Meeting transcript
Safety Committee, Special Meeting
June 2, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
2020 it's 12:03PM. Present is myself, Eric Anderson, Kurt Dowling, Diane is here, Daryl is here, and Kathy Palazzi is here. So absent is Carol Lee and Ed Kasich. So item number two COVID-nineteen response. So what I really wanted to focus this meeting on is just what each of the individual groups are doing in terms of COVID-nineteen and what things we need to start considering as we begin to open up town hall and open up you know for that both. So what I'd like to do is start maybe with Kurt and do the fire commission first and then we'll do library then we'll do senior transportation then we'll do Daryl and then I'll talk a little bit about town hall and we'll go from there. Kurt?
Okay, first off, I'll be talking also for the fire department as I am Chief Mike's representative. I keep thanking him for that. We're still following the guidelines set up originally as far as the facility goes here at the firehouse. No crowds, no meetings, everything's being held virtual or like you'll have an officer's meeting, but there'll be six feet apart out in the bays basically with their masks on going over things. Our crews are still responding with full PPE. We're still, the ambulance as before is still very busy. We're starting to pick up on some of our regular work, I. E. The drug overdoses, the psyche valves, things like that, non COVID responses, but everything remains the same as far as any meetings or anything like that goes. Now, my question to you is, did you or the Board of Selectmen set up a timeline to start the phase in, say occupancy of the buildings back in or you know, what, what I need to let, let Ronnie know. We have a fire commission meeting tonight, virtual. So I can, I can bring it up there if there is any pertinent information?
So the, so so to answer that question at the last board of selectman meeting, the board put off any discussion of reopening town buildings until this coming meeting. So I don't have any guidance for you specifically on that. It will be a discussion by the Board of Selectmen on the eighth. Okay.
All right. And like I said, right now, I did talk to Mindy. Right now they're still planning on having our, which is our largest fundraiser of the year is the steak supper in September. So they'll have to follow all the guidelines at that time if we do go through with it. But just to let you know, it hasn't been canceled yet. And that's up to the board of directors and the president. Sure. Okay.
Then like I said, I'll wait for the eighth and see what the which way the board of selector are going before I, before I tell Wally or Ronnie anything.
Okay. And remember, because the fire department is a critical it was never completely shut down, you know, per the governor's orders. It was just, you know, the same thing, social distancing rules apply, disinfectant protocols apply, you know.
We practice that from the, from the go. Just the fact that the facility itself, you know, closed. It's not, it's not closed to the membership because we still have the respondent clause. Just that it's closed for like our monthly meetings, things like that, you know, public of course. Sure. And just to make a note,
Ron's in the process of putting together the UTV purchase for the and trailer. We'll be coming to you shortly once that gets set. Also, we had our final, virtual, final inspection on a tanker, and a tanker should be arriving in the state sometime either by the end of the week or first part of next week. And with, hopefully a July 1, in service date. Okay.
That's all. I got the report. Thank you Kurt. Diane, library?
Yes. Hi, I just wanted to jump in. Am I taking the minutes?
No. Mean I would assume it's Diane. So Carol can read it off and take the minutes when she gets a chance. That's her penance for missing the meeting. Okay. I just was double checking to make sure. I'm happy to, but Carol it's Carol's role. Right? Correct.
Okay. Perfect Sorry No problem. The library presented a four page, reopening plan to the board of selectmen at their last meeting And I guess they they thought it was a good report The question from the library is does this plan need to be actually approved by somebody, Board of Selectman, Eastern Highland before proceeding with it?
So Eastern Highlands, no. As a courtesy I sent a copy to Rob Miller of Eastern Highlands. He didn't have any real issues with it. You know I explained to Amy that I thought it was a reasonable plan and that as far as I was concerned, she was fine with going to the curbside pickup. But that, you know, and as soon as we started, you know actually opening up buildings we could proceed with that but that has not occurred yet.
As you know the library has been closed to the public since March 16. It had it reopened on Monday for curbside pickup. Correct. So Amy's been there. Of course, she was in the building a half hour before she lost power for several hours. So that was fun. The library, the curbside pickup is now Mondays. Let's see. Monday and Wednesday, ten to four and Tuesday and Thursday, one to seven. Again, the library the building itself is not open to the public. All books being returned to the book drop are being quarantined for seventeen hour twenty try to remember again. Seventy two hours before being reshelved and logged back in.
All programs are being done via Zoom and meetings. They had a reptile program that had about 50 people in attendance, which was pretty good. They like that. Discussions are being held via Zoom. And kids story hours are being held once or twice a day, Monday through Friday. So they're still doing those kinds of things. The library board of directors and librarian are in the process of acquiring things like plexiglass, Clorox wipes, hand sanitizers, disinfected products, paper towels, soaps, gloves and those sort of things for when they actually do reopen. When they do reopen, the bathroom will probably be off limits for a while. We have noticed that the cleaning people have not been in for quite some time. The question is, are they doing the town office building?
Yes. So has Amy spoke with them? Because I gave Amy the contact information for the cleaning people to deal with them directly.
Right. She's gonna be Well, we we talked about it last night. The library board met last night. That information and told her to go check because it looks like, again, they haven't been in. And are they doing any kind of disinfecting or are they just doing vacuuming and dusting?
They're not really doing any disinfecting other than the bathrooms. Okay. Right. And that's pretty much it. Anybody have any questions? Okay. Kathy, Senior Transportation.
Yes. As you know, governor Lamont has said the seniors are still in step three, which he hopes to open on July 20. And, if so, we're hoping that we can start our senior transportation activities again. For the meanwhile, Ellie Scug will begin delivering food pantry and food share. She will be starting tomorrow on June 3, I believe. She has been shadowing Paul Bancroft, and I guess he's told her exactly what to do and so forth. My understanding is that Mickey will be following her tomorrow, and Mickey will be showing her the people that will get the boxes so that it will go very smoothly. That's the plan, I believe. Correct. You can let me know if if the plan has changed. And we have no medicals because doctor's office have, of course, canceled all medicals at this point, and we expect, hopefully, to start medicals the week of July 20. And we're hoping that we will be able to start our lunches again on July 24, but we're actually going going to go slow with that, Eric. We want to wait and see how we do the week of the twentieth, and we may put the lunches off till the thirty first. And the plan so far with John is we're going to have people six feet apart and not have all the people sitting in one room as we had done in the past. We'll be using two rooms. Okay. That's about that's about all I have unless you, you know, have something to add.
Yeah. I I think it's still way too early to say how that's all gonna play out, right now. Exactly. Right.
We are, I think, going to have to end because CERT is ending their Ted's food delivery program. So we are gonna have to replace that. And there's at least, there's basically at this point two residents in town that we need to deal with. Right. Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Duvall you know in both cases we need to provide some method of getting them food. So in and I have not talked to Ellie about this yet. I was planning on it. It's on my list. I just haven't got to it. But the question becomes, do we begin to start taking just a few people to the grocery stores and working with the protocol from Eastern Highlands Health and Or do we you know, and essentially deliver the food to them via Ted's or Highland Park or whatever, or, you know, how do we approach that? Because obviously we can't just, you know, leave them hanging. You know, we can't have people starving, but we've got to be able to do it safely. So my, what I'm leaning towards at this point is, you know, giving them transportation for food, probably to stop and shop and using the early morning at six to 7AM window.
Okay. And actually, that might work out okay. I talked with Ellie, and Ellie told me that she would be happy to do you know, take them to the store if that's worth the plan. But, also, she is willing to drive over to Ted's and pick up the food for them. Or I think I think what they're they I think what the two people involved are going to do, they're gonna continue to call the store, get give them the list or send them the list on email. And then they are going to the store will pack the groceries, and then Ellie will drive up. That's what the we thought the plan was. And the boxes will bags will be put into the van, and then she will deliver them to the two people. Now if I I remember very well that there is one issue, and you will will recall the issue. So that might very well be that we'll just start taking the two of them to the store just to see how that works out. That might be very good. I like that idea. And Ellie is very willing and prepared to do that. So you should probably make that decision at some point. Let me know because we're definitely prepared. We're ready to go.
Understood. Yeah. That decision will get made sometime this week. Not sure exactly. And I don't and, Eric, I don't want to start back the,
full bus of taking to stores yet. I I I think two, that's great. I think that will work out really good because we can separate them.
Oh, no. We're not talking about taking two at the same time. We're talking about taking one at a time
on Tuesday. Fine too. Okay. Alright. Yeah. Alright. That's fine. I think, though, senior day is Tuesday. So they would go on Tuesday to get the 10% discount. But maybe we can alternate it. So one could go one Tuesday, one could go another. Let's let's see how we can work that out.
Yeah. And the other thing is Ellie's gonna have to be willing to get up early to deliver them early because I think that's I'm going to call her. Eight window.
One of them is not an early riser, but perhaps she will.
Well, if it's the difference between that and starving to death, she'll probably get out. I
will, I will text you what I find out today.
Okay. And, Daryl, how are we doing in terms of police response and the needs of the community from your perspective?
It's been very busy lately. The month of May, we, town of Annover had over 200 calls for service. So, nothing that we can't handle. Obviously, with the protests now starting, it has even more ramped up, but, we are we are well prepared. So there's, always somebody in town. If it's not me, it's definitely, you know, another patrol guy. So, I worked Saturday evening. It was it was extremely busy within the Northeast Corridor here. So, you know, things are starting to heat up as more people, start leaving their homes. But rest assured, we're out there.
Excellent. And anything you need from the town in terms of support services?
No. I know that, I haven't been in the office a lot lately, so, you'll start seeing me around more often. And, but I'm fully equipped with the proper PPE and, I don't, require anything at this time so I appreciate it though. Okay,
stay safe and if that changes let us know. Most certainly will. Thank you. Okay. So last thing from the town's perspective. The governor's obviously put out a a really large number of executive orders and at one point or another I have read through all of them but being infinitely familiar with all roughly 50 of them is difficult. So the two things I know is that they've relaxed the maximum group size to 10 individuals but still recommending that masks be worn and social distancing be in effect at times for in general. So what we have done at the town hall is we have essentially rotated employees through so that in any given office there will be a maximum of one employee working.
If you're going into somebody else's office you're expected to wear a mask and the goal is to you know minimize direct contact between employees so when we do get one of them that tests positive for COVID it doesn't wipe out the whole office or kill too many people off. As far as the protocols for reopening the town hall, that's to a large extent a board of selectman decision. However, when you really look at what it requires, what we're required to do before we open up to the public, it's fairly intensive in terms of disinfection protocols as well as putting physical barriers in place. So if we're going to do that, it's going to take a bunch of reconstruction in the town hall and we're going to have to put up a bunch of plexiglass shielding
and we'll probably have to swap out a bunch of doors to half doors so people can approach an office, but they can't actually enter it. So I'm actually hoping to just sit it out for another month or two and not go through that construction phase and just basically wait it out. But it's going to depend in part on what the board of selectmen choose to do because ultimately that's not not really all my decision or not even mostly my decision. So that's pretty much it. This is a special meeting. So there's limitations on what other things we can discuss. But I can certainly field any general questions from any of you if you have any questions about what the town's doing or town priorities or things of that nature at this point.
Couple questions for you. Sure. Are town employees being tested? Nope. Okay. And the the library is saving all the receipts for all this COVID nineteen equipment and, you know, plexiglass and gloves and all that sort of thing. Hopefully that they'll be reimbursed either from what the feds of the state or from town somebody at the end
possibly I mean you know we've been told that there will be reimbursement for roughly 75% of our expenses but having sat through several of the FEMA, the state FEMA briefings and other briefings on all of this they haven't the state really has no idea what they're doing In truth, it's been an incredibly ineffective organization to deal with. So I don't even know who I'm applying to. I mean, I have set us up an account with FEMA. So we are a, you know, interested agency or whatever you call it. But the state has said not to apply to FEMA at this point because there's so many different programs out there and they don't know which program should be used for which thing at this point. So it's really kind of you know maddening but you know
that's the status. So I wish I had a better answer for you. We will continue to save our receipts. Exactly. And you said you had one more question? About testing of the employees. Oh okay okay
yeah I mean we've submitted a list to the state of all the employees that we have and what hours they work because there's some rumor that they're going to start permitting employees you know have some kind of portal or methodology for testing municipal employees but we haven't gotten anything back on that yet in terms of what or even what that testing will be will it be antibody testing will be at the standard COVID-nineteen nasal swab what they're talking about so you know that's another thing I you know I'm cc'd on all the emails from the emergency management you know coordinator but there's not been a lot of details I know the fire department has made a decision to opt out of the testing. Yeah but that's all I know at this point. If testing is available, ends up available to town employees, I will encourage employees to get tested. But I mean, I think that was primarily
get tested just prior to reopening to the public. So I don't think we would be there yet anyway. Other questions? Kurt, Daryl, Kathy, do any of you have anything else? No. I'm good.
I'm all set. Thank you. Okay. So what I would say is just be safe. Notify me of what affects your individual departments. If you have questions or concerns, you all have my phone number, and email address. I will try to address them in a in a reasonably proficient fashion. That's all I have for me and unless anybody has anything else. Okay, in that case I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second.
Okay. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion carries four zero zero. Thank you all.
Eric, I have one question for you before we leave. Is the connectivity grant still