would actually suggest if they're in the area to go visit one for themselves. It would probably ease a lot of their concerns. It's not anything different than a retail store that we would get in town to be honest with you. I mean, I had some reservations when I went to go look and I was pretty impressed with the operations and the way things went. So that's why I'm kind of getting behind this a little bit because I think it's a good thing. Something we definitely need some business in town and I think
it's something that our rural character and we have 20,000 cars a day on Route 6. So I mean, that's a huge target market right there driving by every day. So I mean, I think we could be really attractive to somebody and if we get in early, we may attract somebody that's interested in investing.
Yeah, I think people are gonna have a lot of questions and if we can answer those right off the bat and ease their minds, I think that'll be helpful. Thanks.
Well, this will not be the last meeting on this topic if we move forward. This is only to sit there and say that this board is supporting this type of enterprise within our community.
Mean Just to be clear, didn't buy anything. Was just there for a tour.
Nobody was thinking that. You were doing research. Nobody was thinking that.
Okay. So again, does someone wanna make a motion to Paula?
Yes. Do you wanna do the motion? I don't have it in front of me if somebody else does.
I'll tell you what. I'll read it. I'll make the motion. I mean k. Do we wanna read this? I mean, we all have it in front of us? I was just gonna make a motion to pass the resolution supporting the implementation of an the new cannabis law in the town of Andover. Seconded. Seconded. Further discussion on the resolution as it's drafted? No.
Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. There's no one opposed. So that's good. So let's move on. We're going to move to our next issue, which is 9H, set a date for a special time meeting to the Iran BOE representative. We're moving that to next month. 9i, Senior Transportation Grant Application.
Correct. So, I put this on the back of the motions for the July 12 meeting that I gave you or as the last. Basically, is a resolution of authorization to allow me to sign a grant on behalf of the town for a grant for another vehicle for senior transportation. And I believe that's an eightytwenty grant where the federal government pays for 80% of the cost of the vehicle, and Andover is on the hook for 20% of the cost of the vehicle. Kathy, nod your head if I'm correct in that. Kathy Palazzi is spearheading this effort. What we've talked about doing is purchasing
a, you know, essentially a small bus that is just under, you know, basically the biggest bus we can buy without having to have a CDL, you know, driver. So, that's what we're shooting for with this grant, but you as a board have to authorize it because it involves, it will involve town funding. We won't even know for about eight months whether we've even gotten the grant, something like that. So you just need us to sign this?
You need to resolve to sign it and then you all need to come in to sign it or you need to give Carol permission to Photoshop your signatures onto the document, so we can send it along.
Okay. So I make a motion to pass a resolution of authorization to apply for and accept a grant for the Department of Transportation for the 2021 capital grant under Section 5,310 to be used for senior transportation. I'll second that. Paula seconded it. Okay. Further discussion on that? No. If document's
ready, we can sign it tomorrow because I'm sure we're all going to vote. Yeah. That's a great point. So it will be ready for your signature tomorrow. Carol will have a copy. All
those in favor? Aye. Then opposed. Hey, Eric, just as a side note, can you check my email address that you're using on the town side, please? Can you send me something because nothing that you're sending me is getting there. Okay. Let's go to new an item added nine and J, the Veterans Memorial Park signage. Definitely.
Well, Scott Yeoman sent me an email today, and he found a JPEG of the sign, the original sign. Apparently there was two of those made at one time, but they cannot find the second one that was made. It's probably been thrown away. He was concerned that the resolution wasn't that good, but I think it was almost a megabyte. So you consider it was made twenty years ago, I'm sure that was a high resolution for the time. So I'm pretty sure that it's the original copy that they made the sign out of at the time. I blew it up. It was pretty clear. I think we'll be able to make another one out of it. I just want to talk to the selectman and see what we could pull money from and see if we can get another one made to go into the kiosk down there. Because the other one, I tried restoring it and it's just too far gone. It's got too much UV damage to the interior of the sign. We just can't bring it back. So we have the original artwork. We just need to get a new one made and then we can install it. Are you heading to charge, Jeff Murray?
I will if we have funds available, will try to locate a company to make us a new sign. And I can probably work with Eric on that and try to direct the PO to whoever the individual would be to make that.
Yeah, we can fund it because we will have some money available from So, we took that pool of money that you guys had initially decided you were going to spend on the Veterans Memorial Park. And we had, we basically transferred that money to the building maintenance fund because if not, it would have rolled into the general budget at the end of the last fiscal year. So that money is still sitting there to be spent on the park or the Veterans Monument Park. And we can certainly since that's part of the park, we can certainly replace the sign with that funding. So if that's what you want to do as a board, we can make that happen.
I just have to get the measurements of it probably tomorrow and start calling around and see if I can find somebody to make a sign. Take pictures of the existing one, show them what we're looking for and tell them it has to be weatherproof and hopefully UV resistant this time. Thanks Jeff. Yeah, no So
do we need to make a motion? Yeah, do you want to know if I'm willing to vote to spend money, Scott? No. Yeah. What about Adrian?
Adrian? He's willing. Even off camera, he's willing. All right. We probably should make a motion for that, Scott. So why don't you make a motion for that I
motion to pay for whatever the new park sign us out of the money that was that we deemed for the park funding out of the $20,000
we amend it to make, to not to go over a dollar limit or just say open checkbook not to exceed $500 a thousand dollars.
We need some type of limit on it. I don't think it should be open ended.
Not to exceed a thousand dollars. I think that should cover it. 1,500. Okay. I like a thousand better personally. Of course you do.
Course Jeff Murray doesn't like to spend a lot of money so I'm willing to bet that he'll
stay to the budget and under some. And I think it's gonna be way less than that.
So if it's gonna be way less, let's do a thousand. Gosh. I think a
thousand is doable. Okay, thousand is doable. You heard it from Jeff. Okay, I'll second. All right, all those in favor? Aye. Aye.
All right, let's move on. Nine ks senior transportation vehicle usage.
Okay, so I got a request through Kathy Palazzi from David Gestanian, and that was whether the town would consider using the senior transportation bus to ferry passengers to their son or daughter, I don't remember which, wedding on Lake Road. So in other words, allow them to park on school and town property and use it as a shuttle in exchange for a substantial donation to the Andover Senior Luncheon Program. I mean obviously we'd have to make sure one of the drivers was willing to do it and we'd have to pay the drivers but I didn't feel that since that's kind of a precedent setting item whether that should be my decision So I punted and said I would happily bring that up to the Board of Selectmen for discussion. And I'm pretty sure Dave Gestanian is on the call if you want to ask him directly or you have questions or concerns.
Sure. David, if you could sit there and provide us what your thought is.
Well, yeah, we've we live at the lake the Merritt Valley side of Lake Road, and we have a shared driveway. We're having about, 75 people, but we'll only need, I think, about 50, people to be transported. Kathy Palazzi checked with the superintendent and said that it was okay to park, you know, in the school parking lot during that time. And we've been a big, a big supporter of the seniors and their programs over the years. Feel a real kinship with them. Daughters have we organized when I was on the Board of Ed at RAM a couple of trips, intergenerational trips, the senior bus drivers drove our kids and some other kids, quite a few to the prom, kind of a safe driving for them, did that for a few years. And I thought it would be a neat thing. We always support the seniors and we always support the senior lunch program. I know Scott's there all the time and Kathy's here all the time. And I thought it'd be a good way to kind of you know help the seniors out and also help ourselves out. It would be probably an hour or so maybe an hour at
the beginning, maybe an hour at the end type of thing. Not a lot of time, short trip.
So the parking is at the school, the transportation is from school to Lake Road. And I'm assuming the individual that drives the bus would have two hours to four hours? Yeah, max, definitely.
Then what is I mean, basically, this is a little bit strange in that it's a personal request, a use of town equipment for personal requests. But I don't have a problem with it. I would like to know what the have you talked to Kathy Palazzi about the contribution to the senior lunch program?
Will Kathy answer that? Yeah, we've definitely spoken with Kathy. Kathy? He did. Okay. Is there a number associated with it?
He did. He did mention that he would make a donation to the luncheon program but I told Eric and I still will say the same. First of all, Dave is a very good friend. David Grace, very good friend. This is not about friendship and it's not about money. It's about are we going to be in a problem we do it for one is someone going to come back and say you got to do it for me you did it for them and I'm having a big event or I'm having a big whatever I don't know. That's why I'm not making that decision and I thought Eric would love to make that decision.
I could understand why Eric is putting it to us. It is a problem. It is a problem, but listen, that's you know, if we could find a way to use a resource to generate some money for the community, that's a positive, and we should always look at that. It's just a question of what the Board would want to do. That's why I asked if there was a value set on it,
and you're telling me no. Was no Oh, we didn't mention money. I mean, we mentioned or Dave mentioned money, but there was no figure. He said he would make a generous donation, but there was no figure. Okay. Dave, when is the wedding so we know our timeline? It it is July 24. That
is quick. Yeah, it is. It is. We've been working since April on the property. My youngest decided she wanted to get married at the house. So we've been working very hard, yeah.
So if that gives us a whopping twelve days to give or not even, we have to give you an answer.
All right. And I would say that I don't personally have a problem with it. I do get that it sets a precedent, but what I would also say is Dave and his wife have been one of the biggest, most consistent supporters of the senior luncheon program. So, to me, it's reasonable request.
How much does it cost to operate that bus an hour with a driver? I mean, what's the cost to the town? Eric is gonna be $20 an hour for the driver.
Realistically, you know, you can probably double that as the full up cost to the town mileage.
By the time you take in maintenance and all that.
So the whole thing at the beginning to that is like, should we just set a fee to use the bus? Because if there's a fee to use the bus and the money goes to the transportation program, then it's equal to everybody. If somebody wants to use the bus that's the Once in programs, yeah.
That would be the feature. I need to weigh in on this as your town attorney. I'm just concerned about insurance coverage. I mean, I assume that you have insurance, Kathy. We do. Yes, we do. Correct. We would probably Would cover this kind of thing? That's what we have to ask Kerma about.
I don't know and there's a way around that, but it's kind of cumbersome to have everybody sign a waiver. And for a lot of people like that, it's kind of difficult, but I'm just very much concerned if something goes wrong. Unlikely, I know, but you know, my position as an attorney, I have to bring it up.
Right. Maybe we should motion to approve or not approve now and then find out the thing. And if the Kermit thing goes through, then go. The wedding's coming up quick. Quickly,
that's what I'm saying, yeah. I have to find out. Mean we can, if we all agree that's something that we're interested in doing, he gives us the right number for the, it's gonna cover all the costs. He gets all the right numbers for that. And then Eric calls Kerma and find out if it's all right, then we'll have approved it or disapproved it tonight. And then Eric can call Kerma.
Well, play devil's advocate, I mean, use the senior transportation bus for the memorial celebration and we had people on that bus that weren't residents either. And we bus people back and forth from the school before it broke. But I mean, just just just to say we did we did transport people that probably weren't residents that came down and parked at the school. So it was a similar situation. You're right, Jeff. Yep.
Yeah. But it was a town function. I think that's the difference. Right? Right, right. Right. Functionally that would be There was
money involved. Yeah. Dave just has to invite everybody down to the wedding, done.
Yeah, I mean, I think the problem you run into is liability insurance coverage is not set up as a commercial entity. So the fact that we're exchanging money for the service is going to be the problem. Think the first stop on this should be karma. But it will be a donation. So I mean,
donation. Yeah, understand that. I understand that that's what we're calling it, but whether it's a donate, it's still a money exchange for usage.
Then it opens the can of worms and somebody else wants to use the bus and
variable donation amount. I wasn't even going there. Listen, my big thing, honestly, Dave, I'm supportive of it only in the sense that we, as long as we are covered by our insurance carrier, that's my biggest concern.
Just as an option, did you check with the school bus, the data code to see if they, is it data code that we're doing with it? That we're doing our school buses with? I did not. Did you ask them if they would do it? I didn't even think of that. No, I didn't. Because they will provide, I think they will do it too. Okay. Just as an option.
Yeah, I mean that even if that code does it, there are, we did something similar with a family, my family threw like a big, I guess for lack of a better word a party and hired a livery service that brings in buses to shuffle people, you know, and it's it wasn't that expensive. Think it was like $800 for the day. So, you know,
Right. I mean, there's no question he has other options. The question is, is it worth the town's while to do this, you know, and at the same time help out a resident or do we not want to set that precedent? Precedent? Presuming of course we don't have problems with the insurance company, which I could certainly find out tomorrow.
Well, I don't mean to be what Scott believes me to be, but I am business person, I sit there and I look at the town having an asset of a van, and if we can help out David and his family, I'm all for it. I mean, I went online and I looked up Gogo Charters. They charge, $95 is the low end per hour on their minibus for showing people back and forth. I'm not suggesting the town charge $95 an hour, but if we have insurance and we could use an asset to benefit the community and benefit a resident, I have no problem setting up the precedent.
Take the same position as you, Jeff.
Here's another question though. What happens when it breaks down again?
That's a problem. Well, we just put all that money into it, Adrian. So let's play it, Ray, it does not. I'm knocking on wood right now. The
question really is to Eric, to get to Kerma and understand the liability requirements related to that type of usage of our town vehicles.
But we need to make a motion or something tonight that we all agree.
I think we need to have a plan A and a plan B. Plan A, we find out if the insurance covers this sort of thing and then decide how we go from there. Plan B, if it doesn't, then we have to decide how to do it that way.
Well, if it doesn't, then Dave's got to figure that out himself. I mean, that's not My the sound of
personal take on it, if you want a motion, Scott, I would make a motion that if our insurance would cover it, then we would allow Eric to negotiate a donation to facilitate this. And that if our insurance doesn't, then we would not be amenable to it. Okay. So moved, Adrienne. Good motion. Where does the waiver come in? Are we doing are we doing the waiver either way or where was that gonna come in? So the the problem's gonna be with the waiver is that Dave can waive, you know, whoever's doing the driving can waive their, like, their course of liability against the town. The problem is everybody getting on the bus can't unless they all individually signed a waiver. And that's where the insurance company is gonna probably say uncle. So cause you can sign away your, your right to sue but you can't sign it away for all of your guests. You see the process? Unless they all sign. Unless they all signed.
No. Unless we create and my the attorney would sit there and weigh in unless unless there was a contract created between the town and the Costanians for the use of the vehicle. Then the Costanians
would have would be required to carry insurance for the event that would cover them. Otherwise, again, the town would still be liable.
Again, and that's where our our insurance company is gonna say one thing and our town attorney is gonna tell us another thing. So let's find out. I mean, I I'm if if all the liability issues are covered for the town, I'm I would be approving this.
Yep. That's why I said I think I first stopped at the insurance company. Okay.
So you are going to make a motion now pending that you'll approve pending the insurance company or you're want me to find out from the insurance company and then you bring it back and do a special meeting to approve. Adrian already made a motion. And so,
yeah. So the motion on the table is that the, if the insurance company will accept if our insurance will say that our current our current program of insurance will accept the liability of it, then we would move forward. But if not, then we would not. So I second that. With no additional insurance. And Eric agrees, sets up the terms.
Yes. Eric, I would guess that Kerma might sit there and have some type of supplemental policy or something that would need to be dealt with. If that's possible within the timeframe that we're talking about, we would do it. Okay.
I would not support that as a motion personally. I
I'm not gonna support anything that doesn't have us to establish free structure because if somebody else is gonna come in afterwards and wanna use the bus, if we don't, it's just gonna be a can of worms opening up down the road.
So do you want I mean, I hate to say this out loud, but it sounds like we all have a little bit of reservation.
We all have a lot of reservation. I have a lot of reservation. I'm willing to do it. Mean, that's why I called up GoGoChartners. It's $95 an hour. What do you want to do? You want a fee structure? Okay. You want to use the town vehicles, it's $95 an hour plus the liability that we're assuming Kerma is going to provide us.
Or you go to Avis and you run a 13 passenger van, you hire somebody to drive all day. Yeah. Listen,
they have a per day rate of $950 to $1,500 I mean, they were looking at a four hour time window, maybe a five hour time window. It's still not inexpensive. I mean, the biggest issue is the liability, honestly. So, what do you want to do? I just wish we had more time. That's all.
I wish we could have went till next month. I wish it was August 24, not July 24. So it would have given us some time to work out the details and come back with a plan and put it in front of David and said, David, would this work? We have to make this decision and get the insurance company to sign off in twelve days and not set a bad precedent for the town. Tough. Not easy.
So if we amend the motion with a fee involved, is everybody still kind of thinking about that or?
I just think if somebody wants to use them and somebody's got all the Augustinians used it in their wedding we can use the bus too. It's just, if we don't have a set fee for the bus then we're kind of opening up ourselves to kind of a can of worms. Right.
And you have to remember that David might have more pull within town and he can get somebody to show up on a Saturday because Kathy Pelosi is making sure there's a driver available. I have a driver.
Say that again? I have a driver. You have a driver already. Jeff Maguire might ask to use the van and that driver would not be readily available. So Right. That's right.
There a ton of weddings happening in town to use the bus?
I'm just saying people having parties down at the lake. They may invite a bunch of people and park at the school and want to use the bus. Exactly. And that just kind of opens up a can of worms that we have to make contracts with everybody and we have to be fair to everybody in town. And I don't wanna make Eric's complaint list 10 pages long instead of four. Good point. Well,
now you know why I didn't want to answer the question myself.
I like I like where where Dave and his wife's heart heart are. But I see that it's to be a challenge. Well, it's something that we should definitely think about.
I I can certainly talk to Kerma tomorrow. If you were in favor of it and your question was simply about liability and then you know, by tomorrow or the day after we would know one way or the other whether karma would cover. So, I mean, then it just gets down to a decision of whether you want to do it or not. You know, with the caveat that, you know, you have to worry about whether that does set precedent.
Oh, it's going to set a precedent. It's a question, can we live with that precedent moving forward? The other issue is it would have to be if we ever made a policy, it would have to be in town use only. We wouldn't want people to want to take the bus to the bush now and all kinds of other things. You got to be careful I about
can even see it like, with a business stepping forward, like, maybe over and over decides to do a big event. They don't have enough parking there. You know?
So I I feel like we always say when something's brought to us that day. I think Jeff Jeff McGuire says this a lot. We don't like to be rushed into making a decision, and this is this is a big decision to make tonight. So Yes.
I wish we had the request a month ago, two months ago. It would have made this a little bit easier. I personally look at it as it would be a use of an asset. Jeff is right. There probably needs to be a fee structure associated with it, but even beyond that, we need to make sure that we have the manpower and the labor to do it on a consistent basis when someone asks us to potentially utilize the van and the bus.
Well, I have another question. Because most of our buses were gathered, you know, purchased through grant programs, Are there any limitations on usage of that bus for, I mean, can we use it for
raising revenue that way? Good question. I don't know. I would say that you could not use the small bus because the small bus does not belong to us yet. Have not till next year, but I would say that the big bus does belong to us. That would be up to the town decision.
Well, it's too quick. And if we were going to set this precedent, I would hate to do it at this meeting.
Jeff, can I just please say one thing before you make your decision? Could I just say that I understand the lateness? Can I also say that at the concert that we just went to, this was not even discussed? It had not been thought of, but at that time it was a question of let's park the cars and we at the at the parking lot at the AES. So I offered to speak to Valerie and ask permission to do so. At that point nothing was discussed how we getting the people from the car to the house. That was not even brought up. I do apologize that it is the lateness, but it was last minute. They've been very busy planning this wedding and fixing their yard up and so forth.
I'll speak for myself. I don't think I'm prepared to sit there and do this this quickly. I think maybe what we should look at is try to determine if something in the future might work for this type of request.
Yeah. Unfortunately, it's not going help Dave though. Not going to help Dave and his wife.
But I think there's just many risks involved with this type of decision, and long term, it's probably going to be a negative. Does anybody want to move forward with a motion? And if you do, make it so we can vote on it. If that's the case, David, we apologize. It is something we'd like to help you out with. It's just too quick and there's too many questions that we would need to have answered before we would be willing to commit to it. I
appreciate your consideration. We just had a real affinity and the kids were talking about how they remembered you know, driving to going to the prom on the bus and that would be kind of fun. So, it was kind of a last minute thing. We'll work something out. You know, I thought it was a win win for the town but we'll figure something out. All
right. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you for everything else. Thank you, Jeff. All right.
We are now on to ten. I think I went through all of the other items. Approval of the minute meetings for Monday, June 14, Thursday, June 24. So we want to make a motion?
Make a motion to approve the minute. That's what we're talking about, right? The minutes? Minutes, approval minutes. Let me find it. Okay, I motion to approve the following minutes, Monday, 06/14/2021 regular meeting minutes, Thursday, 06/24/2021, special meeting minutes.
Do we have a second? I'll second then. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? No. Okay. Item 11, finance department report. Eric, I didn't really see that in your package.
Yeah, so that's kind of lacking at the moment. Sherry is kind of buried trying to do the transition to Edmonds right now. So, we're definitely behind on getting some of that information to the board.
Okay. Item 12 our budget appropriation transfers and over expenditure request. Yeah,
there's none at this point because we don't have a budget so there's not anything where you know, we're pretty much we made the majority of the appropriation transfers at the last Board of Finance. There will be a few catch up ones for the next Board of Finance, but not many. And nothing that that you have to deal with as a board.
So, what about currently now the Board of Finance is responsible for approving all expenditures for the town? That is correct. That is Including the school. That is also correct. So are they aware of that? They have been made aware of that. Okay. Yes.
Okay, in your report under the finance department, it said the audit is complete? Correct. For what period? Say again? For which period? I'm just questioning.
Oh, the audit for not this current fiscal year, but the prior fiscal year.
Okay. And where are we with the current fiscal year? I guess we just ended, so there's really nothing to this at this point in time.
No, nowhere. Sherry is still trying to close out this year fully. We're definitely in the black, not much in the black, but we are in the black overall for the year. Okay.
And has our schedule with the auditor been confirmed moving forward?
We have not confirmed our schedule for when we're doing next year's, when we're starting next year's audit. Although Mike has said he plans to do it quite a bit earlier than we did this year's.
Okay. All right. The tax collector's report was in our package. During the month of June, there was $85,696 collected. There remains a balance, at least in her report of uncollected taxes of $392,456.86 for the years 2019 and going back to 2006. The assessor's report
Before we get to that, there are refund requests. There are three, Justin Rialt, which is $25.39 Sean Martel, which is $66.94 and Olivia Kurlik, which is $130.15
Okay. Someone want to make a motion to refund the excess payments? Motion to accept the excess payments and move forward. Someone want to second that? I'll second it.
Okay. Further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Eric, I will be in to sign those tomorrow. Okay.
The assessor's report, there wasn't anything specific in there, and the assessor is now back in the office. Eric, where are we at the revaluation services? Are we finished? What are we doing?
That's a good question, one for which I don't have a good answer for you at this point. I mean, I know we're not delayed in the process. We're moving appropriately, but I can't tell you exactly what's happening right now.
Okay. Fire department report was in our package. They had 36, 37 calls. Had, well, this June, I'm assuming they're commenting on. From a fire department standpoint, the accident that occurred on Route 6, it was responded to by our fire department. Among others, yep. One death in that accident? Correct. Anything else to share with that?
No, it's still under investigation. The state police are still looking for any eyewitnesses to the accident. It was a head on collision between two older vehicles. There was one fatality and two fairly serious injuries as a result of that.
Okay. All right. Thank you. The burning official provided a report for the first two quarters of the year, there were five permits issued. Okay. I noticed none by Scott Person, Adrian Mandeville, the resident, I forgot his name. I forgot his name. I'll never pronounce it correctly. He's from Estonia though, and he did not apply for permit. Anson. Elo Anson, thank you. Correct. Sad about that. State trooper, we have a new state trooper in town. His name is Eric. Sebastian. Sebastian. That's right, Sebastian. He is a very nice guy. I have to sit there and say he called the morning of the accident and informed me that there was an accident in town. Eric, I'm assuming he's doing well.
Very well, actually. Okay. I think he's gonna fit in really well. He's been issuing speeding tickets like gangbusters the last, you know, week or two. He's been knocking him dead on Long Hill and getting an awful lot of people on Route 6 and he's having some success fishing in some other areas either.
Let's hope he didn't get Mr. Murray coming down the hill and we're good to go. All right. On his bicycle. On his bicycle. All right.
The assessor's report was down in the bottom part of this. So if anyone wants to see the number of adjustments made, primarily all the adjustments made on the accessory report for the BAA change of condition or all sales of vehicles.
So the one thing I would like to say about the assessor's office is we did get quite a few complaints about motor vehicle assessments increasing this year. And just so everybody understands, I mean, had told the board like six months ago, part of the reason our grand list was up so much was that the NADA values for used vehicles had increased pretty dramatically, especially on trucks, especially on diesel vehicles. But at the same time, the town sold, you know, a old diesel pickup truck with a blown engine, you know, and got $10,000 back for it at auction. So, I mean, they're used vehicles right now for whatever reason are commanding a really large price. We have had a number of complaints about that, But in I've spot checked Roberta on three or four of them, and they're using the correct NADA values straight out of the book. And if you compare last year to this year, the NADA values that are reported have increased, therefore the assessment increases. So as far as I can tell, the office is doing a fairly good job. There is a mechanism in place to check up and make sure it's correct.
And if you don't like the results you got from that, people can go to the Board of Assessment of Appeals. So, although it's a source of complaints right now, I don't think there's necessarily anything we can do about it from a town level to alleviate those complaints.
Okay. Public works, we heard directly from Jay today. Thank him for that information. The transfer station, there was nothing in there. The library provided this report as far as the number of residents using the library for the month of June. Senior Transportation provided us their report as far as number of usage of the transportation services. The registrar of voters provided a report for June. They had 49 voters that they processed. They worked three town meetings, one referendum, and one recount for referendum, and we should thank them for all of their efforts during this budget season. And that was it as far as reports go. Eric, I'm assuming there is no correspondence item 16? No, nothing of importance.
All right we're gonna move to item 17 public speak. Oh wait wait a second here
did we add something early on about IT support tonight? Oh yeah we did we missed that.
I did not put that in thank you Paul. Issue really that, well I had asked Eric to put this on because the, the finance director and the treasurer's office has not been properly linked to the school and to the new Edmond software. So, Eric, you were hoping that South Windsor would be able to come in today. Did that occur?
So South Windsor came in today, and so we had two of the three links of the puzzle. We had Edmonds and South Windsor. We did not have the school's IT person. So they did not end up getting it in today, but there's a plan in place to get it in Thursday. So we're delayed until Thursday, but with a little luck, we'll have it up and running Thursday.
So what happened? It got scheduled and they couldn't make it? What was the problem?
Well, I think, I mean, knew it was an issue. I got David in and we, Edmunds arranged for their technical people to be available. And the school knew about it, but I guess it sounds like they didn't reach out to the school's IT people so we only had two of the three legs of the puzzle together today. So failure to communicate. Okay. That really needs to get finished.
Is that gonna that gonna cost us money to have South Windsor on call again?
No, I mean basically what I did with David so we didn't pay extra is I just had him further divide his work week and he worked two hours today and he'll work two hours Thursday. And then we'll see him again in a couple more weeks.
Okay. Okay. Thank you, Paula, for reminding us about that. I do not have that on the list, so we're going go to public speak right now. Amy Knox? No thanks I'm good
okay and that's it I don't know Marci Meinier I'm sorry
No, thank you. Have a good night, guys. Thanks a lot.
All right. So I'm going to make a motion that we go into executive session will be to discuss, Eric's contract and related issues. And we'll invite Eric into the meeting. Do we need Eric on this one?
Not if you don't want him. Eric, do you mind? I mean, we are talking about you and you have the right to come into the meeting.
If you want to discuss it without me, you're more than welcome to. Okay.
All right. Let's go into executive session. All those in favor? Aye. All right. So we're coming out of executive session at, excuse me, 10:32. Now we're going back into our regular meeting.
Do we have any motions that anyone wants to make? So I would make a motion that that the board of the selectman, accept, Eric Anderson's contract, as proposed and, authorize the first selectman to have Eric review the contract and if there are any major changes to sign the contract accordingly, unless there's something monetary, in which case it will need to come back to the board of select.
Okay, do we have a second? I'll second. All right. Further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Okay. All those opposed? No. We go on. Any further motions for this meeting? Motion to adjourn. Second.
Right. Paula seconded. All those in favor? Aye. All right. Right, Eric. Thank you very much for your time. Sorry. It's okay. No problem. Good night. Good night. Have a happy evening.