Meeting transcript
Board of Selectmen - Regular Meeting Part 1
August 9, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Ninth. I'm sorry, Amanda. My bad. I'm going to call the town of Andover Board of Selecting Meeting for Monday, 08/09/2021 to order, 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
for which it stands, nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice frown.
Thank you very much. We're going to go through and do public speak before we get started. Well, we're gonna flip flop the RAM artificial field perception in public speak, so we'll let people speak before we get onto Scott and everybody else. So we're gonna do that differently. So let's go. Judy Benson Clark.
Yes, hello everyone. Good evening. I'm here to actually learn and observe if that's okay, sir. No problem. You. Greiner.
Diane's having some mic issues and she messaged me. Okay I think I fixed it. Can you hear me? We can. Oh, good. I'm so I'm so brilliant I fixed my mic issues, but I have nothing to say. So, enjoy the day. I'm listening in. Marcy minor.
I know. Thank you. Don't have anything to say right now. The
baby family, Scott, do you want to say something now or hold until later?
Okay. Yeah, I'll wait till later. Thank you. No problem. Thank you. Louise Goodwin. I'm all set. Thanks. Okay. Valerie Bruno. I'm okay, Jeff. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. Kimberly Persom? Nothing right now. Thank you. Okay. Kathleen Goodwin?
Hi, I'm Kathleen Goodwin. I'm the board chair, RAM Board of Education chair. I'm just here to listen and to support my colleagues who are also on the Board of Education. All right, thank you. Katherine Magaldi Lewis. Nothing, thank you. Liz Loketch. Nothing for now, thank you. Michael Ceriosisi. I said that wrong, I apologize.
That's okay Michael seriously I'm the principal of Rand middle school I'm just here to support the
Scott Leslie in the presentation coming up. All right thank you Gerald Kerme.
No, I'm just here to listen and watch. Thank you. Celeste Willard? Nothing at this time. Thanks, Jeff. Diane Shakat? Nothing at this time, thanks. Celeste, I'm assuming that's your phone. I'm sorry, what?
Now I thought it was the phone come up. 860208. All right, we're good. Okay. We're gonna have a presentation on the RAM artificial field from the superintendent school, Scott Lesney. Scott, the floor is yours.
Great. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the invite. Again, we really we know you guys have a busy agenda, and so we all really appreciate the time that you've offered us. As I think you know at this point, the ram board has decided to begin the discussion with the town and pursue the possibility of bonding for a turf field project. We have a presentation that will go through the details of what brought the board to this point and why we believe that it's an important step to make at this point. Andover is the first board of selectmen that we're presenting to next week will be presenting to the, the Hebron and the Marlborough board of selectmen. We also have two public information meetings scheduled for next week on the sixteenth and nineteenth so we're, we're trying to make sure that we get the information out to everybody. Following this, this evening's presentation, I'll make the presentation available to everyone and I'll make the, there's a newsletter that we put together as well that I'll share with you so that you guys can distribute and certainly, make that available. Those documents are already on our website so, anyone can can also can begin checking those out now.
Joining us this evening, Joe Connor is going to be working through the presentation. You've already met Kathleen Goodwin, who is our board chair, Julie Judy Benson Clark, one of our other board members is here, and Penny Briscoe and Mike Srussi our principles at the high school and middle school. Michael Slahoeffer, our facilities director and Dan Trudeau our athletic director so plenty of folks to ask questions of so after the presentation will be happy to answer any questions that you have and certainly if we don't have any answers for you will certainly get that information and get it back to you. And I believe Lori Blake, the Andover representative on the RAM board will also be joining us during this meeting. So I'm going to introduce Joe Connor, who is a ram board member and also a member of the ram facility subcommittee, who has an extensive knowledge of the ram, certainly our school system as a whole but also in particular, the ram facilities, and, some of the challenges that we've had with our in particular athletic facilities. I'm going to be scrolling through the PowerPoint,
and Joe will be, talking us through it. So I'm going to share my screen and Joe, I'll let you unmute yourself and thank you, Scott. I will start the PowerPoint. Give me one second here.
Okay, can everybody hear me? We can. Okay. Very good. Well, thank you very much for, having us tonight. And it's a pleasure to speak with you folks. Let Scott get this thing rolling. Just a quick background on myself. I've been a member of the Board of Ed now for since 2013. My background is, my is mechanical engineering, and I have been on the board since, like I said, since 2013, a member of the facilities committee, also chairman for that committee for, I think, for almost eight years now. Have a resident of Hebron since 2003 when I came to town and built our house here and set up our home from in Hebron. I have three kids. All have gone through college now. Actually one has graduated. Very proud of the RAM system. I have a lot of friends that live in Andover, great, great town. We have done some, a lot of work on facilities as some of you may know. We've developed a CIP program that's been now I think four or five years now working. Developed for transparency reasons to show taxpayers where their money is going to as far as this beautiful school that we have. The objective of our committee for facilities has been always to be responsible with, fiscally responsible for putting good money to good use at our facilities.
That being said, this has got the program up here. So our overview and recommendations, Ram High School athletic fields project. The Board of Education statement, this presentation highlights the problems with the current main track and competition field and the recommendation replace, I got a blackout, I can't read all of this, Scott, because I gotta downsize my screen. Here we go. To recommend to replace and install a new multi use synthetic turf field. Our responsibility is to provide our children with a safe and reliable playing field to serve as the focal point for Ram's major sports program and for Andover Hebron and Marble Sports program to use as needed. This slide here shows the yearly field usage report. It's quite an in-depth chart. I think we should, when you guys look at this, you'll look at the this has been based on our hours. And we've had our engineering people, BSC group, who we've hired to come in as our consultants to develop this chart and utilization report of how much hours is actually being utilized at Ram athletic fields. And you can see by the note on the bottom, Sports Turf Management Association recommends no more than two fifty hours of use per year
for these fields. So that's actually the comp field. No, I'm sorry, that's all our fields, I apologize. What are the existing conditions? The field has a very long history of drainage issues due to original improper construction over twenty years ago. Poor field drainage leads to ponding of water at the track and field interface. Standing water on track surfacing can lead to delamination of the surfacing from the base below. Alright, What are the existing conditions? What we already talked about. This is just another picture of just showing you the ponding of the water. This is how it goes out to the track portion, gets under the track. And then obviously when we have colder conditions in the winter that raises the surface of the track. So we're competing with a lot of different problems and as you can see the ponding of the water is a safety concern for our athletes. When we've had numerous games canceled by our referees, the state CICA referees
to saying that the field has been unplayable at many, many events. So, the ponding is throughout the entire field and that's based on the original construction of the field which was determined by, Rich Calarco and the Hebron Parks and Rec and some other scientists from Yukon that the field was constructed incorrectly, at the time of construction, 20 ago. It was, built in properly upside down, with the materials. What are existing conditions? The track has reached its expected lifespan and needs to be replaced. It lacks the recommended safety zone from obstructions from the outside lane. Track surfacing can be recoated two times before it's no longer previous, pervious trapping water under the surface leading to delamination. So just a little history on this. The track was original from 2003. We resurfaced the track in 2016 and it only, we're expecting it to, well you can see the cracks we've already had through the lifting of the water ponding and so forth. The expectancy is between five and seven years. We're approaching that life expectancy on resurfacing we did in 2013 and that's it. The next step is to strip it all out down to bare asphalt and replace it.
Why is the project being proposed now? Taken over the years to improve the field have not resolved the issues of the field being non playable during the school year. Region eight school district will have a significant drop in debt obligations due to low retiring current debt. The cost of this project over a ten year bond interest will be at an all time low. It will be a benefit to student education in the communities RAM serves. What current sport activities are the field used for? Why a new synthetic field would be better to play on? Competition field is currently being used if weather permitting for football and boys and girls soccer and lacrosse. Synthetic turf surface provides a consistent and uniform playing surface no matter how much it is used. It reduces the amount of use on other natural grass fields on campus. Campus. It minimizes game and practice cancellations due to inclement weather. There will be improved safety when compared to bare, compacted soils. A new turf field will allow use by other sports group in the region service area. What has been done to this to date to mitigate this current situation and why hasn't that solved the problem? Over the last few years, sand top dressing was added to improve slope and surface drainage,
but the perimeter of the field has not been addressed leading to ponding, as you saw in those pictures. A series of drainage projects lacked a comprehensive approach. These projects have only focused on localized areas without more comprehensive understanding of the causes to poor drainage. New competitions to deter field project assets. Proposal is for an eight lane running track and field events, pedestrian and maintenance access, existing bleacher usable, visitor bleacher pavement, new security fence, lacrosse safety netting, maintenance equipment, prefabricated storage shed and sports field lights. What are the benefits of the synthetic athletic field? More consistent play compared to natural grass, early and late season play wet and frozen conditions, added sports programming and participation, takes best advantage cost per use of related infrastructure, example bleachers, lights, avoids having to purchase and develop additional land to accommodate current demands for fields, lower maintenance costs, no special maintenance skills, no application of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers. This is important because Ram cannot use any of these products due to the regulations of the state. Improved groundwater recharge, no mowing, striping or aeration or top dressing. What are the important statistics regarding use water savings and safety issues? The new field provides six fifty hours of use per year higher with lights versus two fifty hours per year with grass. Fields will be 100 recyclable or I'm sorry, the field will be 100% recyclable at the end of its use. Water savings of 160,000 gallons per year per field. A five year study comparing synthetic turf to natural grass has concluded 66% reduction in neural injuries, fifty percent reduction in cranial and cervical injuries injuries, thirty three percent reduction in third degree injuries. Synthetic turf specifications for athletic field. This uses a crushed stone base for drainage and stability.
Two inch high woven poly ethylene turf carpet with ten year warranty, 100% recyclable, blended fiber mimic natural grass, aesthetics and playability, 17 millimeter resistant resilient pad, expanded polypropylene underlayment for enhanced safety, lower G max and high, HIC for impact, natural wood particle infill sustainable, a 100% recyclable. Synthetic terse specifications for the track. This is a mill and overlay asphalt base. It's an eight lane 400 meter running track with polyurethane base map pour system, high school track event layout, and standard markings needs to be recoded every five to seven years based on maintenance and use. What type of maintenance is required for a synthetic turf field? The estimated life cycle is twelve to fifteen years, but could last longer depending on the usage. The warranty is for ten years with seam and turf failures covered for that period. The field is to be cleaned every one hundred hours of use and deep cleaning every five years. Sanitation and bacteria treatments are not required for outdoor fields due to UV exposure. What is the projected cost and the estimate homeowner property tax per town for a ten year bond obligation? It's important to know that these numbers have come from each and every one of the towns.
They're not given provided they were not driven by the board. They were kept again from each town. The total cost of the project will not exceed $3,500,000 The average property tax additional costs per household for a home in Andover with a medium of 250,000 assess will be $65 annually. Hebron with a medium of $2.10 510,000 assessed value will be $52 annually. And in Marlborough with a medium of 250,000 assessed value will be $71 in. Projected schedule. This is obviously based off of going off of putting this to referendum on November 2. 11/02/2021 referendum date November 2021 RFP for consultant service services December 2021 would be the kickoff design February 2022 town permitting permitting I should say March 2022 the final design April 2022 bidding process 05/01/2022 bid award July 1 start of construction and 11/04/2022 final completion January construction period based upon approval of the referendum. Here we have our school website where you can, any taxpayer can go and find information
to this presentation and based on other information on the athletic field about this project. Have two upcoming meetings as Superintendent Leslie has mentioned. It will be August 16 at 06:30PM. You can. That's a. Informer meeting, Scott? That is a formal meeting in, in, in also,
a virtual meeting as well as an option, correct? Joe, no, these, these are just public information sessions. So they're not considered formal board meetings. They're information sessions.
Yes, right. So but these are the formal and they are,
in person and also online. Correct. They these are only remote, only remote remote. And in addition to sharing the presentation that Joe presented this evening. We'll also have representatives from BSC which is the engineering group that's developing and design so that if anyone had any more technical questions, they'd be available to answer those questions. Thank you, Scott.
And obviously, a slide with, Board of Education representation from each town and superintendent.
Okay. So, excuse me. Are are you guys completed with your initial presentation? We are. Yes. Yeah. Okay.
Alright. And I'm I'll let the other board members go, but I do have a question. You had a slide up there about events, and playing hours on those fields. Is that possible to put that up there again? Sure. And then of those events that you have there, how many of those are put on this field?
Well, what this is really showing, if you look at the first column bar graph, you'll see it's it that represents the competition field. So, this represents the hours of yearly use and you'll see that the competition field actually has fairly minimal use. And the reason why in comparison to the other field, there's such little use of that field is the fact that we have to manage it so carefully. We're not able we're not able to have any teams practice on the field. And even for competitions, have to manage the number of competition events. If the field is wet or, you know, following a period of rain, we may not be able to use it for fear of causing enough damage so that we'd have to put it out of commission for a while. What the larger numbers really are showing is that the three sixteen fields, both the north and the south, those are the fields on Wall Street,
are really getting much more use than is recommended as a result of those fields tend to get beat down pretty well and down to bear, bear dirt because we're using those primarily for our practice fields. Even even the baseball, even the baseball and softball fields would get a break with a turf field because we'd be able to use the turf in spring when either the baseball or the softball field may not be available because they're too wet. And instead those teams tend to be relegated to the gymnasium, we would be able to get those teams out onto the field as well.
Okay. And then for my question, because you didn't talk about any savings or any costs associated with the current field as to would you have savings? I'm assuming there would be some maintenance savings.
There would be some maintenance savings. The average savings from a turf field to a compared to a grass field is going to be in the realm of 2 to $4,000 a year.
That's all you're going to say is that's, That's on your line by line budget, Scott, that you would pull out only 2,000 to $4,000 of reduction in maintenance costs? Correct. Yeah, because you still have maintenance costs. I mean, it's not a buy. I understood. I saw that you had one hundred hour cleaning and then, you know, an annual deep cleaning, but okay. So the cost is projected to be $3,600,000 and I'm assuming that when you put up that the Andover resident would pay $65 on a medium income home, there are current costs for bonding programs that this would reduce that by, correct? You have current programs at the school that you have in line items for
bonding expenses that I would assume this is going to be replacing?
Correct. So I can- How much money is that? Let me pull up and I'll share this document with everybody as well.
While he's pulling that up, Jeff, can I just piggyback on what you asked? Sure. You gave us a 2 to $4,000 savings. But I'm assuming that that's not that that that is not including your ten to fifteen year replacement cost of 767,000. That's correct.
So you're telling us in ten years, or fifteen somewhere in there, we're gonna need another give or take $70,000 a year in maintenance costs that that goes back. That's correct. There is there is a replacement cost. So it's not really savings, because we're going to end up with a $767,000 in today's dollars replacement cost at ten or fifteen years. Right. Yep, that's correct. Okay. And
just so we have all, can you, let's finish with the bonding issue. Yeah, let me, here we go.
The bonding and again, I'll share this with you as well. You know, in, So, for the twenty twenty two twenty three budget year ram will experience a significant decrease in our current bonding for the for the building it drops from, 2 and a half million dollars down to basically $1,000,000 so there's about a 1 and a half million dollars savings that stays flat for two years for another year, and then it will drop again by another 600,000, and then remain flat for the next three years until it's paid off. So, the thinking is, is that we would coordinate this with that year where there's the significant savings. So the addition of the bond will be in somehow buffered by the savings to the building bonds, of course, following the payoff of the building bonds, there would be,
you know, the existence of the remaining bonds that would be in addition to anything that's currently in the budget.
Okay, so you gave us totals. When you do your next presentation, can you sit there and take that reduction off of the annual number that you present the residents so they can understand that as to what is coming and what is going? Sure. A question that I have, did you do any analysis, and this might be for Joe, did you do any analysis as to if you kept this a natural grass field, what the cost would be to renovate it and correct the errors? That's my question also, Jeff.
Yes, we have. And Scott, if you have those numbers to replace, to turn this field upside down and put a brand new grass field in with a proper drainage. Scott, do you have the number there?
I don't have it in front of me, Joe, but it's around $800,000
grand. Yeah. Dollars 800,000. So that's why we've been no, I know this is a financial, discussion really. And it's, it really is an important one. We have exhausted every, everything that we have put at this from engineers to Rich Kolarco, is one of the gurus of grass. And we have, it's through nobody's fault. This is what we inherited, past history. It's somebody's fault whoever constructed it. Well, yes, but that's long gone. That ship is long gone. And before my time, before I came to Hebron, I lived in Manchester. I knew nothing about any of that. The school was being built at a time, but I never approached those types of subjects, sir, with it's somebody's problem. The problem it is, has been ours all along and we're here to fix it. The company who built the school, there was a lawsuit. I'm not a 100% on, there was some money that changed hands. So maybe some of the longer term residents of Andover know the history than more than I do, but I don't look at it that way anymore. We're not going to be able to get any money from anybody else about this field unfortunately.
Joe, we understand that this is a dollars and cents issue and then what's best for the kids. That's correct. But you have to look at what you're presenting to us. You're presenting to us a $3,600,000 field upgrade. You might want to sharpen your pencil. 3.5. 3.6. You can rehab the whole place for 800.
Then the question becomes of what events do you lose and what's the benefit to the kids? There are a lot of questions. Don't take it wrong from our perspective because that's our job because what you're asking is for the town of Andover to incur that additional bonding costs related to field upgrade. Well, it might be a great idea. It's just financially, what are the ramifications? That's what we're trying to understand so we
can pass that information along to our residents and go from there. Completely. Hey, look, I completely get it. We have the same thing in Hebron. There's no difference. We're very transparent. Want your board of selectmen and your taxpayers to understand that there's lot of questions I'm sure, but we have the answers for you. When you talk about it's easier to spend 800,000 is 3.5. That really doesn't fix all our problems. So, I mean, there's a lot of, I don't know how much time we have here to go into depth, but we can definitely defend and show you all our hard work that's going into this presentation and to get to this decision, which isn't an easy one. We've been talking about this for many, many years and our last presentation that we did a public forum on was in July 2019 when the previous superintendent made a formal presentation to all the taxpayers. And back then that ticket, that the dollar was around 2,900,000. So obviously through inflation, I get it, we get it a lot. So it's really important to understand that this is not just about a grass field versus a synthetic turf field. It's also about the playability, the utilization of all our fields and how much we're wearing and tearing on our fields as well.
So how many hours can you play on this field to get to your ten or fifteen year replacement cycle? How many hours
will it Yes, you put up there, you can put two fifty hours on a natural field. And I'm assuming that when you talk about field utilization, you're thinking you can play more on this one. So how many hours can we play on this one? That's correct. You really,
and what other schools have found you extend your play. I don't know if any schools are specifically limiting themselves to the hours but they're finding that particularly with lights, they're able to extend, you know that the day in which teams have access to the field, you know up until the evening so that you know you're really going from a much more constrained current grass field where we're managing the thing and and not putting teams on it to a field that would be readily available at any time for the Ram teams and the town. Teams as well. So the ten or fifteen year replacement period doesn't have a specific hours recommended tied to it. I don't believe so. We'll
get that information specific information for you though.
Believe that it was eight hundred hours, Scott. Think I Jesse said, I thought of one of our slides that we had was eight hundred hours a year. You could utilize this field. And when you talk about solving some of your problems or all your problems, is that really what you're alluding to as far as playable hours trying to get kids on fields?
Well, we're trying to do is, is, you know, we have kids get out on the fields, but we have also, I don't know if you guys know this or not from, but Hebron, we use Hebron's Towns fields at Veterans Park for part of the Ram, athletic program, as far as soccer goes and, some of the other sports of practice. So, we also have in that report was I believe Veterans Park as well. So we have overuse of all our fields. As Scott Leslie alluded to, like when you get out to early spring sports, where you have April and may are typically wet weather months, or frozen months. In some cases, you know, we have safety concerns where we have lacrosse players and soccer players, playing in a gymnasium, which is not again, more usage on our gym. So we've compiled that whole statistical data in place by, through BSC showing that these numbers that how much overuse of the field is not, and looking at the comp field. We have to limit the comp field because of the repairs that have gone on there. With the wetness and everything in the spring, we just can't all our other fields are taking a beat,
you know, and managing that from the athletic director's perspective as well as is very challenging and time consuming. So it's kind of a combination of both serve that there's a lot of things that we've looked at as far as getting out there early, staying out later, night, games, with the light capability, utilizing it for, for all our sports that were our, when our other fields are unplayable wet, this allows us the ability to get out there and be very competitive and get us into where we need to be as far as having our practices go. I'm also assuming those numbers are from last year during COVID pandemic that accurate. You probably should use a year that didn't impact by COVID.
For the field use numbers? Yes. We went back in time. That
graph has been around since at least 2019 because that was thrown up at a previous presentation. Any other questions from the board members? I have a litany. You have about fifteen minutes. Good.
Did BCS group or anybody, did you ever talk to anyone else bring someone in to actually consult on the repairs or to look at other options? I mean, because you guys did some repairs to the field, but they obviously didn't work. I'm just concerned that, you know, who's going to guarantee that you could put in a turf field and not have it be a be a, you know, a horrible situation.
And we have had other vendors certainly looking at the field and, providing us with, you know, you could do this. So, know, we've raised the crown, we've put, some, sideline drains in. We've done a number of work with with some drains already. And so yes, we have, we have used other, consultants as well. As a matter of fact, I think when the, you know, kind of what got the board to this current position is, they were considering doing a perimeter drain, which after bidding would have come in somewhere in the $125,000 range. And again, the concern is, is that nobody could give us a guarantee that yes, this is going to solve all your problems it should, and it might. But, you know, I think the board felt they were throwing good money after bad. And because of the, the installation of the field where you've got hard packed material directly under the soil. You're going to be able to you're going to you're going to tackle problems, but then additional problems may arise and they felt like they were they were going to, you know, put themselves in a kind of continuing cycle of continually have to manage the use of the field and continue with new projects, again, unless you you you flooded an entire. So, yeah, so
has the has the field situation as it stands now been incorporated into this design? It's so this plan is to completely rip it out, get rid of the hard packed soil as well?
You know quite frankly because you're looking at a turf field.
I'm just gonna say if that wasn't considered somebody better. Yeah. And if it was somebody else better get a performance bond because $3,500,000 later, three years down the road when it floods, I'm gonna want somebody's head on a platter. Yeah, no, by and I would understand that totally. I mean, we'd need to be thinking about performance bonds and not just a one year performance bond, multi year performance bond. So we're protecting the taxpayers, you know. Yep. And listen, in general, I'm not for against this field, I will say I'm a little disconcerned about some of the presentation numbers. Mean, if you want, if you want residents to take you seriously when you say we're trying to be transparent, then they're not number of $6,767,000 needs to be included in the presentation that there is a replacement cost down the road that increases your yearly fee by nearly $75,000 You know, so we're not really saving money. We're, you know, and we're going to have an expense down the road. And that's in today's dollars. I think that that, you know, it's, it's a little disconcerting that we're also looking at this off cycle, because, you know, I keep hearing from residents, why isn't this part of the conversation of a budget request, that they're showing us, hey, we're not gonna, we're not going to use that, that savings from the bond for something else, We're going to allow you to have that savings, but we really want this field.
If you guys were putting that conversation together, I think you'd get a lot more trust from the community. Right now the community is in uproar about this concern that this is sort of a bait and switch, we're going to give us a feel, we'll give you the money back and then when the budget comes through, oh, by the way, we need that money for something else.
So there is definitely I would respectfully disagree with that. I mean I have my hand up at some point for the moderator. But can we, can we circle back to the, $7.67.
Well, the $7.67 is, is, is a number that should, you know, when you look at the, that's ten years down the road, there's ways you can budget for that in the capital. I don't disagree with you. I think if you want to be, fully transparent, yeah, you got to know that hazard replacement costs at fifteen years is going to be, it could be a million at that point. Who knows what the number is with inflation, but I don't disagree with that. But there's ways that we have been doing things with capital planning. And I hope that that will continue after my tenure on the board. Before that, there was no capital improvement plan here whatsoever until about five years ago. That was what I was talking about being transparent. We had, we did a window project. I hope everybody's familiar with that window project. We didn't, we didn't come and ask the town at any point to, you know, we asked for your support. We sued, previous, contractor for that, manufacturer of those windows. And that was a $2,500,000 job that we saved our taxpayers a lot of money. But this is what I'm talking about was capital improvement. There's a lot of different ways to your point. There's a lot of different ways to, to enhance, to bring that into the into the scope when you're talking about, you know, fifteen years down the road. You know, we can have that conversation.
No, I just think you need to be upfront with people because I mean, as you pointed out, it's $800,000 to completely replace the current field. Well, it's a give or take almost $800,000 to replace just the surface in ten or fifteen years. I think the the secondary conversation, you know, when we start talking about these things is the whole reason that you guys had to sue the window manufacturers, they were installed incorrectly. Right. So you had installation problem, you guys fought over it. So we want to just make sure that when this project is done, we don't have those same mistakes. So, you know, third party oversight, you hire an outside person, a clerk of the works to verify things are put in in the correct manner in the correct way. Things like that are important, you know, and it will make the taxpayers feel more comfortable if the projects being done correctly, because you know, you guys are volunteers the same way we are right so you're not you're not there every day. Let's pay someone to be on-site and over overwatch these things so that we know that the field is not going to get put in upside down, so to speak. Right. Adrian
may I may I speak. The order, sir Mr. McGuire may speak. Okay, Judy, go ahead. Yes, Doctor. Benson Clark right so I am from Marlboro everyone And Marlborough shares many of the same concerns that we're hearing from Andover. But I want you to be mindful, we are going to Andover first, and we're looking at you as partners to help us with the questions and what needs to be contained in this. Did vote to give the money back to the towns and much of that was at Marlborough's request. Marlborough pushed hard and said, you know, the debt level would be far less. You know, we're asking you to do this. Our understanding was that Andover also wanted that, although not as we weren't approached, at least I wasn't. I'm the vice chair now. Was not at the time, but in as formal of a manner. But there are many, many benefits and we hear you. We can list everything, complete transparency, all of the costs, everything. There are also the kinds of pride kinds of things, just so you know, that sometimes our kids couldn't play on their own field when they earn that right for competition games because of the state of our fields. You know, we're envisioning this as a place where, you know, all of you and anybody in the communities can go for a safe, well lit place to walk.
But I want to promise you, this board, I think so highly of nobody is hiding anything. We're looking to you and Adrian to partner with you. Maybe you can give us that feedback on what we can include so we can be as transparent as possible. And we decided the costs of upkeep were so great that we decided to turn this over to the people, right? We're in America, turn it to the people of the towns and let them decide with the vote. And I think that's maybe why it's separate because we didn't want to hide it in anything. We wanted that real conversation and we wanted the people to decide. So please, if you have Adrian or whomever, if you have points we should include, please, if you could possibly jot a quick email to us, that would be extraordinarily
helpful. Thank you. Sure, Judy, I can tell you, if you talk to Scott, I've been very forward. We're trying to ask some of these questions ahead of time. I just think it's important for our residents to hear those answers and also to get feedback maybe that Scott didn't have from the board members that were working on this project. Again, I'm not for or against the field per se. I just want to think that whatever solution we're coming up with is going to be a long term solution. You know, mean, I, you know, genuinely appreciate that I can speak for myself and I think the whole board genuinely
appreciate that because that will only help us to do due diligence better. And for everybody to make the best decision and once the decision is made to have oversight and proper protections if appropriate. So thank you.
I do have just a couple quick questions here. So you're saying and I don't know if Scott maybe that was just a conversation. You you said that there'd be some other debt service that would need to be addressed going forward when the other stuff drops off. Was that just a mistake in the way you said it? I mean, we understand there's still ongoing debt service, but we are gonna have a debt service change of about just under 1,500,000, right? Correct, yes.
So the real savings to Andover when that happens is, you know, give or take 270,000. So with this $70,000 adjustment, we're still saving give or take 200,000 unless that those numbers are reappropriated to something else. That's correct. Okay. And I think that's important for the community to understand and that was my concern and I express this to you that having it off cycle. I think it's be harder to get that information out there for people to understand there is still a service, a debt service savings total. Right. No. Yeah, I mean, I guess again, I just, I, you know, I know the school was built, and there was some time that went by, but I'm just really surprised that this wasn't addressed with the original contractor that built the field, you know, because it shouldn't have taken more than a year or two to figure out you had a problem there. If it was built upside down, you know, a couple of quick other things. Now you're saying that the UV because the fields outside you don't have issues with with you know, with spraying it down. Because I can tell you, you know, I mean, MRSA infections are one of the one of the bigger problems with these fields. Right? So,
and I know you put up there about injuries being reduced. But I'm, I'm just trying to understand that a little bit. Because I know there was some conversation previously that, you know, like, men's and women's soccer, major soccer, they don't want to play on these fields, they actually have it in their contract to not play on on turf. So they're concerned about injuries. So as a high school, you know, is there something about this field or the way it's constructed that is not is gonna is gonna reduce that injury load that we're that they're so worried about.
Well, and I think the the data that we're looking at compares high school athletes on grass fields versus turf fields. I'll, I'll get more information on that research for Adrian because I think that's a great question
to give you more, a more complete picture of that. Okay, that would be helpful. Thank you. And I think the anybody else on the board have any questions? I don't want to monopolize the fifteen minutes.
Well, I just have some recommendations from a financial side. The issue that you talked about being transparent, I would recommend that you have your numbers in line as far as your total maintenance costs of your current competition field so that we can understand that. If it's only $4,000 that's a very difficult thing. Then I'd probably ask the athletic director to look at the number of days lost so that you could sit there and provide, these were the number of competitions lost, these are a number of practice fields days lost. Then one last thing, and this is just going down the road because we talked about how the competition field was constructed incorrectly. Well, you also have the fields that you're playing the most on, especially the ones along 316 are rock hard. I'm sure the athletic director will tell you that a lot of the kids that are practicing on those fields will complain about shin splints all the time. If you improve the competition field and then come back to us in another year or two and tell us you need to spend $2,000,000 on the three sixteen fields, I don't think the town of Andover is going to be very receptive to that. So you better look at what your needs truly are for the kids because if it was me, I look at those charts that you have for days and usage and I go, You have fields along 316
that are horrible. They're like running on concrete. I would sit there and ask the athletic director to ask his kids and sit there and see what would be the most important thing for them to sit there and have a better practice field or spend $800,000 on the competition field and sit there and improve that. Those are just things for me. I know you guys have multiple other presentations you're going to give to other towns. I would just provide a little bit more financial details so people can truly understand the end cost.
They need to understand the replacement costs. I would just point out two other quick things. You guys put in the presentation that the field is 100% recyclable. But as of right now, our understanding is that nobody actually recycles them. Just be careful that may come back and bite you if somebody sees that they're going to come back and say, that's, you know, that's not true. The other thing I would do, and this would benefit you guys is you talk about how this field is going to fill in and how many more hours you can get on it. When you start talking about fixing this field, the field we have a problem with, you also have to include building another field right to get to the same usage hours that this one will provide you. So when you start talking about comparisons that should be part of your comparison if you if you need to fix the current field and build another one to get to the same hour usage hours. That needs to be part of the conversation right. Because that was originally part of the conversation a couple years ago when we when this was in 2019 when this presentations was done. That was part of the conversation is that you guys would need to build another field and then rotate them because of the number of hours on the field. That should be part of the conversation. So that, you know, residents can understand that it's not just about fixing the one competition field. It's about total usage hours and what you can get on it. Right. You know, if you need two fields to come up with six hundred hours then you know what I mean. Yep.
Great, very helpful. I'm good. Great. And Adrian I've appreciated your questions so please, you know, keep questions coming to us and we'll certainly continue to answer them and I'll share will update some of the materials and I'll share everything with you guys so that you'll have all those available for you. Jeff, you had a list of questions. Did we hit all yours?
No, I just had a couple just concerns in general. Mean, actually just passed the site probably about thirty minutes ago. And that field is on the lowest point of that complex and all the water and I've run there. I've used a track numerous times and most of the water from the whole complex, the ground runoff ends up in that corner of that property. Exactly. And my concerns are putting a new track in and a new athletic field without addressing the drainage issues first. We may be back in the same place eventually. And putting a new track in and not addressing the drainage issues, we're going have the same puddling, we're going have the same lifting of the track. And I'm really concerned that we're going to be spending this amount of money if the drainage issues don't get addressed first. I would be much more comfortable with that $800,000 figure redoing the field, getting the drainage issues fixed before we even start discussing putting an artificial turf field in because if you don't get those drainage fields, that drainage issue fixed, you're still gonna have the ponding, you're still gonna have the water issues if you don't get the drainage done
underneath the turf. And that's something that I think hasn't been addressed and it needs to be addressed. And I have serious concerns supporting something unless the strain issue on the lowest part of this complex is not addressed or else looking at another area of the property to locate the field. Yes,
concern, this is Kathleen Goodwin. I just would like to just just go back on that. And just, and Joe, you might remember this, I do believe that the facility subcommittee did bring that up. And I think Joe, you had addressed that at one point too about drainage. Even recently, I don't know, maybe Scott remembers too. I don't remember the decision that was. But I do know that we have talked about that several times.
We and that was actually a big part of the discussion that we had with BSC and the design of this field and that it would address the current drainage issues. We've also been looking at the baseball field because you know we have some issues up there and we've been looking at drainage issues there we're not suggesting we need to replace the field or anything but you know there's still some drainage issues there and so we've been, you know, the facility subcommittee I think has done a really nice job of focusing their efforts to address those issues so in BSC's design, you know, they believe they are addressing those drainage issues so that you wouldn't experience the same thing with a new field.
If I could just add a couple of things. You know it's, we really welcome the conversation. But we have done and I don't know how much you all know about this field, but I can tell you for my eight years on this board and what I know, what we've done, the drainage is not a issue caused by being low, maybe a potential or a small percentage of that. The drainage issues that you saw in those pictures is from the field not being able to drain from the composite of the field. Simply put, you'll never find an expert like Rich Kolarko. You matter of fact, he's done your work in Andover. He's helped with your fields.
We've had scientists from UConn come out and look at this. We've done core samples. When I tell you we are at the end of other than putting in a perimeter drain that Mr. Leslie's already described, and that's the reason why we felt that so compelling enough for the board unanimously voted to go in this direction is that we're just going to continue to spend money. The field will not drain. We've had sand injection. We've put over 126,000 worth of well pumps failing and sand injection, slit drains, lateral drains, nothing has worked. With all due respect, it's not because we don't know what we're doing. It's because it's not working. And the only way it's going to work is to rip that field out, put in, build it correctly, put the lateral drain in the drainage that is effectively going to work engineered system. And that's why, you know, we're estimating 800,000. It could be close to 900 to a million by the time you're done when you find other problems. That's been, you know, again, the earlier conversation, I don't know the gentleman's name, I apologize, but it's, you know, we've inherited a lot of problems here, guys and ladies, this is, is no blame. We just fix problems. The way my approach has been as from facilities is that it's a problem, we need to fix it. We had balls going into tennis courts instead of standing around looking at how do we, whose fault is it to hit a home run into a tennis court and hit a student? It's nobody's problem. We just fixed it. It costs a little bit of money. We fixed the net. We put up and we constructed this net. It was whatever number was.
We've had oil tanks removed. Everything has been a progress, a progressional progress to make sure that we have been conscientious about spending money, how we're going to do this in a methodical approach and an engineered approach too. Okay. When we did the window project, we didn't just say we're going to have this company come in and do this project and not have a guarantee. We hired professional engineerings, Foss and O'Neil, groups like that to oversee this project. To the point the gentleman made, make sure that it is done and signed off correctly. That was what our committee was formed to do. We had that, we made sure it was done. And it was a defective process that was made from the manufacturer. But we can't go back in time and say it's, know,
Scott knows this whole project. Joe, we're not, we're not. I'd like to stay on track and discuss the field, please. Joe,
wait Joe, a second. We appreciate everything you're doing. Do not take offense to us asking you questions over how to spend our tax dollars. I'm not. We appreciate everything you and the committee has Don't get us wrong, we're sitting there looking at this as you're asking the communities, not just Andover, but the Hebron and Marlborough to spend $3,600,000 and we're just trying to get some facts and understand what the alternatives potentially are. Please don't take offense to it.
My whole point was it's a big investment and if we don't get it right this time with the drainage, we're going to have an issue. I would be much more comfortable having the drainage issue fixed before we lay a turf field down on top of there. And
so we appreciate any information you can provide us that helps us to talk to our residents and to understand how we need to move forward. That would be great. But we do appreciate all your hard Mr. Khan, I would ask for suggestions to what you could do to help allay some of it. I didn't hear in the presentation
that you had done core samples. Didn't hear in the presentation that you guys had gone to that level of detail and brought in UConn consultants before you got to BCS. So it would help for residents. So if Jeff had heard that before, maybe he wouldn't have brought up the drainage issue, right? So hearing those that you've gone to that level, you know, is going to help people be more comfortable with this number. You know what I mean? If they don't know that you've done that, and we don't know that you've done that, then then they're going to ask those questions. Well, what about the drainage? How is that really going to fix? And, and again, not your fault, but the fact that the windows were had, did have to get redone that, you know, people start looking a little more skeptically when big projects come down the pike and go, well, how is this going to get messed up? So if
you can give us that information in a presentation for residents going forward, whether it's our residents or Barbara or whatever, make sure you try to put something in there that says that the mitigation measures that you've already done, and how you got there. And the other things that you've done to not just have somebody from an outside firm come and take a peek. Think Sometimes with residents, they don't understand the level of detail we're going through that right now with a Community Center in town. We've already had the engineer down there, I don't know how many times to look at it to look at a site and take measurements and and and go through exactly what you're going through, we had to bring in someone to look at a septic and blah blah blah. Residents don't always understand that unless you tell them so tell the residents, all the effort you've gone through, because we haven't been there with you, as you've been working on this for the last four We had those late nights and all that time invested. So give us a sample of what that looks like and what you guys have been through and that will help you in the process as you go forward with these other towns. You know what I'm saying? Just adding to Adrian's comments,
I did ask Scott for soils reports and anything that he did have that I could examine before this meeting. I mean, I asked for those a week ago and I have yet to receive anything. So, would like to ask questions off of that but I had to ask them in this meeting. So, if you could provide any information about the soils and the things you've done in the past, it'd be much appreciated by this board. Okay, I will
say to your credit, Scott though, a lot of the other stuff that we asked for you to get back to us as far as numbers and other things. So you have been very helpful as far as getting information back to us. Please don't take that the wrong way that Jeff's asking for that. I'm
not trying to beat on you guys. Just want all the facts and the information because this is a lot of money to ask out the taxpayers at town. And
Jeff Murray is absolutely correct, know that you're not going to get rid of that wetness down there. When I was going to that school in the early 70s, that whole corner was completely wet, nobody even used it, nobody even loaded, did anything with it, it was a weapon. Nobody went down there because it was a weapon, that you have an underlying issue to start with, and so throwing $3,600,000 at a wetland issue when you really have an underlying wetlands issue, all you're going do is code it with $3,600,000 worth of new track and you're going have a shining star of a track, but you didn't fix a problem. But what Jeff is saying, we spent this 800, you put a new track in there, addressed the whole wetland issue, the wet area issue, and then you came back and said well we 'd like to put a nice new track on top of it, know,
could stomach that a lot easier.
I could support that as well to add to something. To save 2.7
to 2 and 3 quarter million dollars to go the other way, would really support that. Yeah, mean I think it unfortunately though that's not going to address as they've talked about, it's not gonna address their total usage hours that they need. They
can still make a grass field that's usable. Adrian, we have a field in our town that was just under five feet of water. Yeah. Okay, and we can play soccer on today. We could have played soccer on it a week afterwards, so as they've said, there's an underlying problem, they don't have any drainage under There's some soil problems on there that needs to be addressed. There's underlying
issue there. All right, gentlemen. People from RAM are very
helpful in giving us information. We've been on this for an hour and ten minutes. Can you just give us a brief, what is the process? I mean, our residents gonna watch this. What is the process going forward from here? You're gonna have some public informational meetings. We saw those posted. And then are you gonna have meetings with other town boards coming forward in the next month or month and a half.
So we have, we're meeting, with Marlboro this week, Hebron and Marlboro next week. And then we have the two public information sessions next week. And then there'll be a district meeting on August 23.
Are you guys doing a distributional or anything you said you had flyers or something correct we are so we have a
newsletter with information about the project that's going to all residents. It'll be mailed out this week. So you're not going to be able to include some of the things that we brought up in there then I not in that that in that document that goes out but I can do it in the PowerPoint that we presented to you, and we have that posted on the website, and we can make that available to the members of the public digitally as well so we'll be able to update, I think, most materials for that information. And the newsletter is not not meant to be comprehensive you know that's it's really give it kind of a quick look, and then direct residents to the
website for more information. Exactly. And Scott any information you have we can put up on our website.
Perfect. Thank you very much. I'll make sure that we share that with you. We'll add a link linking back.
Joe, before you leave and you go back to the board and CIP when you start investigating the pool that's necessary at RAM, I would greatly appreciate that.
I would support you on that 100%. Let's build a pool. Let's go. Yeah. Another shortcoming. Thank
you very much for your time. We appreciate it. Great. Well, thank you guys. We really appreciate the feedback. Very helpful. Good night, gentlemen and ladies. Great. Thank you, Adrian. Good night. Much. Is there any other people or any other comments or? Well, this
is a board of selecting meeting. Only the four members that are present
are really supposed to speak. Thanks, Jeff. Okay. Thank you very much. Good night. Thank you. We're
going to move on to item four, which is additions and deletions to the agenda. The other members of the board, do you have anything that you'd like to add? We need an executive session. Okay.
And I would like to add the replacement of the greenery sign at the Veterans Park. One
so we'll go 18A executive session related to what Adrian?
Well, we have a couple of issues. We need executive session related to Well, we have several employee questions, staffing mostly. Well, are we still in union negotiations?
I have not. I mean, Eric was gone, so I don't think we move forward with anything there. I haven't seen anything come across. Eric, did I miss something?
Yep. We should talk about union negotiations and executive session. Okay.
Sorry, I'm typing. So where are we going to add to Creamery? Okay. Add the what? Creamery signage. Have veterans
on there for anything else? Yeah, we'll put it under 10D2.
And in the executive session I also want to talk about
just a little fine with what we have for executive session. You're fine. Okay. I'd like to add a mask in the town hall. One second, Jeff Murray, that was the signage at the creamery signage. Creamery signage for the veterans, right? Yeah, that's the sign that's damaged down there, the fiberglass. No problem. Scott, you wanted to add, should we put that under old business or new business, Scott? Masks. Yeah, we'll put under old business. Yeah. HIJ9J.
You guys have any stomach for the five ks thing? Yep. Was that a yes? Yes.
The nine ks, four zero one ks permitting process or a race permit? No five ks. We'll just call it race permitting process. Okay. All right, anything else gentlemen?
Do we have your spot for your field issue with the well pump on there, Scott? What's that under
It's under there's storm damage at Veterans Memorial Field, 10E. All right, that's what you're under. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Anything else, gentlemen? Okay. So I'm going make a motion that we add 9J town hall mask mandate, nine ks race permitting, 10D2 a creamery signage at the Veterans Memorial Park, and 18A executive session union negotiations.
We want to move Scott up to the front so he can get off the call and not be stuck on? Sure. We'll do that right after this.
Does someone want to second that so we can I'll second that. Yeah. Thank you. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Thank you. Also, by the way, Paula will not be joining us today. She has issues, so no problem. She called me, we discussed. We told her it would be better for her not to attend because she wasn't going to talk and I told her that I would give her speaking allotment to Adrian and I figured it would be okay.
Adrian, you're to be able to handle that? You got to wait until I was drinking when you did that, thanks. That extra time? We'll definitely be handling that.
Where is it on our, it's under new business? What are we calling that? Well, we're going to allow Scott Beebe to talk about the Andover Animal Control. Animal control position. So we're going to move that up right now. So we're going to do that before we do boards and commissions. So Scott, thank you for joining us. I know we got your information during the week and we wanted to just hear from you as to what your needs would be moving forward. So if you have time, that would be great. I think he's still here. Yeah, I'm here. Hey, Scott. Hi,
good evening. So basically, I mean, I took the job on and when I took the job on, I was told that, you know, basically nothing goes on in our town and there's only a few phone calls here and there and the truth to that matter is it it's couldn't be further from the truth. There's always something going on in our town that involves animal control, whether it be a dog bite like right now on Lake Road or a rabid skunk that we have in town that I got called about this morning or someone's German Shepherd at 01:30 Friday night running down, you know, Boston Hill Road. When dogs are impounded, now the pound is since I've been the dog warden, the pound is being used. So I guess beforehand, the pound was never used. That being said, once the I have a dog in the pound, I'm required by law to go there every day and take care of the dog. So already this year we've had one dog fifty five days. Another dog I would have to count but he just left Sunday morning to go the Humane Society around twenty something days, you know, so my salary is just not anywhere near what the job entails. That being said, I use my own personal cell phone, my own vehicle, know, basically the town has a rabies pole, a camera and a pair of gloves and things come up like I'm required by law if a bat is found in a home or a bedroom. If it's found in a bedroom, I have to first catch it and then have it tested in Rocky Hill or first euthanize it and then have it tested and then let our residents know what happened.
So they can either start protocol for rabies vaccinations or know that the bat is not rabid. So all these kinds of things are coming into play that I don't think anyone's really ever done in the past in our town to be honest. So other towns have equipment to euthanize a bat, which is something simple like a CO2 cartridge in a tennis ball can, but the point is they have it, right? So, the more that goes on in town, the more I'm forced to do other things, right? Like I had to find a way to euthanize the bat. The state gave me a different way which was to put it in a plastic bag. Now mind you, I'm not even rabies vaccinated myself. So I'm dealing with something that potentially has rabies, which is deadly, and then I have to euthanize it, and then I have to bring it to Rocky Hill to get it tested. Right, so I've addressed this with my boss and I don't really get any help on these matters. I'm told it's a thankless job, so I'm just at a point where I feel like somebody else can do the thankless job for $3,500 a year or maybe it's $4 now. Don't even know. But the reality is this,
I'm not gonna continue to do the job for that kind of money. I leave my business to deal with it. One week alone, we had five loose horses in town. Within four days, five loose horses. Right? Another time, six piglets running through town, goats loose in town. So anytime anything like that happens by law it becomes a public safety issue especially with Route 6 And 316 right any of those animals make it that far you're talking about someone dying if they hit a horse So,
I just don't think anyone has ever, you know, first of all, one perfect example is the very first time I charged a resident for an impoundment fee and brought it to the town hall, no one knew what to do with the money. Because in all the years of town of Andover and I've been a resident for upwards of twenty eight years from when I was a kid to coming back and buying a house, not one person has ever collected a dime for this town.
Scott, I totally understand and I hear you that there are issues. I know that Adrian spoke to you and I know that he requested, is there a possibility that we can get from you something that
you will Right. Adrian asked me to write a letter, right, so I still have to deal with this dog bite on Lake Road tomorrow. And I'll do that. The thing is, you know, there's no sense in me staying on if the town's not really gonna step up because I'm just not gonna do the job for for nothing. Totally totally understand, but what we need to know,
we're trying to figure out how big of a step that is Scott. Yes, exactly. Thank you. So, I mean,
me personally, I believe like around 10 to $15,000 is appropriate. And then there's other things that you're talking about, right? So liability issues, here's a perfect example. I went to a horse barn, there's a rabid raccoon in the barn. So far, no contact with humans or horses. It's my job to dispatch that raccoon. So, I do that now, but with my own personal firearm, it's never been a training with the state, right? I'm just a country boy who has a permit and all that kind of stuff. Don't get me wrong, I've had plenty of training, but my point is this, anything goes wrong, that kind of liability falls on me now,
right? We've had deer on Long Hill Road suffering, right? So, the townspeople call me, our our select, when I talked to our last resident trooper, like he knows I have a gun permit. He's like, Scott, can you handle that stuff for me? So, I do when I get those phone calls. Right? But I also know like we had a a raccoon running around Lake Road this year. Right? Here's a perfect example. This this fox, I should say fox, Eric was with me on this when I was talking to him on the phone the whole time, right? There was a possibility of it being rabid. I'm not sure, right? So, I'm there the whole time watching this fox, watching this fox. The state police pull up in their cruiser like this thing just robbed the bank, open their doors, and literally start shooting with 40 caliber handguns at this thing. Houses in the background with no no I mean, it was unbelievable. Right? I called Eric, I said, I'm leaving. They're on my car and I left.
I said, I want you to leave because I don't want you responsible for that. Right, but that's the kind of stuff where I just, I
don't know, There's just way too much liability on me for $3,500
Okay. Well, we have to sit there as a board come up with something that makes sense. Sense to you, I understand that. No, it has to make sense to you too. It's either that or we have other issues. So any help that you can give us to sit there and give us information that would allow us to be able to make an informed decision would be So Scott, can
you give us a list of tools that you need, get a list to Eric, because whether it's you or somebody else, we're gonna need the tools obviously, So
let me just say this, if it's me, some of the tools I own, right? I'm in the business. Been doing this stuff for thirty years. I go to a call, I bring my boss, I have 17 crates. You have a hoarding situation in town, I can take 17 dogs. You see what I'm saying? But in the past, I put one dog two years ago in my car and we're in private sector, right? The damn thing was loaded with fleas. Next thing you know, I got to bomb my car and my car is loaded with fleas. So it depends who's doing the job. So a lot of things disinfecting. You
had made the suggestion about not being a town employee per se. And the more I thought about that, I would have to call my business insurance. Right. I'm sure that would be through the roof for me. That was gonna be my point is that at least if you're a town employee, you're covered under our town insurance, would assume. Is that correct, Eric? That is correct. So there is some benefits of being under that Absolutely
there is, right. Yeah, wouldn't wanna be a subcontractor. Contractor. Okay. So that takes care of your liability question.
And it sounds like maybe we did we do need to supplement some of your tools.
So really the bottom line is gonna be talking about, is that the correct number that you had Listen, and you guys come up with a number and let me know what you come up with. But I don't wanna be, I'm gonna be honest, I don't wanna be filling out mileage reports, all that kind of shit. I get a phone call, I'm literally getting in my car, rushing to the town person, dealing with the problem and getting back to my business. I don't wanna sit at my business and go Google Maps, I went over here, I had to chase the horse across town over here. It becomes, you know, you can I'm not giving you report. You're get one mileage report. That was it in all the years. It's car mileage, not horse mileage. Yeah, exactly. Okay. It's just, I'm not, I would rather just pay me instead of all that nickel and dime stuff that went on before me.
Let's see if we can come up with something and get something back to you. Is that all right?
Yeah. And we'll talk about it tonight, Scott. Yeah. All right, guys. All right. And we will let you know. Yeah.
I will continue to take care of things until you let me know. Give us yet, we're going to talk about tonight. Worst case scenario, we may ask Eric to reach out to some other towns and get some comparisons to see where you should be and go from there. Okay. Fair enough. Thank you, Scott. Thank you. Thanks, Scott.
Okay. We are going to go to item five, boards and commission presentations. I do not see any. Eric, are there any that I need to be aware of? There are not as far as I know. Okay.
Item six, appointments. Any appointments we need to take care of? Not at this point. Okay.
Item seven, any resignations? No? Not on the list, they're not here. We just addressed that one. Correct. Well, it's a non resignation. Item eight, the town administrators report. Eric, you're up. Okay.
So this is going to be verbal. I apologize. I was gone last week, so I don't have a written report for you. But I'm just going to head over a few highlights. I think you're all aware that COVID cases are climbing locally, statewide and nationally. And over vaccination rates zero to twelve year olds zero percent, twelve to fifteen year olds thirty one percent, sixteen to forty four year olds fifty eight percent, forty five to sixty four year olds sixty eight percent, and 65 and over nearly one hundred percent. The best guess from the CDC right now is both the Delta and Lambda COVID variants are between two and four times as infectious as the original strain. And they're now saying, we may need to get over ninety percent vaccination to get high levels of herd immunities. I reached out quickly to some other towns. Colchester I know has gone back to a mask mandate. Hebron is imposing a mask mandate. Ram has imposed a mask mandate with and without students. Marlboro at this point has chosen not to do anything
yet. So, I know we're scheduled to talk about it but I just wanted to put that information out there, so that you had. The ARPA funds, we have received the first tranche of our ARPA funds, so they are sitting in our account. I had a conversation with Michael, our auditor, just before I left on vacation, And about because it appears from talking to the other town managers and administrators, is that the state and federal government is putting a lot of the responsibility for oversight of the spending of the ARPA funds for smaller towns on the town's auditor, so I wanted to bring Mike into the loop very early he agreed that that was the case and that's a discussion he's having with a bunch of the other towns.
He also in talking about the calculations for the quote unquote loss of income. He seems to feel that that is the formula they have, we could probably justify the entire first tranche of our funding as loss of income, because the state builds in a 4% inflation or the federal government builds in a 4% cost inflation per year. So he is going to prepare the calculations for us for that to show us. And the advantage of that is that then would give you as a board of selectmen more flexibility and how you could spend that money. So that that makes if, if that is the case, then that gives us more flexibility
and what your options are. I did notify Kerma that we would be submitting a claim for the damage due to the lightning strike at the veterans field. And, you know, Scott person has been kind of spearheading that while I was gone. And I know that's on the agenda so we'll talk about that in a little bit. So, Bunker Hill update, one of the things that's come up that's an issue is going to be dealing with the students that live on Bunker Hill. Valerie and I drove that today. Valerie, the superintendent, and I drove that looking at possibilities and trying to figure out where the kids live on Bunker Hill and whether we can either get them to the bridge end and pick them up with the bus there or how we address that. That's going to be a problem for both the elementary school and RAM. It's a little easier for high school kids because legally you can make them walk a lot farther. Elementary school kids, you can't make them walk anywhere. So we're going to have to address that with time in building department, the start for permit link has been delayed to the sixteenth, which is next Monday. It's basically built the initial training sessions have taken place. We were supposed to have the beta version to start inputting data today, but we don't seem to have had it. But hopefully we'll get that tomorrow. Center, the town engineer has given to the building committee for the community center his recommendations on the. Sorry about that. For the
selection of the initial civil engineering slash
contractor for that. Did he go back and get an apples to apples like we had asked? I don't know.
So what is one of the one of the firms included an add on an add on in their bid for the engineering to go directly into the project for architectural services. They were they were they were not because of that their bid was slightly higher or could have been slightly higher, so I think the question was could could we go back to the other two and say what was your add on for architectural services that's what one of the things that was asked. He
addressed that Adrian. He said, if we were going to use those services, then we would readdress it for the whatever it was the $5,000
Yeah, but it's kind of hard to pick when you don't have a number from the others if they're if it's not their add on services may be more expensive. He said that we would he would readdress that.
Okay. I didn't see that email. That's the only reason I was asking. Ed Serrisley had cc'd me on the original. I didn't see one after, so.
Okay. Honestly, I have not reviewed any emails from him in the last week. I still have two hundred three hundred more emails to go through from when I get back. It's probably sitting there, but I have not reviewed it.
So Scott, can you just, can you forward that to me? His reply. Please. Certainly. Thank you.
Okay. So fire alarm testing. As you know, we've done the switch over to the new monitoring company, has gone well. The resident state trooper tested the panic button at the library. It does in fact work and it does in fact go through the monitoring company to the barracks and gets to both myself and Jay. So the rest of the systems will be tested this coming Friday. At this point, and it's not absolute yet, but it looks like our cleaning service has quit. Frankly, as far as I can tell, Carol and the cleaning person got in a bit of a pissing contest last week while I was away. And I got a letter from the cleaning service basically saying she wasn't coming back. So I don't know whether that situation is resolvable or whether we even want to resolve it,
that's where we're at on that. Is this the person that also cleans for the firehouse in the library or library? Correct. Correct. Okay. Yep.
Yep. And Eric, did you find out what the problem was with Carol and the cleaning people? You address that to us in an email.
I'd be happy to do that. I will forward you the email from her and give you a written percent from my perspective.
Great. Just one thing on that. We have a garbage can that's in the front of that town hall. Can we sit there and move something to an area outside of the Town Hall in the back so that garbage can be consistently thrown somewhere else other than sitting in the front of our offices? That would be greatly appreciated. You should look into that. That's a recommendation from me because I was in there Thursday and that barrel was completely full.
I may have made an executive decision while you're gone and suggested that they spend the $19 a month to get a shredding bin as well. You have a new shredding bin.
Those are two little things that maybe we can sit there and do to make everything better. Keep going, Eric.
The next two running race, we're dealing with as a separate item and the animal control officer. I did get a letter from the Department of Labor regarding mediation. So we can discuss that in executive session. I have been in the background reexamining our options for VoIP for the town phone systems which as we all know are still kind of unacceptable. You know I've kind of pursued Granite Frontier, and we're also pursuing I've asked South Windsor to give us a proposal for that. We may look at other options too. I think we can also look through our CEN provider now because they were talking about getting into that business. So we're in real early stages, but that is something I still want to address. And I had a discussion the other day with the South Windsor town manager. They are adding additional employees for their tech support. Because they are starting to broaden out even more. And I think that will give us more flexibility in the future to potentially if we decide to add more IT time, especially when we have emergency situations.
Eric, did you say Xfinity as part of that conversation? Because they're doing VoIP for business, I think.
I did not say Xfinity. You want me to pursue Xfinity too? Yeah, I know they do a VoIP for business. So,
and given the large presence they already have in town.
Yeah, I mean, only issue with that is that because we don't, we no longer have cable service to the town,
you know, but maybe it's They don't care. It's no different. I don't have cable anymore either. I just have internet. And there are a lot of residents in town the same way. Okay. It's not really an issue for them. That's it.
That's all I got unless you have questions for me. I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff but honestly I haven't gotten through everything that happened in the week I was gone yet.
Lots more to go through. Okay. Do anyone any of the members have specific questions for Eric on his?
Yeah, could I have an update on Bunker Hill Bridge? Where we stand with that? Closed. It's closed.
I know that but where's the bridge inspector? Is he coming?
So we've been going around the board with that and you know our engineers are of different minds depending on who you ask. Kind of the senior engineer at the company that's doing the bridge design told us we would be better off frankly not saying a damn thing to the state about it and just go ahead and fix it. His suggestion was go straight to your wetlands department. And he also said he would send me some details because he's been doing these kinds of things since the 60s. He would send me details of what used to be the DOT approved fixes for, you know, culverts with holes in them. I still don't have that yet, unless it's in an email I haven't gotten to. I was hoping to, it looks like I went down to the river today, it looks like it's low enough. And I looked at the mean water flow through the Willamantic River, which is a fairly good gauge that we can probably wade in tomorrow and take a look and see whether we can identify where the actual holes that are causing problems with. And then the question becomes, do we try a fix from the inside of the barrel or do we try a fix from the outside of the barrel?
We can wait to see what the DOT recommendations were from the 60s. That's when we worked on that last week.
Going to get us hopefully information this week as to what can potentially be done with that bridge so that we can make a decision quickly.
That's why I asked this. I wanted to know where this is going and if it was moving at all. Scott have you, I know, I know. And I'm gonna go down here Jeff, I know what you're asking, I will go down there soon.
Okay. Are you gonna YouTube you guys waiting into that thing just in case it turns turns funny? I'm just saying we can make a little YouTube money. I help pay for the bridge.
Do you feel like coming down and videotaping it will give you one of the big expensive town cameras so you can do it in four k high definition. How about that?
Okay, anyone else? Scott, you have any more questions? Sure. Okay, Jeff or One
other thing I didn't talk about. I know Jeff, you've been asking about the closeout for the other bridge. Four times farm, we did hit another snag, which we're trying to address now on the DOTs, the Connecticut DOTs final review, they decided our contractor Black and Warner did not hire a minority subcontractor for a large enough period of time. Now they're questioning the subcontractor set aside for that job. So we've gone back to Black and Warner and asked them to produce all their documentation as to why that hasn't happened. So we're still plugging at it, but it's slowly.
All right. Jeff Murray, I was asking, do you have any questions for Eric on his report? Nope, I'm all set. Thank you.
Let's go on to old business and we'll try to get through this. Eric gave us a little bit of information on 9A, the alarm monitoring for the town buildings. Eric, just so we understand, where does the Old Town Hall fit into this and where are we at with that building?
So the Old Town Hall, based on your recommendations that you wanted to look at both possibilities, which is possibility of using the front point and just adding sensors to it versus using the system that's even older than that, that's still in there that we know the alarm still goes off when you hit a pole station, but we don't know what else in there is actually connected. That will be one of the locations that is inspected by the security company. So hopefully by next week, we will have a report on what it would take and whether that system could actually take a cellular monitoring system and we could reuse what's there now.
All right. Anybody have any questions related to that? Okay. So on the COVID funding, you told us that we had received our first amount of money from the federal government. You're going to give us a report from the auditor so that we can determine if the loss of income provision can be utilized for the first amount of this money and what we can do with those funds after that designation is granted. That's correct. Put that on for the next meeting so we understand that. Nine c community center, building a committee update. Anyone who want to sit there and talk about this?
Well, that's what Eric was saying there. We're at the point now that we're looking at the bids, Scott? Choosing between the two bidders. Well, there was three, wasn't there?
There's two we're gonna be looking at on Thursday night.
Yeah, Adrian, I believe there was three that were close. One was a really bad, it was a really high outlier. Okay. Then they just narrowed it down to those two.
Okay. So on Thursday, you're going to review the bids with both those firms? Okay. All right. Anything else you guys want to add? The 9D public library chimney report.
Okay, I'll give you a quick rundown on that basically see IP map. They did not have quorum, but they did have enough members to review the report that was given by the independent inspection service that we hired. And their recommendation or the CIP's recommendation was basically to rebuild it from the roof up. And I need to go back to the original three bidders and see whether I can get an apples to apples prices on what the cost would be from those three vendors from the roof up. And that's where we stand with that.
Okay. And if all went well, when would be the timing of the work? Next month, thirty days, sixty days, ninety days?
Well, I mean, I guess the question is, who's the approver? Who makes the final decision?
You present us with the appropriate bid that you believe is the most financially prudent for the town, and we'll evaluate it and potentially approve it or disprove it. Bring it to us as quickly as possible so we can decide what we're doing. I mean, that money has already been budgeted correctly. What did they decide about the flu? In short, they decided to ignore the flu. So the flu was fine?
They decided to ignore the flu. It's not a good answer. More complicated
than fine or not fine. That's what Eric's trying to It was an involved discussion about flus and draft and whether there's because of the way the chimney is built it's actually a double wall. You have another layer beyond the flu and most flu because they're clay on clay always end up with cracks in between the clay to clay. But beyond that we have a double wall and then on top of that you have draft. So it's not really an issue.
Yeah, so basically there's no safety concern with not replacing the float. Does that answer your question, Scott? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I'm not trying to be invasive. Could spend a half an hour discussing the ins and outs of when and where we,
whether we should put a flu in or not. And we had about a forty five minute discussion on that, so. As long as it's safe. It is.
Okay. We're going to go to 9E, the request for qualifications on the affordable housing plan.
We don't need to talk about that. That RFP doesn't close till September 1 anyway. And I've given a copy of that to the board. Okay. So 9F tree trimming?
I honestly don't know what the status of that is at this very moment. Jay is on vacation today, I would get details of that for you tomorrow. You know, we have been trying to work with both the contractor, as well as the utility company to collaborate and cost share again so we get more work done for our dollars. Any questions on that? Anybody want? Scott, You good? No. Everybody happy with the video? Yeah, good job by the way. Thanks. Nine gs, the roadwork progress report.
Okay, so at this point, we're pretty much done with the roadwork roadwork portion of what we're doing for the year. Everything we chip sealed somewhere around eight and a half miles of road shimmed and chip sealed. It will get re swept a weeks. Few weeks? Yep, something like that.
Looks like it's had the initial sweep, but it needs another, it will need to be swept again.
It'll need to be swept multiple times. There was a significant amount of traffic today around Lake Road and I happened to be home when the accident occurred on 6 and it was nice and busty.
Did they reroute along Lake Road? Lake Road. Okay, I did not know that. I would say that this, you know, we gotta think a little bit about this because this, it seemed a lot dustier this time than last time. And we gotta start looking at what stone we're using for chip seal, I think, going forward, because I was not necessarily as happy with this batches last year's. Do they get a washed product or no?
I don't know. My guess is no, at least not washed enough.
Yeah, I mean, it certainly doesn't hurt to get a sample of the pile before you get a big delivery. We used to go up and get a five gallon pail out of pile to see how much fines was in it.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, most of this, they didn't deliver. Most of this, they showed up and applied it directly to. We didn't really have a stockpile before they started in. But that is a concern of mine and something I want to sit down with Jay about. Like they dumped, picked up from the wrong pile.
Well, here's a question. What are we going to do? We have a pretty substantial pile leftover too, don't we?
Yeah, but I don't know necessarily that we own that.
No, whether we own it or not. Mean, we should probably better find out if we take for it.
Yeah, but we paid by road mile, by square foot of application, not by material quantity. So they don't give a tonnage estimate with that?
I mean, we do have material estimates, but that's not what they, once we agree on what the scope of it is and what the cost per unit is, that's what we get charged. Okay. So
that's something I'll bring up with Jay about the materials.
Before they all leave, Eric, can you just go have them go down to the vet park and get that parking lot done? Was that on the list? It was not on the list. What is the issue, Scott? I don't,
I mean, I don't know how we've we come up with the funds for it. If you want to address that. Are you saying they have all this extra material thing in a lot? That
doesn't mean they have the emulsion. It's stone. There's a pile of stone down there. Oh, emulsions all gone?
Don't know. But again, I mean, it wasn't factored into the labor or Right, right, right. Emulsion quantity. And the expensive part is the emulsion.
Yeah, so I do agree that next year we should seriously look at a double chip seal of that parking area and get it flat because we only got a couple of years before that milling layer is really worn off and kind of in rough shape. I mean, it's already in rough shape.
Quick question, are we going to do any, we're not going to Fox seal any of these roads like we did School Road in Wales, are we? No,
no. And I'm, know, that's one of those tough ones. I really like the fog seal, but the fog seal cuts about a mile and a half out of how much you can do any each year. And the question is, can we really justify the cost of the FOG seal? I think it's going to depending on what we get for complaints this year, we need to address that going forward and decide whether we want to be fog sealing after the chip seal or not.
I think one place we should consider it is probably around the lake because there is people that rollerblade bike, that kind of activities and it's just makes for a smoother surface instead of the chip seal. It's just a suggestion.
Yeah, and Jeff, one of the things we've discussed was depending on how much negative feedback we got, you know, one of the possibilities is going back next year and microing over the top of it and going from a chip seal to a cape seal, but just spreading the cost out over two years. Again, it's really just a kind of a cost benefit analysis and we're so far behind on so many roads that I felt like it was kind of hard to justify spending that much extra money in the Lake District when we weren't doing anything other places.
Yeah, hear you. There's just a lot of recreation going down around the lake and it is flat roadway to rollerblade or skateboard on and it's just would be nice down in that area. That's one place I would probably do it if I was going to do it. That's all.
Okay. Given the speed numbers, I don't know what we want encouraging anybody to be skateboarding on that road. Those kids are gonna get pulled over.
No, I mean, saw the traffic data from the speed camera.
Did get one complaint from a resident this morning about the intersection of Merritt And Lake, basically saying that the chip was loose enough, several people rolled through the intersection because they couldn't stop in time going down the hill. So we may look at addressing temporary signage there until it's fully swept up. But the other reality is that people blow that stop sign on a pretty regular basis, probably 10% of people roll right through it anyway. So I'm not sure we'd actually address the issue,
but I think we ought to look at that. Well, I think Jeff is 100% right. I think you're going to find that there's a lot of people that use lake area for recreation, walking, cycling, and your complaint log is the next one. We'll sit there and see how it does. And see whether you should have fog sealed that.
Even running is just when you run on that fog sealed surface, it's just a lot easier on your feet. It is. So it's just like the, I see a lot of runners, I see a lot of bikers, people riding skateboards, rollerblades, whatever. It's just a better surface for down there, I I
think you have about till the end of the month that when the residents and the people that use the area determine that you're not going to make it like Lakeside, you're going to have your complaint log will get larger and larger and larger. But anyway, we have to sit there and deal with it because we only have so much money, so we've to determine what we're trying to do with what we have. Yeah. Okay. Are there any other issues with roadwork? Where are we with Shoddy Mill and everything else done?
No, we're definitely not done with Shoddy Mill. That's something I need to address tomorrow with Jay because we don't seem to be as far along on the drainage work as I would like.
And so while we're at roadwork, there's a rental piece of equipment I'd like to bring it up here since it's roadwork related. Can you explain to us this piece of equipment, so all the board members understand it.
Sure. So, we rented an excavator. We've used it for a couple projects. It was primarily rented to do the drainage work on shoddy. But unfortunately, you know, we've had so much storm related stuff after that last rain event that we have primarily been patching roadsides for the last, you know, almost three weeks. You know, that's we I will tell you that the public works director has said that that that is his priority, kind of across the board for equipment is obtaining an excavator. He wanted a much bigger one. And I told him that I didn't think that was realistic to get a bigger one because if we get a bigger one then we need to get a new equipment trailer, because we can't tow the damn thing with our existing equipment trailer. You know, and we would have trouble in narrow areas.
So we've done a survey of all the other public works departments. And I sent Jay and Tommy out to demo a couple different ones that different departments had and talk to the other departments about what they used. And Mansfield and a couple of the other departments had settled on that one because it's the smallest unit. How many pounds does that air? I can't tell you exactly. Don't know that. It's
around 18,000 and it can pick up a basin. It can do basement placement. I think digging depth on it is, you know, between fifteen and nineteen. So it's a pretty substantial machine. It's it's literally the thing that everyone's going to now because it's small enough to pull with a, you know, with a with a truck without going to a full lowboy, you know, it's it's a nice setup. And, you know, they all doesn't matter what brand, they're all, you know, similar manufacturing now. So I think that one's a Taiuki, Taiuki. I mean, our friends would have them. It's a great unit. And and Jay admitted that he was surprised that it could do what it could do. So Yeah. But a basin is how much? 6 or 7 or something like that? Depends on the size, but yeah, I mean it's substantial it's not just picking up a basin, it's being able to place it, you know, so.
So it is expensive. Now I think Jay and I are going to try to go to CIP next month and start talking about capital planning and whether we can actually purchase an excavator this year. Part of the reason why we chose this was because the rental right now will be if we do choose to purchase this unit, then everything we've rented can roll directly into the purchase cost of the unit. It's 70%. It's not everything 70% of the rental rate. I thought it was 100% for the first month.
First month, but then the next three, it's reduced. It's Okay. About 70%. All right. You're probably correct. It's similar to what we had with the loader when the loader was purchased. Yeah. But what I brought up and given that we have, I mean, don't know, given that we have so many projects that are coming down the pike, and this is really specifically to address drainage for these specific projects. From accounting terms, normally you would expense a cap, you would take a purchase of capital item expensed against those projects, right? It's the same thing that bridge builders do when they're doing, you know, they buy equipment, they expense it against the project, they saw it when they're done. Would it make sense for us to spread the cost of this into some of these projects and purchase it out of? Because if you look at the rental rate, if we're spending four months a year, by the time we're done, we're almost at $20 a year, over five years or six years, that's the cost to buy this thing. And
I totally agree with you on that one. I think the issue for me is first making sure it's exactly what we do want because I don't want to buy a piece of equipment that's not really optimized for us. Number one, and number two, the thing that burns me is that in, it's kind of ironic because when Jay said he wanted it was his priority to own it rather than lease it. He said his prior experience was that every time they rented a machine to go do something, something bad would happen and they'd get pulled off on it and they'd be sitting there owning the thing for three weeks when they weren't using it. And that unfortunately is exactly what's happened here. And it's gonna continue to happen. Yeah, and I do agree with that. I mean, I, you know, it's simply a question of sitting down and saying, okay, given that we have that many drainage projects to do, you know, that probably is the most logical piece of equipment to own, you know, in terms of capital,
in terms of what's actually coming. Jeff, can we do that as a municipality? Can we say that this year's rental went against, you know, went against, you know, like the repair because, know, we would have needed to go and rent something like that just to dig out the bridge and do some of the repairs there. Can we, can we split that up against different things? Is that allowed? Like next year we're gonna have drainage work on it. Can we do it like that? Or do we have to?
I don't see there's any reason that we can't do it like that. I mean, personally, when I saw the bill, Eric, I was like, that's too much money to not be going to something that's going to be a long term asset of the town. I mean, I you to go to CIP immediately. If we have to do what Adrian's requesting and spread it out over the road projects, Let's spread it out over road projects over the next six years. I let's find out how to get that accomplished so we're not I just think when you do something like that, you're throwing money away. I would much rather sit there and put it to a long term asset.
Yeah, because we're probably $20 a year for the purchase payment. Would gather it's 96 or 98 for the machine. I mean, let's just get the money. I mean, only thing that I saw was the bill. So I I the rent So it's attached to the bill if you went I think third page in was the breakdown of the total machine if you were to buy it. I don't think they gave us a a five year lease purchase. I don't think they gave us a five year loan. So But we should look at it and see what the numbers are. So Okay. Anything else related to the roadblock? No. Nope.
So the back back to the roadwork, but quickly, can we, is there a reason why we can't stop the drainage work and go onto the shoddy millwork and then go back after shoddy mill is done? So that machine is not sitting there?
Well, they were dealing with the bridge and everything else, right? It wasn't that they got pulled off. They had to go deal with the bridge issue and and then they've gotta be around for the cape seal or for the ceiling guys, right? Yeah, I mean the
the So if you start with four guys and you say Jay in the period where you're doing a lot of chip ceiling and road working is primarily doing going to be supervising and making sure they're not screwing the roads up. Gets you down to three guys, because we have so much mowing to do. Richard Bacon is primarily just, you know, day in and day out roadside mowing, he does get pulled off of that occasionally for storm cleanup and stuff like that. But mostly what he's doing is roadside mowing. Pause for a second.
So we took the roadside mowing out of the budget because weren't we hiring somebody part time wasn't that where Richard started?
He did start there. In the past, we did some of the roadside mowing with temp help. We never budgeted enough to do all the roadside mowing.
Do we still I guess my question is do we still have budget money to do roadside mowing and have we looked at hiring someone to do that so we're not taking Richard away from the day to day?
Honestly, I have not looked at hiring somebody else to do roadside mowing.
I'm just concerned but as Scott said we're you know and as you just pointed out we start pulling guys from their primary purpose.
That shotty mill has to be done. Yeah, I know. And I mean And you do you have a timeframe of how long it's gonna take? Months? Yes.
Yes, but are we on a schedule with a contract? That's the question. On a schedule with what? The contractors. Contractor, what's the contractor schedule for Shotting Mill?
So honestly, I do not think there's no way we're going to be done in time to be in paving season this year. So that's going to that's paving that is going to get pushed to next year. And it's which, in a sense is going to work out okay, because we can't pave Long Hill until we're done with a connectivity project. And I think that's going to push past the end of the paving season for Long Hill also. So are those on the same contract?
No. Or why would it They're on the same grant, aren't they? Well, they're on the same grant. They're paid for by the same grant. And we're probably we're going to bid certainly the reclamation and the paving out as a unit. So we have a bigger total amount that we're doing because there's no sense paying two mobilization charges to bring in the reclamation unit. So we'll go in, we'll reclaim Long Hill Road, you know, and as they're flattening that out, we'll send them right immediately to Shawty Mill. So they are linked then? Yes. That was the question. Okay. Yep.
And what is the timeframe and how long will it take to do this? That's what he just said. I mean,
Scott, short of all the other stuff that happened, I was hoping that July 1, we would have been working full time on shotting. And it's five weeks later and we haven't even started it yet. So that kind of irritates me, but I also get that we're working right alongside of wetlands,
and we just had a huge rain event. So, I mean, you kind of got to wait till that dries out a little bit anyway. Well, mean, but not for nothing. We've been messing around with this bridge. We've had other storm cleanup work that got thrown at us. So, you know, there were some kinks in that plan.
Yeah, and I do get it. One of the things that's stressing me out a little bit is we still got to do some very significant repairs to one of the plow trucks that we had kind of decided to have Tommy do inside and do the welding on rather than sub it out because the costs we got back for subbing it out were fairly extensive. But I mean, we may be running out of time and we may be ending up going back to subbing that out. And that's probably an 8,000 or $9,000 bill.
Much time would I ask you? Is there a timeframe on that grant money for Shoddy Mill?
So, yes. So we have, I signed the contract in June of this year, and I delayed signing it as long as I can to be as flexible as I could. So we can pave any time between June of two years from last June, basically. We've got twenty four months from last June to So be
our worst case scenario is we get the drainage done this year and we do reclamation and paving beginning of next year. Yeah, I think that's unfortunately what's likely to happen.
Okay. That's kind of where I was going to go with that. I wanted to know. Was going do Okay.
All right. Does anybody else have any other roadwork questions? Okay. We'll go on to 9H complaint log system.
So I sent you my initial complaint logs. I guess it did not get compiled in my absence. So you don't have the town employee wide complaint log. That's on me. That should have been presented to you at this meeting.
All right. That was interesting reading. Thank you very much for sharing that with us. 9I, senior transportation grant application.
The transportation grant application was submitted for one, basically 15 passenger small bus, just small enough that it does not require a full CDL driver, just somebody with a passenger endorsement. We won't actually know till probably next April whether we got the grant, but it sounds fairly promising. And that is an 80% federal grant. And given the funding, the ARPA funding dollars, it looks like we could probably either get it in kind from the state or use ARPA dollars for the other 20%. So we should be okay on funding if
we get the grant. All right, in kind from the state would be much better. I concur. Concur.
9J town hall mask mandate. So I'll tell you my, I thought our current requirement was that any unvaccinated individuals would be wearing masks. Is that accurate?
That is what the policy is. Is it being, is everybody doing it? Definitely not. Nope.
So if that's the case, and that's what I understood from my visits into the town hall, I'm going to recommend that we make a mandatory town hall mask mandate.
Let's just have a vote on it. Stop talking about it. Okay.
That would be in keeping with the CDC guidelines, I would say, and that seems to be where the majority of towns are going in terms of town halls.
And just so we all understand, nobody wants to be wearing a mask. I think with the issue of vaccination or not vaccination is a bigger question and we can't pull any favorites. You cannot allow someone to sit there and say they're vaccinated or they're not vaccinated because they're not going to want to wear their mask regardless. I'll make a motion that we put back in place a mandatory town hall mask mandate. I'll second that. Right further discussion, Adrian and Jeff, go ahead. Can I just have a clarification?
So that is all employees, all visitors to the town hall from this point on wear a mask within the town hall? That's correct. Okay.
Anybody? Adrian, Jeff? Okay, you got nothing? All right, then I'll call the vote. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? Aye. There's no extension to a three to one. Nine ks race permitting. Obviously, had an issue with this last race that was held. We have to have a standard policy that everybody that's on the board and within the town administrator's office understands that we want the ability to vote on those races using town property. We already have a policy, I thought, Jeff. Yeah, it was ignored. Yeah, we want want to make sure that it's followed. Ignored, followed whichever term you would like to utilize, feel free.
It's an issue in our town administrator, our fire chief and our rec commission wasn't even aware of it. Okay.
As we move forward, we're going to follow that policy. As I would tell all of you, if it's not followed and someone has a race, we should fine them $1,000 payable to the Town Recreation Commission so that those things are followed in the future. Because that would have been my recommendation related to the race on Saturday before I heard what had occurred. Anybody else want to talk about it? Do you want to get in to the details of it? What would you all like to do?
My issue is that the race was held. We didn't give him a permit, but he still held the race, you know. I really have a problem with that. I mean, someone coming into town and making money off, you know, utilizing the town, you know, and he knew better. We've we had an event with him before he gave money to the food pantry, begrudgingly,
but he did give money. We've had issues with this individual for probably about five years now. You remember that Jeff, right? Yeah, he knew better. He knew better. He knew he had to get his paperwork in. He knew he had to go to the board of selectmen and recognition and he chose not to. So that's an issue. So
I will reach out to him and let him know that in the future, won't be expected to vote. If he doesn't have a vote of the Board of Selectmen, he's not to hold the race. Well, I would say that we should ban him. I mean, he knew better. He knows
what the policy is and he waited till the week, like literally days before the event. Paperwork
supposed to be in ninety days before the event. Ninety days. He knows. So, in the paperwork, he did submit states right on the top to be filed at least ninety days prior to an event.
We will all sit there and have if he tries to run an event again and the support is still sitting altogether, we'll have the opportunity to vote and say no. Let's all just follow the rules and not have things slip through and have events like that. Can we ask him to give a donation now?
I'll speak with him. Why can't we ban him? He's been banned in other towns.
You could and the next time it comes up for a vote, you could vote no. Let me talk to him and then we'll sit there and if you want to ban him at the next meeting, we'll ban him at the next meeting. Why do we have to wait? Why don't we take a vote? I would make a motion to ban them. Maybe one second.
Not bad but just not permit any more events in the town. Yeah no permitting in the town.
I'll modify to that. And unless he wants to come up with a big. Donation to the All few
our running and racing events have always benefited the town and they've always had a flavor of either the food pantry or beneficiaries. And that was kind of always been
the way we've done it. Do you have any problem with them allowing him to have some sort of tenant?
They're using our resources and facilities. Exactly. Mean, every other town, I mean, I've promoted a bunch of events in other towns and every other town you either have to, there's either a user fee or a coverage fee to cover the expenses of the town. Let somebody come in and come out and walk out with 2,000 or $3,000 and
not benefit the town in any way. His argument that he was sick is disingenuous. He certainly got all his advertising in on time for the race, didn't he? Didn't want to get his permit in. Someone going to second Adrian's motion? I'll second it.
Further discussion? All those in favor of Adrian, just so I understand the motion banning further permitting in town? Yep, from this individual.
Right, banning further permitting in town for Eric, what's the gentleman's name? What's his company's name?
I don't know actually. Oh yeah, I do have it on the thing. His name is Rich Baber.
Rich Baber. Okay. I don't know that there's any honestly, I don't know him. I've never met him, so I don't know who He's been to meetings before. I mean, he does know better. I mean, but my issue is really simple. You can always be able to put in a permit and we should always have the ability to say no and reject it. First Mile LLC is what it's First, your Personally,
each board should be able to do as you change members. Well, you're relying on institutional knowledge. It isn't always passed down.
This is not institutional knowledge. He should have a $500,000 fee because he failed to do things appropriately and he didn't turn it in in time and he held the race. I believe he should just be charged money and if he doesn't pay the money, he should never be allowed to have I
think the problem with doing that though is that we don't have an ordinance in place structurally to be able to charge. Yes. Can I chime in here? Sure.
Our town attorney is here. Thank you very much. I Oh, that's been that call. I've
been here for a couple of hours waiting to talk or not. And and I I know this guy, by the way. He's from World Manic originally. Oh, great. He's not a bad guy, but he's obviously screwed up. You should have an origins that find anybody that, you know, I don't know what obviously, if it's Rich Favor, it must have been a running race. You're not talking about cars and stuff, bicycles. It was yeah, running. Okay you have a recreation commission you should have an ordinance if you're going to find anybody you need to have an ordinance right because you can't force the fund an ordinance and you can't enforce it without a hearing procedure and I'm gonna I just drafted a hearing procedure ordinance at Eric's request but we can talk about that later because you're on your schedule tonight is a I guess you have to have an election for a vacancy on the on the regional school board and you're going to have a town meeting soon. If you're going to have a town meeting that's the time to bring up ordinances.
So then we should sit there and get that in place so
I could draft an ordinance for you. I'd have to talk to Jeff Murray or Eric or somebody who knows, you know, can fill me in on the details.
Sure. But so so I am correct. We can't we can't suggest finding him because we don't have an ordinance to do it.
Right. We need a hearing procedure for a citations ordinance. And we have the draft that the attorney prepared for the town in the past. Can we share with you at any time? Can we ban the individual?
That am I correct in believing? I don't want to use the word ban. Would say prohibit from any future. And we prohibit this individual from doing that these in the future.
For all time? What's the point? I mean, you're going to sit there and vote every time he's supposed to have a race.
Why don't you just find him in the future? You know, find anybody who does not, get a permit before they have an event like this. Where is the race run?
Dennis, Dennis, I'm sorry. I'm going to ask the other board members. If we don't get satisfaction related to this race, this race could be ranked and we don't get something that's going to make every member of this board feel better about that race having been run the way it was run, Is anyone on this board gonna vote for him in the future? No,
no. That's why Adrian, I would suggest that we go with Jeff's suggestion.
But the problem comes in No, we're gonna vote on this. We're voting on this but my point is Listen,
if Scott feels that strongly, you wanna go talk to him and see if he can get satisfaction, fine.
Look, Jeff, he promised the food pantry he was gonna donate a set amount in previous years and he's never delivered.
And then this is kind of like for me, it's the last straw. Understood, I get it. I get it too, Jeff. We're gonna end up two-two on the vote. Paula's not here. Go talk to him and then we'll have this conversation again next month. Yeah, we'll put it on the agenda for next month and you can talk to him and see what he wants to say. All's in your court, Mr. McGuire. Excellent, let's go. You gotta part your butt down and will a manik and see what you come up with. Yeah, okay. So
now we're on to new business. We finally got to item 10, new business. So we are going to get to 10A, bike ride presentation by Drew Smedley from the Boy Scouts to benefit the Andover Food Pantry. Drew, how are you? Hello, I'm doing good. How about you? Good.
Thank you very much for your presentation. We greatly appreciate it. Congratulations on your Eagle Scout proposal.
Thank you. Do you mind if I give my presentation now? Absolutely, you're on. All right.
Amanda, are you helping him with his presentation to to get up? There we go. Yes. Here he goes. Okay. Thanks, Drew. Alright. Can you see everything? Yes.
Alright. So before I get into my presentation, I would just like to give a little bit of background about myself. I've grown up in Andover, lived here my whole life. I'm a member of Andover's troop one twenty four. I'm a cyclist. I work at a local bike shop. And for my Eagle Scout project, I wanted to really combine both cycling scout some way to benefit the community. Sorry, close out of it. There we go. Alright, so this ride will take place as a benefit to the Andover Food Pantry. I've already spoken with Joan Sousi about it, and we've decided that this will be an event to benefit Andover's Food Pantry. So the event will consist of two different routes, both an easy rail trail ride and a road ride lap. Participants will sign up via BikeReg, which is an event site for cycling events, and as a registration fee they'll make a mandatory donation to the food pantry. Those who are wishing to donate more can use the pledge reg, which is a website for doing event fundraising. This could be used for friends and families of riders to donate more through there, and there will be incentives such as prizes for people to raise more money for the food pantry. So the ride will start and finish in a central location. The central location will serve as both the start and finish line. The feed zones, so riders who are going on longer rides will stop back there partway through their event to get more food and water. It'll also serve as parking for the participants, and there will be staggered start times to ensure that people who are doing a longer distance will be finished up at around generally the same time.
So when this event will take place? So far the earliest possible date, which I believe would be an ideal date, would be Sunday, October 17. This is the first major weekend where there's not going be another major cycling event within a 50 mile radius of Andover, So this would mean there would be quite a large draw of participants. It also would have a higher likelihood of having better warmer weather than later on in the fall, and it's also a great time for seeing the fall colors around Andover and the surrounding towns. And then if that doesn't work, weekends in November would also be a good consideration since there isn't a whole lot of cycling events planned for November. However, weather would be a consideration as there could be cooler weather and even snow and ice. Any questions so far? No. All right, so permits and logistics. So part of the process of getting this event to take place would be a USAC, which is The United States Cycling Governing Body, would be get race records insurance through them to ensure that neither myself or the town or the Boy Scouts are liable for the race in case somebody is injured. Through filing with them, we can get fairly cheap insurance, which will help cover all the participants in the event.
Additionally, I'll have to get permissions from traffic authorities, both for Andover, surrounding towns, the event will go through, and the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Throughout this whole process, I'm being advised by the CCAP, which is the Connecticut Cycling Advancement Program. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with them, but they are a local nonprofit. Their goal is to help cycling be more accessible to youth throughout the state. They're very experienced putting on races and all sorts of nonprofit events throughout the year, so I've been in contact with them and been meeting with them to help figure out some of the logistical processes. Additionally, I'd be contacting the CERT team to help out with traffic directing at the start and finish, along with first day along the way. So when I'm thinking about a location for this event, some of the requirements would have to be someplace with a large outdoor space to be setting up tables, food, water, tents, and for also participants to gather there. There would need to be plenty of parking along with access to bathrooms and portable toilets for participants. So my two main considerations in Andover were the Long Hill Ball Fields. Number one, because of the big open space there, there's easy access to the rail trail, which is just a short ways up the road and through the crosswalk at Route 6. However, one of the considerations there is there's relatively limited parking in the dirt lot and also along the road there. Another consideration would be Andover Elementary School. Here there is a larger parking lot, but it's harder for people to access
without having to go down Route 316, which both for
having to deal with traffic on the road and also the amount of elevation would not be ideal. So these are some of the rail rail trail routes from Long Hill. So this event would hopefully be offering a couple different routes, both on the road and on the rail trail, for people with different abilities. So the shortest route would probably be around 12 miles or so. It's flat, it's free of cars, and it's quiet and secluded on the rail trail. So this one would be starting from the Long Hill Fields, crossing Route 6 at the crosswalk up onto the rail trail, taking the trail up to Bolton Notch, turning around and heading back. This longer route, which is 20 miles flat and free of cars as well, would be starting from the Long Hill Fields, following the same route as the 12 mile ride, but then after the 12 miles, stopping back at the Long Hill Fields for riders to able to replenish their water, get more snacks, then returning back up to the trail to continue their ride into Columbia, and then turning around there and heading back. And this ride will feature a mid ride rest stop at the rest area. This is the road lap route from Long Hill. It's 25 miles, a scenic route. It's on quiet back roads. There's very little numbered roads throughout the whole route, and the ones that are there, it's just merely crossing them. I did a test ride of this route the other day and I think it would be a great
option. It's very quiet, lots of back roads. There it is, okay. There is a fair bit of climbing involved, so it would be a little bit more challenging for some riders, which is why there's going be the the rail trail options for other riders. But for a serious road rider, this would be definitely a fun route for them. And it also includes some points of interest like Nathan Hale Homestead, Cometrey Lake, the Will Mantic River, and the Nathan Hale Cemetery. These are some of the rail trail options from Andover Elementary School. So this first route is 14 miles, but some of the major considerations for it is the climb on Route 316 that riders have to go up at the end, both because of the consideration of having active cars out on the course. It would be preferable to have it at a location where riders would not have to deal with that. Same thing for the 23 mile route from the Andover Elementary School. There also is the climb up Route 316 at the end of the race at the end of the ride.
This is the proposed road lap route from Andover Elementary School. It's 18 miles long, it's a scenic route, it's on quiet back roads, around 1,500 feet of climbing, and some points of interest include Andover Lake and Bishop Swamp. These are some of the needed materials to make an event like this successful. For the start and finish area with the feed zone, there needs to be pop up tents with tables and chairs there volunteers to hand out refreshments to riders. There would also be speakers and a PA system there to give out announcements to riders at the start and finish area along playing music throughout the day. There's going to be water coolers to hold water for
participants to refill their water bottles from. There would also be grills for cooking lunch at the end. Sag vehicles, which would be used to pick up riders who get stranded either because of a mechanical issue, they get too tired, or something of that nature. Additionally, possible signage. One of the considerations with signage on the route is one, it's expensive to get signing material. It's time consuming as well to go out there and sign an entire route. And also, want this to be an event which is not going to leave a lasting impact in that way on the town. I don't want to for there can be multiple months after there being evidence of this race. I want this for this event. I want this to be something where there's no trace left behind. So a different option for the routes would be Ride with GPS, which is a program which allows people to create cycling routes and create cue sheets. People can use the route either on their phone, using the Ride with GPS app, or on any cycling GPS device, which could be used for navigation. If I did go this route, I would also be printing out cue sheets, which would have a map of the route along with term by term information for people participating. Another needed material would be food and beverage. With being in the fall, part of the consideration with beverages would probably be having something warm first for cyclists like
hot chocolate, cider, something like that to warm them up before and after the race. And I'll go into more detail on food and beverage on one of the later slides. Another material would be numbers and pins. I'd be planning on using a number system pinned on the people's jerseys to keep track of participants at the race, and also make sure that everybody returns safely from the course. Raffle tickets would also be used for a charity raffle. Raffle items additionally would need to be donated from some local businesses, for other businesses who are interested in helping out. Bathrooms, this is a big consideration as people will need access to some bathrooms. This could either be in the form of real facilities at a building in town or
probably the better option would be to have porta potties out at the event. And then additionally trash bags to make sure there isn't any litter. Food and beverage. So some of the feed zone products for the rest area where cyclists would keep coming back through. There's some sports nutrition products that would be needed like hydration mixes and granola bars, things like that, along some grocery items like bananas and sandwich supplies. So I've already gotten some contributions from a few sports nutrition companies. Noon, which is a hydration company, has already given, they have already donated a 100 servings of their hydration mix. Osmo Nutrition has also donated 60 servings of their hydration mix. Scratch Labs has showed interested in donating a variety of their products to the event. PowerBar has agreed to sponsor the event and donate supplies, which include bars, gels, chews, and hydration mixes as well. And then, untapped maple and RXBAR have also decided to give us very generous discounted rates on their items case we need some more items to supplement the feed zones. For beverages, there need to be water, which would be handed out through water coolers, electrolyte mix for people to replenish their electrolytes while they ride, Hot drinks, as I mentioned before, with the cold weather, people will want some hot drinks to warm up either before and after the race. And then additionally, some bottled beverages to go to lunch.
So the lunch would be run either as, so people who are participating in the event either as volunteers or as participants would already be entered into the lunch. There would also be tickets available for purchase for family members and others who want to attend the event just for lunch. I was thinking for lunch we'd probably do grilled foods where we'd have volunteers cooking hamburgers, hot dogs, veggie burgers for participants to eat, and then also handing out chips and fruit along bottle of drinks for part of the lunch. So volunteers. So there's going to be some volunteers required to help put on this event. The whole scout troop, troop one hundred twenty four, is willing to help along with some members of Hebron's Scout Troop as well. It's going to also be calling them Ponce members of the community. There's definitely going be some people in Andover who don't necessarily want to go on a bike ride. So those people can help out if they're still interested
by either handing out supplies at the feed zone or in other ways throughout the event. My friends and family will also be involved. I've already had numerous people out of my friends and family agree to help run the feed zone and food prep, which are just two of the components of where volunteers will be needed throughout this event. So the feed zone will need to be staffed throughout the day. There will need to be people handing out food and ensuring that water is full. The day before the event, there will also need to be some food prep done, including prepping sandwiches for the feed zone and making sure that there is enough food to be handed out. There also need to be volunteers to help put on the lunch, people both for cooking and handing it out. There also need to be volunteers to practice first aid, and this will be in conjunction with both the scouts and the CERT team. There also need to be volunteers to be SAG drivers to pick up riders who are stranded on the course. And lastly, there need to be also some riders on the course who are very experienced and know both how to fix mechanical issues along with helping out other riders who might be stuck. And for the riders on the course, I'm part of a cycling racing team and I have numerous people there along with some of my fellow bike shop employees who'll be more than happy to help in that form.
There will also be a charity raffle at the end of the event, where there'll be multiple items which will be entered into a ticket drawing, and the way for raffle tickets to be quote unquote purchased would be for non perishable goods to be donated in exchange for raffle tickets. These non perishable goods would be going to the food pantry, and so say I have a can of soup, would donate it to the food pantry in exchange get one raffle ticket which I can enter in one that drives. So I've already reached out to a few companies for donations as raffle items, and so far, just for example, Hammer Nutrition has agreed to donate one of their cycling jerseys to be a raffle item, and I'm reaching out to some other companies as well to find some more items. So the impact of this event would be to raise money for the food pantry, also raise non perishable food items both through the raffle, through those donations that are being made, and along with some of the extra supplies from the feed zone, which can be donated to the food pantry. This will also be just a fun athletic activity for citizens of Andover and surrounding areas of all ages to come out and have fun, have some get some exercise, and enjoy the beautiful fall scenery. Additionally, this would be if this is a successful event, which I really hope it will be,
this could be a possible event for future years depending on the success of this. And then lastly, these are some questions that I have regarding approval before I open this up to discussion. So which of these dates would be best for the town of Andover? Which of the proposed locations would be preferable, along with what are some of the restrictions on numbers of participants? And lastly, access to bathrooms, if that's going be something that will have to be provided out of the budget for this event, or if this will be something provided by the town. And with that, I would like to thank you for listening, and I'll open it up to your discussion.
Drew, thank you very much. That was a tremendous presentation. I know Eric and Jeff Murray are cyclists, so they would definitely have more experience in these types of events and what would be necessary from your perspective. We can start with questions there. Jeff, Eric.
I know you said you didn't want to do pavement markings, but I've noticed you tend to get a lot less people lost if you actually do pavement markings. I would suggest you consider that. The other thing since you work at a bike shop and you have that connection, one of the things that works great at the bigger charity events, especially when you offer very low impact options like the rail trail portion is to have bike shops for at the beginning, because a lot of people, you know, with that as an option are likely to show up with a clunker that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see if you were, you know, talking about 100 mile and 60 mile legs. So those would be the two things I would, if the Board of Selectmen is on board with it, I would consider approaching the rec commission and asking them to help support the event. You know, that's it the routes look pretty good. I wouldn't necessarily worry about riding up Route 316 for most road cyclists that ride a lot. For people that don't ride a lot, that would be problematic so. So my guess would be the Long Hill location
would be a better staging location. From my perspective, we would just have to make sure whatever date we picked that we blocked that out so that there's no competing soccer games and we can maximize parking. Are my concerns off the top of my head. I would certainly volunteer to ride SAG, you know, for the road course or wherever you needed needed help. I'm sure I could probably drum up a few extra volunteers too if you needed it. The only other thing I would think is that maybe an interesting thing you could do with the ride would be to hold the cookout at the Andover Museum, but not have that as the staging area So everybody comes back through, have the SAG stop at the museum, which isn't really ideal location wise, but it would be a great place for a cookout and you could probably have the museum open
for people to trump through, which would be good for the town. Those are my initial thoughts.
And you'll definitely consider Can you stage that many people there though, Eric?
I mean, you're probably going to get the first time you run something like this 70 to 100, maybe 150 if you publicize it well. I mean, you're not probably going to get a, you're not going to get hundreds and hundreds more than likely. Not saying it's not possible, but
you know. Yeah, was part of the considerations about if the town would have any limits on how many people could participate in this event. Of course, my goal would be to get to be reached out to as many people as possible, and I feel like I have a pretty good marketing network between I work for Pedal Power, so we have five locations where I could kind of advertise for this event, along with also through bike reg and online. The CCAP has also agreed to put out some information about my event to all the members of their newsletter, and I was also thinking of reaching out to the the River East and maybe also Bike Walk Andover for some extra advertising
pretty much for online. Sure.
So As far as the date, October 17 does not bother me. I would sit there and suggest your starting point be Long Hill. I would not recommend trying to get people to cross back over Route 6 to get to Long Hill, Even though we have the new walkway, hopefully it'll get finished by then. But the question that I would ask the other board is, well, access to bathrooms. We have let's say both the Museum America, I believe is still there and the one down at Long Hill. You would probably need additional ones, Drew, that should come out of your race budget if you're sitting there having 150 or 200 racers, and then you can determine where you would want that to be kept. I'm sure that we can sit there and work with you on the service that we utilize for the porta potties. So I have no problem with it. I think it's a great idea. I think it's great that you're willing to go and do this and participate within the community like you're doing. So I have no problem supporting the event on the seventeenth. Thank you. Anyone else? Jeff, do you want to Jeff Murray?
Drew, I'll message you my phone number through Zoom. We can connect tomorrow if you'd like to. I've probably done about 25 of these events. So I've got a pretty good handle on what's gonna happen. The only thing that I'm concerned of it's a pretty big feat to get done in two months. Even our permitting process, we're supposed to be ninety days but we can probably waive that if we make it a town event and probably get Carol involved. If I reach out to Carol Lee, I know that the rec commission's got a meeting this week. Okay. Yeah, I can probably the best thing to do is just do this offline, have discussion offline because we won't take all our meeting time up I think our meeting is tomorrow night, Jeff. Yeah, their meeting is tomorrow night. So, I would call Carol Lee at the town hall, the town clerk and talk to her tomorrow. And I sent you my phone number so you can call tomorrow if you'd like. So, that would probably be the best bet. Logistically, it's a lot to take on in the time period. I don't know, he had DOT on there. I don't know like what kind of permits or approvals we're looking at but they do tend to take a while.
The lake race I did, it took about sixty days to get that permission to go out to close 03:16 or even have it there. There's a couple of things like you have to notify DEEP that you're having the event on the rail trail, things like that. So could probably work with you if you're willing just to give you some heads up on some things just so you don't get caught at the last week and say, Oh man, I should have thought about that. I can give you a heads up and maybe give you some advice. Yeah, thank you. No problem. I've been chasing this. Until Hunter and Aiden I said hi, it's CCAP. Yeah, for sure.
So here's a question. If this is really tight to do, you know.
So when does this have to happen? I mean, does your project have to be done?
So the deadline for my advancement to Eagle is February 4 and obviously I don't want to have it during middle of the winter. We have a lot less competition.
I was hoping for some time this fall to put on the event.
Yeah, we have to put our heads together and streamline that because there's a lot of logistics there in your presentation. What
was the furthest that you looked in November that looked okay, Drew?
So pretty much other than Thanksgiving weekend, any weekend in November would be a solid option for the race, for the event. It would just have to be considered that the weather might not be as good then, and because of that, there might be either a last minute cancellation or having to have lower turnouts.
Yeah, he doesn't want to go past October because a lot of people don't have, you know, the other thing you got to, it's just, I've worked the hole in the wall cane camp brought a bunch of times. I mean, you can get anybody from a seasoned cyclist to somebody in soccer, just tennis shoes and gym shorts, showing up on a simple mountain bike with platform pedals. So, it's just you got to pretty kind of prepare for everything. Good luck, Drew. Thank you. So yeah, I don't know how to.
Well, here's the way we'll do it. Drew, go to the rec commission tomorrow at the meeting, get their support, and then we'll come back and we'll vote on this at our next meeting and we'll streamline the rest of the process. If you work with Jeff, Murray, and Eric, you'll be able to sit there and try to get this pulled off.
Yeah, if we work directly, I can keep the rest of the selectmen involved. So if we have any issues, can let them know and we can work through it. Well, if you go the last weekend of October, you're give or take eighty days out. It's just that you can get anything on those. You can get anything from snow too. I wouldn't want to have them go much past his October 17 day. I mean, when I've had the road race, it's been anything from 80 degrees in humid to 30 degrees out. It's just, it can be anything that time of year.
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend pushing it into November. I mean, November can be some awesome riding,
but You cyclists are pernickety, know that? We are. We
want him to have his event and get his an advanced eagle. That's the problem. We need to have that happen. We to make sure. Do you have a rain date? So we probably should actually, or is this gonna be a rain or shine event?
I was thinking probably rain or shine unless there's like some severe weather like thunderstorms or snow or something like that, that would make it
dangerous to be out there. Okay, and then you're gonna have to probably get ahold of Coventry too and let them know you're using their roads as well? Yep, so that was kind of the idea with that Coventry loop, just kind of
minimize the amount of towns that are going through for permanent reasons.
Yeah, it's like you're really, you should, it's probably just almost just convenience just to let them know. And so is that USA Cycling Insurance, do they have a, is that a touring insurance or like a, it's not a race event insurance, correct? So it's,
I spoke with the CCP and they said that the race directors event insurance would probably be the best fit for this event for us in terms of what it's going to be covering. And so that would be set up to cover participant and a portion of that donation to the food pantry would have to be taken as a payment towards their portion of the insurance.
Correct, so they don't have to be USA Cycling members correct to participate? No, they don't. Okay, I just wanna make sure because that was how it used to be in the past. Another thing is, have you ever reached out to a couple other clubs in the area? Because there some cheaper insurance that you can get. And the only thing with USA cycling, I think they want ninety days too. So if you did your event permit tomorrow, you're probably gonna have to pay late fees on top of it. I dunno if that's gonna be an issue as well. I might wanna look into that too tomorrow. They're pretty fussy about that. And if that becomes an issue, we could probably, my club has insurance and then there's what's the one on Willimantic Eric? Dread City Cycling.
Drew, by the way, you're gonna have to get two badges, one for you and one for Jeff. Which I'm
assuming, so Bill Penn is your scout master? Yep, Bill Penn's my scout master. So he can link in, he's a TCC member.
Yeah, and I know they have event insurance too. You may want to look at that as well. They probably work out cheaper for you and USA cycling is really hard to deal with. All right, well,
let's talk to Carol tomorrow and you help him out and we'll circle back to this. We have a pretty busy agenda still. Yeah, know. So yeah, I
sent you my phone number, just reach out. If you can't call me, you can get ahold of me through the town website and we could talk.
Right, thank you. Make sure you get to that meeting tomorrow night. Yeah,
they'll help you. Jeff, Drew, good luck on your Eagle Scout project.
Drew, thank you very much and seriously good luck on your Eagle Scout program. Thank you. Thank you very much, Drew. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay, we're going to move on to 10b, Andover Animals Information page. I
I am am mute. Okay. Yeah. Okay, good. Thanks. I just wanted to see if we could on the website and maybe on the Andover support page, if we could make a little section for, it was kind of fortuitous that you were talking to Scott, for like maybe Andover animal adoptions and give a little video and some info on the animals that we have. Because right now it's just kind of like word-of-mouth Carol Lee has to call or someone has to call and say, do you want to adopt this dog? Do you want to adopt this cat? Which doesn't make sense when we could just do a little video and tell them this is the dog or this is the cat and see if somebody can volunteer to take it. Okay.
That's something that we should sit there and think about. I know we haven't had very many animals that Scott has had. I think he said two,
but they were longer than they probably needed to be so that we can look at that, Catherine, and sit there. Okay. I mean, if you want help if you want me to design something, that's fine. I just thought it was a good idea to have it out there. Okay.
Appreciate that. Thank you very much. Okay. So 10C, set date for a special town meeting to elect a RAM Board of Education representative for chairman in 06/30/2023. Scott, when do we have to Eric when do we have to have this done by.
So I had asked Carol to give me a date in September. She has not. My suggestion is the week of September 19, whatever date is convenient for the board that pushes it out enough. Know we can get the legal notices out. And at the same time, we need to have a discussion of what ordinances, you want to piggyback on that meeting. After speaking to the town's attorney my suggestion would be the ethics ordinance that the previous boards have considered the citation ordinance, because if you're going to find somebody you need a citation ordinance, and a revised blight ordinance, as both Jeff and Jeff Murray and Scott have asked for fairly recently, and we have drafts, I have drafts of all of those from the town's attorney that I can share with you but they came too late to get on tonight's agenda. So that would be my suggestion. Okay, so again, what was the date?
So I would pick something the week of September 19. So, it'd be basically the twentieth through the twenty third, Monday through Thursday, depending on what you wanted to do. And I'm sure there's going to be no matter what day you pick there's going to be conflicts with other things. But you're the board of selectmen so you can mumble.
Does anybody have any issues with this? Like, what time they wanna do this? I'm trying to get to the calendar so I can at least see what the heck we have going on. Alright. So
Now I will also warn you that we have exactly zero applications for this position at this point, which is not particularly promising. There's one person that says they might be interested pending some additional. You know some additional information which Carol is is trying to provide to the individual. So, but
not like we can have a meeting without someone committed to have a position.
Why not open it up to nominations from the floor you have to do that anyway.
You have a Republican Town Committee meeting on the twenty seventh, a Conservation Commission meeting on the twenty eighth, senior transportation on the twenty ninth, and a Yogen on the thirtieth. What does anybody want to do? Someone else make a motion related to this? Or make a motion for the meeting on the September 28.
I mean, can you, again, I mean, like Eric, can you have a meeting without a nominee?
Well, I mean, here's, and it's not, we're not in a great situation, but we're also sitting here with only one Ram board representative, and they just walked out and put a $3,500,000 proposal in front of us because the board with only one Andover rep voted for it. So, I mean, I'm not sure I want to go any longer than I have to without another rep. So it's a quandary and I don't
have a perfect solution for it. How long has this been unfilled now? Would it have been a month now? Yeah, maybe more than a month.
So please set September 28, that's past our sixty day window, right? Where we could appoint somebody? No.
If I may. No, you you can't appoint to this. We can't appoint to this even though it's unfilled? No. Okay. Oh, no.
Can you guys hear me? Yeah. We can hear you.
Good. I I wasn't sure if I was, you know, muted. Yeah. You you at but, you know, the statute says you're supposed to you're supposed to at least, I think, schedule a town meeting within thirty days from the beginning of the vacancy. I don't think there's gonna be a problem if you don't follow that to the letter, But I wouldn't wait too long. I think September 28 would be okay since nobody has surfaced as an as a, possible nominee. But all all I would suggest is if you want to, you know, make the best of a town meeting and you go to the trouble of having a town meeting, you want to put some ordinances on too, you really have to approve you have to approve the ordinances, not substantively, but you have to approve their referral to the town meeting. So I would suggest that you have a special meeting later in the month and firm up the agenda for this town meeting on the twenty eighth. Now your next meeting date is the September 13, I believe.
And that's probably cutting it a little too close if you maybe not. We'll have to check that out. If not, then you wouldn't need a special meeting. You could firm up the agenda for the town meeting on the thirteenth with potential ordinances. And also, yes, I think you can have it, even if you don't have a nominee at that time. I would do that as long as you have another reason
to have a special town meeting. But that will be those ordinance. Then we'll still have to come back and have another meeting to appoint or to elect if we don't have a You
should be able to come up with somebody by the September 13. No?
I don't mean We'll work to fill that. Is the twenty eighth doable for everybody? I mean, it's almost two months from now. So any problems? I mean, let's put it on the agenda. It'd be good. Let's put it on the schedule so we can this done. So we can have it on the schedule, right? Okay. So I make a motion that we have a town meeting on the September 28 to fill the vacancy or to elect a RAM Board of Education representative for the term ending 06/30/2023. I'll second that.
Further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. All those opposed?
I'm upstanding because I don't know if I can make that date. Think we're actually not here.
Okay. So 301. So we'll have a meeting on the September 28. Okay.
So just super quick, Jeff, I realize it's late, but the three ordinances I talked to, do you want to see formal ordinances for that? Yes. To the board? Yes.
Are there other ordinances that you want potentially to present at that meeting to the town?
No, we won't have, we're gonna end up having to have a special meeting too. We want the details and then we'll probably end up having to have a quick special meeting related to those ordinances. So they're tightened up before our meeting on the thirteenth so that we push them through at the meeting on the thirteenth, but they're already done. I don't want to be sitting there having a two hour conversation about ordinances on the thirteenth that we're trying to get ready for a meeting on the twenty eighth. So
I understand that. I'm just saying before we get to that point, are there other ordinances you want myself and Dennis or Dennis and myself to present to you at whatever are there other ordinances
you're anticipating you want to bring? There probably are Eric, but at this point in time, at this time What are the three you have right now, Eric? Ethics? Ethics ordinance, a citation ordinance, and the blight revised blight ordinance.
Do we want to do all very, they're all very detailed, folks. But, you know, I've gone over them very carefully. I'm sure you're going to like them and general, and you may want to fine tune a little bit, but, anyway, I don't think it'll take long to discuss them at a special meeting. Jeff never lets me talk for more than three minutes anyway. Okay, AJ, what did you want to ask?
Do we want to put the we just had a conversation tonight about having an ordinance to find someone for not permitting, you know, do we want to include that? Isn't that the citation ordinance, Eric?
Yeah, the citation ordinance lays out what you have to do to have a hearing officer. So before you can find anybody for anything, you have to have a citation
officer and procedure in place. Yeah that's also for in order for them to do that that's was been a topic of discussion for like three years. I thought that was simply limited to having the the resident trooper writing tickets in town versus writing state tickets that's all. Right. Well, there's a there's a separate statute that authorizes that for
parking tickets. This this ordinance is a citation ordinance that covers just about everything except parking tickets and zoning. So this will this will enable you to have any ordinance you want
that's within the law. Yeah. I think we didn't have any we didn't have anyone that wanted to volunteer as a hearing officer because the hearing officer volunteer.
That's right. So that's why I died last year. If lived there, I'd volunteer for it as a former judge. I would love doing that. Yeah, I thought thought Celeste volunteered.
Somebody will do it. You just gotta have the ordinance in places. If you can't get anybody, then you won't be able to do it. But, if you, you know, if you don't do any I think by the way Adrian I think you could also have an ordinance that fines people for failing to get permits for. Okay That's fine. Well, I guess we'll move forward. So Dennis, are you saying that's a fourth ordinance?
Yeah, that would be simple. I just have to talk to Jeff Murray or Eric or somebody who can just give me the details and I can whip one up really fast. Let's get those four in place and Eric, get those two as soon as possible. Then if we think of any others between now and potentially our special meeting, we'll email it to everybody. More bang for the buck. Sounds good.
Thank you, Dennis. 10D, Veterans Monument Park updates. There is one, the Battlefield Cross Monument proposal, there is two, a 10, a D2, the Creamery signage.
Right, so Jerry called me and asked me to represent him here. Eric, has everybody seen the Battlefield Cross Monument? It's in our package.
Is everybody in favor of having that at the memorial?
Yeah, I spoke to Jerry about it at the senior luncheon on Friday. Yeah.
I'm not in I'm not against it, I'd like to finish what we have going first. I think we need to finish the current project we still got. We got a sprinkler system and some other stuff to be finished down there, lighting. Let's get that finished before we start. Anything else?
All he needs is an approval. He's not gonna get this ready for a long time. It's gonna be way past irrigation time.
That's not the point. The point is we're not done with the last project and we're starting another one?
Well, I would sit there and say to you, Adrian, he's not sitting there. It doesn't appear that he's going to put a shovel in the ground related to this just yet. He's trying to raise money. He can't do anything until he gets approval. Nothing.
Now, I would agree with Adrian. One of the things that I would like to have a better job done, but we should just approve this because I'd have no problem with it. Then we should talk about the veterans, the Monument Park, and especially the program related to the Agent Orange Monument and get a very good understanding of what occurred with the town funding of the irrigation and the town funding of the other projects down there. We understand what was town funded and what was fundraised
by Jerry and his group. Yeah, I mean, kind of like to finish the current project, recap it, and then decide, you know, how we're moving forward or give Jerry permission at that point. That's all I'm asking for. I'm not saying I don't want to do it. I'm saying I'd like to finish what we have going, recap it, and then see if there's any, because I don't wanna do what we did last time, which was we move forward with the Agent Orange thing, and then we get halfway into it and decide we gotta rebuild the park. And Jerry took on a huge burden in that and did a fantastic job, but I don't want him to have to do that again. I don't think it's fair that a resident had to take that on and that really bugs me. So, you know, let's recap and see where we're at and see if there's anything else that we need to do with the park as well to make that next phase of it work.
I understand what you're asking for. I don't think you take away the motivation of a volunteer that's doing a labor of love. Right. I know. You're not gonna stop Jerry.
Well, stop Jerry. It's about stopping Jerry. It's about taking stock. I mean, even Jerry knows that the first thing you do when you get back from a mission is review the mission. It's called a debrief. I wanna do a debrief. I don't think that's too much to ask.
But if he's putting walks in or he's adding to this walk with bricks, wouldn't we wanna get that done before we put any irrigation in? Well, at least wanna know and have it staked out and know exactly. Yeah, find out where it is. Yeah, we need to find out where it is because we don't wanna put irrigation lines right where he's gonna put his walk. Well, talking they're about putting irrigation lines in for what they have down there because they're sick of watering it and I don't blame them.
So the irrigation is supposed to go in on what, another month and a half? Month?
I personally don't feel it's, I understand what you're asking for, Adrian, but I just think we're just giving them approval to move forward with the Battlefield
crossbow. I'm one vote guys. You're more than welcome to vote however you like. Okay. I make a motion that we approve
the new Battlefield Cross monument to be placed at the Annover Veterans Monument Park. I'll second that. Further discussion? All All those in favor? Aye. Aye. All
those opposed? Aye. Not three zero one, it's three one this time. Okay, thank you. 10 D2, Jeff, the creamery signage.
Yeah, as requested, I went out, I worked with Scott Yeomans and we searched through state contacts and tried to find the original sign. I guess there was two made at one time. So we're trying to find the second one that they had made and it's no longer available. He was able to secure a low resolution image but It's not high enough resolution to do a two by three sign that we need. So I reached out to three vendors. Actually I heard back from one person who actually works at Fast Signs in Manchester who was actually a Andover resident and wanted to get involved. And they're gonna basically, I got the high resolution images on the sign from Scott Yeomans and they're gonna recreate the sign as it was with their graphic artists for a total of 4 and $27.56 what I'm asking for is I'd like to make a motion tonight to approve the amount of 4 and $27.58 to FAST Signs of Manchester so we can get the sign made and just move on with that because it's been a while and the sign's looking pretty decrepit at this point. Does that number, did you take the tax out already? That was without the tax. If I take the tax out, give me one second. It's actually 402,005. Seconded. And
what do we have for funds to take that out of? We still have funds available in the park that we owe, the $20,000 we allocated?
We absolutely do. We can take that out of that with no problem. Okay. What have we spent out of that so far?
Around $2,500 for the replacement well pump and that's it at this point.
Further discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Okay. None opposed, four-zero. All right. 10E, storm damage at the Veterans Memorial Field. Who wants to give it, Scott or Eric? What do you want to know?
What was the damage that was incurred at the field after the flood? The fence came down in one corner. And
I thought that me and Eric had gone over this to fix.
Don't really, I want to talk about the lightning and the pump and all that. Let's just get the fence done first. I thought we were going over the fence the last meeting.
No, we got a quote from the Atlas for 6770. I just don't understand what's the 80 feet of fence that's the problem. Right.
Seems to me it's pretty ridiculous and they're adding a small fence, taking the other one and moving it and it costs them $7,000 What I'm proposing is just make this fence straight, the one that goes along the river and put a couple big rocks in there, some nice stones. We don't need fence. Go up you know in between the bollards and the fence, put some stones in there so far as our vehicles can't get on there, any kind of vehicles.
Probably take more than two stone maybe. Just so I understand, I don't remember Atlas was not the original installer of that wood fence where it wasn't.
No, it was not. Jay reached out to like four fence companies but everybody's pretty busy. Atlas was the only one he got an actual quote for that from. So I originally told him I thought this was too much money and it was beyond what we wanted to do. His point to me, was a valid one is that, you know, we have a walking track that's paved and it's not handicapped accessible in any way shape or form because there's no place no way for a handicapped person to get to the field which is kind of dumb. So part of his proposal was to take the existing entrance for vehicles move it down to the end add the wood fencing in the middle with a four foot wide opening so it would be handicapped accessible to access the field, which I think that's something we should consider in the future, but I don't think we have the funds to do it now.
So what I kind of talked to Scott about a little bit, and I asked Jay to re quote was just to straighten out the fence. So it goes in the direction of the flow, retie it because it's basically all the ties are busted loose replace the top pole because it needs some top pole replacing. Don't change anything with the, the wood, you know heavy timber railing, and then we'll rustle up some landscape boulders and drop them in there for now. A short term fix. And then in the future if we have the cash to dedicate to the project, we can think about A, making it handicapped accessible, and B, how we want it to look aesthetically.
Okay, so that's a great idea. Let's just do it.
Is that what's acceptable to the board? What is it that you want to do?
What are we that's that wasn't that's not the 67.
No, I mean, I don't have a firm cost for that before I left on vacation I asked Jeff to pursue that and not Jeff Jay to pursue that.
He hasn't gotten to it because I talked to him today. I and I and to be honest with you, I'm not comfortable with a with just taking one number and going with that company. I'd rather wait. I know people are busy, so let's try to contact them directly and see what their time frame is. If we need to do the bid based on getting measurements for them and doing a layout, then let's do that.
What we're recommending Adrian is we don't do this. We
just take the existing fence and straighten it out. We're going to do that. So we're not going to have somebody outside. No, we're still going to end up getting the fence guy in to do it of some sort. But, know, we're taking out all the expensive parts of this project. We're talking about straightening out two poles and retying. So we're not, we're talking about something in the, you know, 12 to $1,500 range, I would bet. Okay.
Yeah, that's my goal with this. Donate the boulders just tell them to come by I'll put them on the trailer. I was gonna ask you if you have any over there. Are you kidding me. Adrian you got any boulders over there. I have a few. You want to load them also. Also? I can load them when they get here. Yep. They don't have to bring a machine, just bring a trailer. All right, so we're good with that. So Eric, if you can look
into that and figure out how I pick the boulders?
You can, yeah, come up and you can tag them, put your name on them. I will. I'm going to come up and get them. Okay, excellent. Good job. You're going to need a bigger truck.
I hope so. Can we go on to the more important issue, the remaining storm damage at the field related to the electrical strike? You're up Scott. So the
strike happened again during the storm, when the storm was coming through, and I turned off the power down there, I don't know if the strike happened before or after or when it happened, but I had turned the power off. We didn't know anything happened down there till me and Rich went down and turned on the pump again and nothing worked. So then we got in Lafran boys, we got in our electrician, he checked everything out and said that the surge protector was fried and I think he got a quote of around a couple thousand dollars for that to get a comparable surge protector with the that's comparable with the motor and the pump and the drive and the pump and the drive is replaced now and the irrigation system works but the motor on the pump is fried. There's a short in the line, it's not a strict zero ohms, there's fried leg in the pump so that has to be replaced or it's just gonna go. So is it the pump or the wire? Pump. Okay.
And we're not talking about some residential pump here, we're talking about five horsepower motor with a three horsepower pump, talking about a drive that's not your residential drive, it's for it's a big high pressure and the pump is also a variable speed on demand constant pressure pump. It's a very specialized pump, 10,000 gallons a day Adrian, it's not
a half horsepower pump. I have the exact pump in my house except mine's five horsepower. Five horsepower, five horsepower pump, 25 gallons a minute. Next conversation. Okay, I just replaced the controller because it got hit by it got hit by lightning. Yeah, and it was a quick two thousand four hundred hours for the controller. So, I know exactly how much the pump cost.
So Okay. So so obviously, there's some dollars related to this, but how can we is there something we can do to minimize
We're wasting money on the surge protectors because they're not gonna do any good against lightning. They don't. They do not help against lightning and in our area of the country, we don't generally get surges, we get lightning strikes. So is there something we can do different? Nope. No, and actually I saw the ground system that Lenco suggested and as a general rule of thumb those are not recommended because they tend to attract lightning.
Okay. Yep, I got $10,000 in damage from that same storm.
Don't even wanna know where I'm at now. So they used to say it was not an inexpensive proposition for me. Still, I just have electricians coming tomorrow and again next week to still fix stuff. What I suggest to discuss is if you could send me the
model of the drive And I can call the manufacturer. We can come up with a grounding and bonding scheme to try to minimize damage.
Yeah, what brand is that unit that they're using? Do we know? Scott, did you give a full breakout in that?
Yeah. I had Earl look up how much that drive was and he looked it up and I think it was around $1,200 I think that's probably what they paid for it. Yep. And when he was sitting there in the truck, asked him how much it was.
For the drive itself or for the controller or for the pump? No, the irrigation controller.
Well, can I ask Scott, can you shoot us an all in email so that Jeff and Adrian can sit there and look at the individual components and sit there and come up with what might be a reasonable cost for that?
I will say I was a little taken aback at the initial number that we got thrown.
Jeff, you're going to sit there and work on a potential protection option for the field system.
Yeah, because that grid bonding system might not be the best bet. It's best to reach out to manufacturer. I'm sure they have these down in Florida where blading strikes are common And then we can kind of figure out the best protection strategy we can use on these drives. Yeah, mean, thing I've been hearing the suggestion that's been made to me, mean,
we have about $50 worth of damage. I mean, we literally lost everything and the kitchen sink. And the explanation has been given to me that there's there's the only thing you can really use as an EMP in the panel box itself. And they said even that is not a guarantee. There just isn't anything because the jewel rating on a lightning strike is a million jewels. Yep. And the highest you get out a typical surge unit is gonna be somewhere between five and seven thousand at best.
Yeah, we don't wanna do anything to attract both. And the more of the brand Maximize the attraction and we want to maximize the protection for individuals and for shock.
I mean, the only thing we can do is make sure that the well casing itself and everything is bonded correctly. If it's bonded correctly, then beyond that, there isn't really a lot you can do. Okay.
Well, is, this, you know, we just need to work on it. You guys need to come up with a plan. Scott, I didn't see, did you have a breakdown that you sent us? No. No.
Okay. I'll get all the information when the guy from La Fram Boys gets back from. You wanna know what the motor is?
I want a cost breakdown and the motor, the model and controller, yeah. Whatever we're replacing.
They wouldn't give it to me today on the phone because Earl wasn't there on vacation.
All right, so if you can get that, that would be great. I mean, because
what's our depth that like, because so that matters whether they're pulling it with a rig or whether pulling it with a wheelbarrow, right? If they have to come out and pull with a rig, then that's more expensive than pulling it with a wheelbarrow, right? So I wanna, I'm trying to understand how we're getting to the, you know, the component numbers that we've been talking about. Because we're working like $7 or something. Yeah.
So they come out with a truck pull it out and they're up, I think they're 20 foot pipes, 20 foot plastic pipes. They pull whatever. I think it's 400 feet down, three sixty or three eighty.
So we have 20 foot individual sections of plastic. Yeah. Instead of like just a single line. Exactly, yeah. Why? That makes no sense. It's a I think it's three inch line.
I don't know. Three inch? Pretty sure. How big is the well cap? Eight, I think. All right. All right. So let's sit there and get that.
How many zones are we running down there? Did it blow the zone controller too?
Not that control. No, that's the only thing that works.
If you could give us a breakdown of what we're actually trying to replace, that would be helpful. Call me when you're down there tomorrow. I'm thinking I'm working from home tomorrow. Could probably run down and take a look. And honestly, if we keep running into this, we should be replacing if we're going to spend the money to pull the pipe, we might as well replace it a poly pipe that's a single, do one pit, secondary check valve halfway down, say 150 feet over the pipe, you know, over the over the pump, and then you're done with it. That way you can pull this, you know, with a, you know, with a wheelbarrow instead of having a truck come out every time. Because they're coming out with a truck that justifies some of the expense. They're coming out with wheelbarrow it doesn't.
Okay, this will be a karma clean. I mean, you know, the insurance company is going to end up on the hook for that.
I understand that. Just, you know, and I just want to make sure when we go out and do these things that we're doing them judiciously.
Yeah. Want to find out why we're not using black poly myself.
Right. You know, that's the standard. If you were saying it was 20, if it's 20 foot metal, I'd understand. But 20 foot plastic makes no sense. And a three inch line with a three horsepower pump at that depth, that's insane. That doesn't make any sense. It can't be a three inch line, it's got to be probably inch and a half.
Yeah, it'd be pushing too much head out of that. Right.
So there's something missing in this conversation. So if we just get the specs as to what exactly we're dealing with, that would be really helpful. Okay.
I just wanna make sure we're doing it correctly, that's all. The only thing that I have a problem with this is that, you know, are well guys. And? It was designed by well guys, was designed by them, irrigation experts. That's my only thing, you know.
Yeah. Well guys like everybody else can make a mistake. So let's just make sure we're on the right page. That's all.
Okay, let's move on to 10F. We've already done it. That was the RAM artificial field installation proposal. We're gonna move on to 10 gs, building and land use department staffing changes. Eric.
Okay, so I sent to the board earlier this month, last month, a recommendation that we pursue two things. The first thing is increase our building official time by one hour but require that hour to be spent here. So we have, so we establish some office hours with them here. When everybody's together and Bolton is okay with that. I talked to Jim Rupert, and they would, you know, they're fine with that as a proposal. And then the second thing is to have Abby winters cover in the building office, Monday nights from five to seven, but to do land use stuff and to link her into permit link also to help out both the wetlands and the zoning agent, because I think there's a lot of things they're doing right now that could be done more efficiently and cheaper by somebody else, and free up a little more of their time since we seem to be short on time
certainly for zoning. So that's my proposal. And then Jeff's question to me was how to fund it. And what I would do is I would take the karma rebate check, which is a little over $5,000 which would cover both those items and just a task that to pay for the cost of that addition to the building office for this year. And then budgeted in next year if we decide we need to continue with that or a different.
What did the the KIRMA came in under a different so basically you're gonna put it in there and then transfer in April, right?
Yeah, I mean, well, long as you're okay with it, we'll, I'll leave that to Sherry to work out the details of doing the transfer. Okay.
But the question is how can we afford it? And in my mind, that's how we afford it. Is you simply apply the Kerma rebate, you know, to that.
Do you need a motion on this or are you okay? You just wanna hear all of us say yeah.
If you wanna make a motion, that's fine. If you don't stop me, that's what I will do. So either way is fine by me.
Let's make a motion to move forward with the staffing changes in the building department. So moved. All
All in right. Favor? All in favor. Aye. Jeff Murray? Aye. Aye.
10H of the auditor presentation at the Wednesday, August 25, Board of Finance regular meeting. I'm assuming we're just being made aware of that?
Yep, and you were all cordially invited if you choose to go to that.
Going move on to eleven. Eleven is approval of the meeting minutes for Monday, 07/12/2021. Regular meeting minutes. Make a motion that we approve the meeting minutes for the July 12 regular meeting. Blah, blah, blah. C is the Town Aid Road update. Does anybody have any questions on the revenue summary? No. Okay.
I don't even know if we have it. Maybe it's in the bottom. Tom, budget summary. Eric, the only question I have is, there's an over, Ann Arbor Elementary School line item is over, is there a reason for that or do you know?
At the time where this was created, they had not made the final payment to the town relative to all their grant income. Sherry gave a good explanation of that to Board of Finance. I can't give you a good verbatim response on that. I could get that for you from Sherry though. Okay.
So it's going to be adjusted based upon grant income.
Yeah, it will be zeroed out. They will essentially write a check to the town to make that even. Okay.
Again, the state has not given us a bill for the resident state trooper.
State has given us a bill for the resident state trooper, which I think we've paid, it came in 17 or $18,000 under what was budgeted. You know, in part because at the end of the year we had Chris and Chris was a lot less costly than Daryl. And we should be well under budget with Sebastian also because he doesn't have a ton of seniority. So as long as we keep him for a resident state trooper and they don't mess up the formula partway through the year, we should be, we should have something around 10 or $15,000 back at the end of the year next year. Okay.
Town Aid Road. We have an ending balance of Townade Road of $138,000 Okay. Yeah, did. There we go.
I hope in the future, in the transaction descriptions or something else, can actually sit there and see which project was worked on and where these dollars went. Hopefully, Edmunds provides us a little bit better detail.
Understood. One of the things we have talked about, which is more common in other towns sharing I have talked about it and, and, you know, we've talked to the Board of Finance about it is that in the future we are probably going to roll town aid road directly into the road work budget. You know, it just spend it all out of one pool instead of spending it out of two pools. And the reason is in the past one it makes it more transparent because it puts it'll put the whole thing in revenue each year, which is what the Board of Finance wants, which I think is a good idea. And the second thing is that now that we have set roadwork up as essentially a fund a standalone fund that carries over from year to year, and Town Aid Rome is the same, there's no advantage to having two funds, which are basically spent in the same way, if that makes sense.
So we're I 100% agree because probably about four years ago, that's what I did. We had it running out of we actually overexpanded the roadwork line item and funded it with town aid road money so that it would be transparent as to how much money was spent. But then it was decided that it needed to go back the opposite direction. I'm all for that. Keep as prepared as you can be. If Sherry is willing to do it, I'm all for that. Yeah, Sherry was definitely willing to do that. Excellent.
All right, that's it for the finance department. 13, budget and appropriation transfers.
Anything related to that, Eric? Nothing right now. We are going to have to, by the next Board of Finance, do kind of the final cleanup. Know there's not a lot that needs to be cleaned up but there's a few things that need to be cleaned up. There's still a few because I mean bills keep trickling in, you know, that were backdated so
there will be some. I'm assuming that's going to be the same issue for the over expenditure requests.
Yes, that will go, because that will go straight to at this point it will go straight to Board of Finance and there'll be one final cleanup. And then Michael is already working on. He's already pulled the samples for next year's audit. So we're actually already in the process of doing next year's audit, which is shocking to me, but nice. Amazing what happens when you have continuity.
Okay, so section 14 or item 14 tax collectors report, were there any refund requests? I didn't see any. I did not see any, no. Okay. So the tax collector's report shows that we billed $9,700,000 from real estate, personal property, motor vehicles, And we still have less left to collect $6,800,000 So, so far in July, we collected $2,800,000 Okay? Item 15 is there any questions or anybody want to make any comments on the tax collector's report? Nothing? Okay, great. Assessor's report it was in here. It was down the side. Eric, on the assessor's report, there's something called a bridge error. Can somebody explain that to me? I can't. Can you find out what that means? There's a lot of them with bridge errors.
Yeah, I don't know if that's something related to. I don't know what that is. I'd like to know.
Side note on the talks, are we have we heard anything back from that union?
Yeah, let's discuss that in executive session now. Okay, thanks.
All right. So, all right. Just a lot of bridge errors. I'd like to know what that is. And add local homeowners, I'd like to know what that is. All reductions. Why are there always reductions and very little ads? Right. Any questions related to anything from the assessor's report? Nothing? Fire department report was in our package. Anybody has any issues related to that? Bring them out now. We'll keep moving on. I saw the state trooper was in here as well. I thought maybe not.
No, but that was my fault. It was emailed to me last week. Unfortunately, I've tried to correct Sergeant Woodward, they keep sending it to the old first selectman address. In addition to me so I didn't I didn't get it last week in time to get it in the packet ordinarily that would have. I can supply that I sent it to Amanda to send out to the board. Do we have that all selectman address forwarding automatically? No, because we don't control that that's still getting sent to Bob's old Comcast address. Which we have no control over, right. Actually
Unreal. We should and we do. Oh well we might not have Comcast anymore but, that was part of the phone service. Was it? Okay.
Okay. Anyway, that's get him to correct the damn thing and let's move on. The only report that there are other reports in here, the library report was in here, but is there any comments on Jay's report on public works? Anybody? No? I mean, know we talked about a lot of this.
So I think the only thing we should at some point is have a discussion with Jay and start coming up with town policies for what we want to deal with for driveway aprons. Know, because it seems to be kind of, I don't know, haphazard.
Are we dealing with aprons on roads that we're not paving?
We sometimes deal with aprons If we have a significant problem with runoff from a town road, you know, running down people's driveways. You know, because the problem is on some of the old ones, it's hard to know what came first, the apron or the paving. We haven't really addressed more than one or two of them, but we've had a lot of people complain about it. So what are their complaints? That water's pouring off the town road running down their driveway and either flooding their basement or washing out their gravel driveway or causing other damage
in one form or another. The problem is once you start taking responsibility for those, you're setting a standard. Can tell right now that the state of Connecticut, I complained, we have a horrible runoff right up Boston Hill. And the problem is they have plenty of drainage on the other side of the street, but on the north side of the street, there's nothing. So if it can't cross back over, there's a problem. It comes right down in between myself and my neighbors. It goes to the edge of my apron and then cuts in, it erodes it and then runs down. And they told me, look, it's water, it has a right to go where it wants to go. We have drainage on that road,
can't help you. And so all I'm suggesting is at some point, we should have a more thorough discussion about what the town policy is, because I think Jay uncomfortable just him setting the policy. Policy because I'm not suggesting we do it tonight. I'm just suggesting that that's something we roll around in the back of our heads and at some point. So let's Let's put
it on a different meeting with Jay there. And we also lose the $50 permit fee, right? If we're doing them. The homeowner
who should be responsible for them has to get a permit fee for that, right? Well, mean, so some cases like obviously if we repave a road, we bring a road up to two inches and that causes somebody problems on their property, you know, we kind of should own that whether we do or not, we should, you know, and if we go back in later, and then we curb all along the road, and we stop it right in front of somebody's property, and all of a sudden, we're dumping water on their property where we weren't before, we probably should own the solution to that too. And if we have a town waterway that the plunging pool has gotten completely filled up and now we're running into somebody's driveway we should probably own that too, because it's a town drainage structure that's screwing somebody up. But I mean we that should be a conversation we have with the board at some point
and talk about where and what we want to do. Because right now we're kind of doing it on a case by case
basis. Well, we're not using near the amount of sand. So we really shouldn't, if drainage structure is filling up at this point, it's not a town incident issue.
It probably will be a case by case issue. I
mean, look, if what you're telling me is you don't want to have this as a discussion, we don't have to have it as a discussion. Can have We figure it along out a policy.
Just sat there and said that we'll have a discussion with Jay and Ami. Right. Deferred meeting with Jay. Jay, that's perfect. And I have a good long meeting with him. Not tonight. We can have it at 11:30.
Not tonight. Are there any other department reports that anyone wants to focus on? No? Okay. Let's move on to item 17, correspondence. Do we have any correspondents or is not in the package? No? We'll talk about correspondence in executive session. Okay.
All right, we're going go to public speak right now. So we're going to start with Diane Greiner because she just turned on our camera because she wants to jump in and say hi to us and she's on. I see all the other public has left you. On
that's except for Catherine Lewis I see her over there. You kudos to you guys. These are long meetings. I applaud you for all the things that you're handling here. I just wanted to chime in about the cleaning crew. The library has been having a problem with the cleaning crew for some time. We've tried multiple things to fix it. We've left them notes with list please do this that and the next thing, which the cleaning crew quit. You don't have to worry about them. Well, I know that. But just for your info, because you were talking about whether what they were going to do. We tried many things lately what we've been doing for the last month on Fridays I access the town security, the security cameras at the library to see how long the cleaning crew have been there. And for the last three weeks, it has been they've cleaned the library from the time they get to the parking lot till they leave. They can clean the whole library in anywhere from ten to thirteen minutes, which is amazing. And we complain about it all the time.
Diane, I think that that's what Carol was also saying because I talked to her and she's mentioned that they're in and out of there very quickly.
Yes, talked to Carol too and I think that probably what sparked probably part of this conversation she had with the cleaning group. And so, you know, we're, we're delighted. I guess my. One of my questions is, what is your policy, I. If I wasn't here, when would the library have known that they had quit.
Well, I've only known they quit for four hours. Okay, so it wasn't last week.
Well, it was last week but I came home to about 1,000 emails of which I've read two thirds. Okay. So that was one of the emails I came back to was a note basically saying, hey, you guys are extremely unprofessional. We want nothing to do with you. Here's my resignation.
So that's where we're at. And we're happy. Like I said, I'm not sure if they were better than the last crew. The last crew was horrible, as was the ones before that. And I don't know how you fix it, but I hope you guys clean yourself. You got two people there. There's more than one guest. Know I don't I don't think librarian should be in charge Diane Diane what it's public speak. Yeah, if I can listen, please. Okay. I don't think our librarian should be cleaning the toilet at the library and stuff like that. Are you suggesting she's overqualified?
Maybe, maybe. So yeah, so we'd be looking to quickly get a replacement for that. So thank you for taking care of that. That's a good one for us. The other thing I just want to ask you, I'm not sure how this works. I see you made mandatory that all employees and visitors at the town office building need to wear masks. I hope that also means wear them properly above the nose, not, you know, it's distressing to see them not being worn properly. And does that also transfer over to the library? Or does the library get to make their own rules on that?
Oh, we're going to close the library to the public. I mean, Shaw.
We've been, and I don't know if that's if you mandate that or we just follow your lead on please only we can't be open. Please follow our lead. Okay. That's what we want to I'll make it as easy as possible, please.
The Board Okay. Of Selectmen does set policy and technically Jeff sets policy. We
did Eric, but we didn't include the library in our motion. So Diane, please express to the board that we would like you to follow our policy. Okay, we will do that. We
do have a sign. We never took it down, but we haven't enforced it lately because numbers were coming down. But now that they're going up again, things are getting.
Okay, blame the Board of Selectmen and specifically the first Selectmen. Let them get all mad at me. Okay,
we just want to be able to say that we're following some procedure. That was it, and we will do that starting tomorrow. You know, I've already emailed the library board all of the library stuff that you talked about tonight. All right. So thank you. Thank you, Diane. Catherine.
I'm not sure. I guess I have to start with Eric. Has Eric spoken to you about Yukon and them taking on Andover as a project? Because I have a concern that we're still moving forward with the huge things like the senior centercommunity center and we don't know what UConn is going to come up with. So I'm wondering if we're spending money that we shouldn't be spending yet.
Well, we're going to have to sit there and see what UConn will do for us. So I'm assuming that we'll get some information as to what that program would be like. We'll move forward with that and we'll use it in conjunction with what we're going to do related to our engineering.
Well, here's my question. What if they have a better place for a true community center? And the good thing is I mean at least these guys have access to developers as well. I mean they're going to come to us with presentations and plans and they, like I said, they have access to the state and to developers. All these things that we don't have on our own. Andover alone doesn't have this, but Andover with Yukon
does. We would love to listen to anything that they have to say and we'll take it under consideration.
I guess I'm confused. It I'm sorry. No, that's okay. I guess my no, it's really quite all right. But my question is, I guess I'm still confused then. If we don't know what they're going to come back with and they might have this terrific plan for us, why are we spending like a million dollars on
The last I knew, Katherine, we hadn't spent really any money on it as far as we haven't spent the million dollars that we'd like to spend on. This project is something that's going to just continue to evolve and we're going to sit there and take all information that we possibly can get under consideration and try to make the best decision for the town possible. So if you're telling me that UConn is going to be here next week and is going to give us a presentation, I'll listen to it. No, no, they're taking us on.
Did you speak to Eric about this at all? Or Eric, did you speak to no, what I asked them to do as part of the EDC was to take on Andover as their project and the students of the Department of Landscape Architecture will do exactly that. So it's there, it's kind of like let them come in and use their imagination and do what they can and give us all sorts of wonderful ideas. I would just hate for us to to do anything when we don't know what they're going to come up with. And I'd be more than willing, I mean they're more than willing to to come to a BOS meeting or just to come one on one and talk with you as well, either one of the professors. Well, I think it would be great if they got lined up with the building committee
and sat there and advised the building committee. So we'll sit there and get that in place. Okay. All right. So Eric, what we'll do next is try to get the building UConn in touch with the building committee so they can take and figure out what information UConn can provide us.
UConn isn't starting till fall of twenty twenty two. Do you really want to put off making this That's what I thought. For a year plus?
No, why not? I didn't say that. So I unaware of the timing of it. We're not going wait till 2022.
No, they take a year to actually discuss their and put together their programs. So they can't do it until fall of next year. Yeah, so they're
going to listen, we still have an executive session. It is public speak. Thank you for bringing it to us.
I have no idea what that meant. But anyway, I just want to make sure that we're not spending money needlessly. If we're going to come back and they're going to say, you could have done this, this, and this. And plus, we have developers now that will invest in us,
but we don't have it now. Well, let's sit there and get the timeline on the whole entire program, and I'll get with Eric after tomorrow, and I'll figure out the information that we do have available. We'll go from there. Fine. All right. Thank you. Who else do we have? We have Valerie Bruno on. I'm not sure, Valerie, if you want to participate. All set, Jeff. Thank you. Valerie, thank you for staying on until 11:04. Melissa Kellquist.
Hi, yes, thank you so much. My name is Melissa Kellquist. I live on Long Hill Road at the bottom of the hill. And I wasn't actually going to speak and I won't take much of your time but I did want to kind of just piggyback off of the apron issue and the drainage issue the lack of drainage. I am one that gets all the rainwater from the whole hill of Long Hill Road, lucky me, and I get it all down my driveway into my front yard. Years ago, nine years ago, thankfully the town did come in and put some dirt in our driveway because it did wash out. We had crushed asphalt put in a couple years ago. That has since gone into our front yard. So I would appreciate it you know I did email Eric last year or so a year and a half ago about this issue. But I invite you all to come visit and see what lack of drainage looks like.
Thank you again for your time. All right, thank you.
All right, I think that's it for public speak. I'm going to make a motion that we go into executive session at 11:05 to just have discussions related to union negotiations. Do have a second? Second. Second. Okay. Everyone, thank you for attending our meeting. We greatly appreciate it. Amanda, I don't know how we're going to do this. We're going to invite sorry, I'm probably still we're still recording. I still need to invite Eric and Dennis O'Brien if he wants to join. Amanda, how are we doing this? Can Eric take control of the meeting?
I just made Eric the host so he can take over from here and I'll start the recording. Nick Levine can hop off. Thanks, Nick. Thank you Amanda. Eric you have control. Thank you.