Meeting transcript
Board of Selectmen Regular Meeting
May 8, 2023 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Or delay? K. We're gonna call to order the town of Andover Board of Selectmen regular meeting for Monday, May 8, at 07:02, and we are going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, I'm going go to item two, public speak. Linda Fish, we'll let you go first. All set. Okay, thank you. Jessica Courier. All set. Amy Knox.
She got kicked out, so she's trying to log back in.
Okay. When she gets back in, if she'd like to say something She's good. I'm good for now. Thank you. Okay. No problem. All right. Item three on the agenda is additions and deletions.
Excuse me, Jeff. I just wanna say something during public speak, please. Sure. Okay. I just wanna remind everybody that our town is turning 175 and we've got various events going on starting next Thursday, May 18. So we've got our dedication day and then we've got a family fun day on Saturday. I gotta find this date before I say anything. Thank you, sir. The May 20, and we're gonna have some bunch of fun games and things to do that day with some food trucks. Check the website. We've got a whole bunch of other things going on. We've got garden tours and Scott Yeomans is giving a great informative speech. And we've also got some cemetery tours and other things going on. So lots of events this month leading into June. So please check out the website for more info and the Facebook page.
Do we have a separate calendar on that? Because I I see some of them on some of this stuff on our regular calendar, but I don't see all of it. Or at least maybe the description doesn't match what you're saying. So do we have a separate calendar going on specifically for the January?
Not that I know of. I don't know what you're referring to as a separate calendar.
So everything's- Well, other words, can we can we put a calendar list together of of one hundred seventy fifth specific events?
Sure. If you go to our website, there is a nice graphic on the website that lists all the events.
Hold on for one second. The down calendar. Paul? Maybe what we can do is we can get with Eric, and maybe we can do a one page flyer that gets mailed out to the town. Eric, it seems like we turned that around pretty quickly. Maybe that would be a positive thing to allow the hundred and seventy fifth committee to get out their dates directly to all the citizens.
And then I'll work with Kate to make sure everything's added to the town calendar. Does anyone have any objection to that? Nope.
No. Did we already mail the flyers for voting? Yes. Yep. I was gonna say too bad. Maybe we could've tacked tacked something out of there. But that can't be more than $500, Eric? More than that, but not crazy expensive.
K. You think it'd be worth it to talk about maybe spending the money to to do that?
Let let me know how much it costs, Eric. I I would like to donate that to the hundred and seventy fifth anniversary.
Yeah. We could use the flyer that's already on the web page, the click flyer.
Yep. It's already already set up, so we just gotta do a fold over and mail it out. Okay. Eric, I'll work with you on that.
K. Okay. Very generous, mister McGuire. Thanks, Jeff. Not really. Anyway, additions and deletions.
Anyway, Adrian? Yeah, I want to I'm sorry. I got to pull up the current agenda. I was in the pound page looking at that other item. I want to make sure we have a executive session for. For the property that we're talking about transferring to the land or the land we're talking about swapping with the town. Can the King Property Do you have an executive session for that right now? No. Okay, I'd like to add that.
We will call that. Sixteen point five. Okay. Sixteen point five.
I can do all mine together if you want. I also want an executive session on final contract for the community center.
Okay. So we'll go executive session, king property. What's next?
So executive session, king property, executive session, community center, and executive session on cool contract.
And I would also like to add an executive session on union negotiations.
There you go. It's a foursome. Scott, will you second that? Second that, Adrian.
Thank you, sir. I'd like to add that we invite into executive session for the cool contract. Just That way, get there because they're on. Yep. They're here. Jessica Courier and Amy Knox, please. So we'll do that one first. Cool contract. Right.
Okay. Anything else? Okay. Let's vote on that. So it's an executive session 16.5, a cool contract, King Property Community Center, and Newell negotiations. Alright. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Aye. Aye.
Okay. Five, nothing. K. So that's the end of that. Okay. Item four, the, treasurer's report, Eric.
So there's not a lot here for the treasurer's report. There's a bunch of stuff missing. We are working on it. I don't have a whole lot else to say. Obviously, that what you're looking at is not totally correct. So what's the what's the reasoning? Why are we?
So let's talk about that one in executive session. How about that? Alrighty then.
Someone doesn't know how to run memorized reports? Okay. Let's move on then. It's not biting, Jeff. Nice try.
That's the answer. I mean, I'm just telling you. Item five, boards and commissions, presentations. Do we have anything? Not that I know of. Okay. Item six, appointments. Do we have anything?
Not at this point. However, the library did have a question about procedure for appointing a new member to the library commission. I did have a discussion with them regarding that. As you know, in the next month or so, you should start seeing a lot of the reappointments for boards and commissions because a lot of them are two year terms and they're up. You will be seeing a whole bunch of those going forward for boards.
Eric, when those start coming in, if they're, I just want to make sure that we have a way to someone applying for a board that has a vacancy versus a board recommending someone. Just can we just flag those accordingly? You know? I'm
not sure what you mean. What exactly are you asking? Well, like, still the library board has someone they wanna appoint. Right? Right. Versus us having an opening and then someone putting in for that. Correct. Correct. That's My
understanding is that they want to take one of their alternate members and make them a permanent member. Yeah, that's kind of my point. I'd rather defer to boards when it's appropriate, you know, sort of us having our own,
you know. Right. When asked, I've told boards that the Board of Selectmen, unless there was a really good reason to the contrary, would probably accept the boards even for appointed boards, you know, recommendations on who to appoint. Thank you.
Resignation. So we have a letter here from a tax collector. So her goal is August 31. What is the plan, Eric, for a replacement?
That would be why I added union negotiation to the calendar Okay. Under executive session.
Okay. We'll talk about it then. It's item eight, ton administrator report.
Okay. First of all, I apologize for sending my, report to you quite late. Does anybody have any questions on that? I'll go through a brief rundown, but is there anything particular you had questions on before I started on that? All right, first things up. There is probably, it looks like the legislation that I noted at the top is likely to get approved. This will be a major change for in person voting. The only good news is it doesn't start with 2024, so it won't affect the next budget cycle. But it will be a fourteen day early voting period. So, there will be a full staff for registrars and people voting ability to vote for fourteen days prior to the general elections, seven days for primaries, and four days for special elections and preference primaries. It will not affect town referendum though. So, that at least is good. And that's going to be cost prohibitive. The state is talking about offsetting some of the costs, but I suspect next year we're going to end up absorbing a good bit of that. So, it's something to keep in mind. And we would need to staff up considerably because I don't think we have enough people that are willing to work. You know, our current people are willing to work a couple days at a time. They're not going to be too excited about working fourteen days straight,
long hours each day.
They're setting hours as well and we're still required to have two checkers?
There has not been That is not in the bill. So, that's going to be implementation, which is going to be determined by the Secretary of the State. However, they are required to have same day registration for those two days. So either our registrars are gonna be need to be there or our assistant registrars are gonna need to cover all those hours too separately from the elections during that period. So it's gonna be a big increase in staffing when that comes through. You know, they said they're going to provide funding to municipalities. But, you know, we'll see. Don't know at this point. There are a couple other bills before the Appropriations Committee. Both of them will decrease the tax revenue on delinquent taxes, both property and stuff that gets leaned on. You know, considering we make a fair amount of money on delinquent tax bills, that's going to take some revenue bite out of the town. But, you know, not guaranteed that will go through yet, they're talking about that for property tax assessments, motor vehicle assessments, and tax liens. There also, there's a bill that looks like it's going to go through that will delay the implementation, the change to the motor vehicle taxation law. Basically, the way it is right now is it's based on NADA value, and they're going to a simpler system that is just MSRP prorated by the number of years. So, but they're not going to implement that to next year because, well, they're not going to. So, at this point, it's unclear where that's going to be in terms of how much taxes, because it's, there's going to be some kind of
prorated amount for the towns. So, again, that's one of those ones where we don't know what the effect of it is, but it is going to be delayed by one year. As far as town hall staff, we did send two staff today to NARCAN training. So if somebody OD's in the town hall in the next year and a half or so before it expires, we are all set with Narcan. So that's a positive. Both RFPs, the one for the HVAC replacement for the fire station, as well as the RFP for the town hall HVAC improvements are live. They're visible on the town's website. And I've reached out to some of the contractors that we've done business with in the past that we've liked and sent them to make sure we get a good, a bunch of bids in for that. So, other news, we haven't been notified officially, but unofficially, we did not get the rec trails grant. And we'll talk a little bit, maybe, well, we'll talk about it right now. So, I reached out to
our Senator and had that discussion with them and the legislative team. So, they are trying to see whether they can fund it directly through a general assembly appropriations. So, we may be able to get the money, even though we didn't get it allocated directly from the grant. So hopefully that's still in the works. We are also looking into the two traffic requests that we've made to state DOT. I've asked for a little legislative pressure on that, which is the Route 6 reduction of the speed limit in the area of the Dollar GeneralLake Road, and also the additional stoplight located on Hendy Road. So we're kind of working on that also. I did get a request from the library. They're not complaining. They would like us to examine the heating in the basement. So I asked Don of Comfort Control to take a look at that and see whether we can add more registers in the basement to get the heat balance a little better between the 1st Floor and the basement. Town clerk's office is running fairly smoothly. We are issuing transfer station stickers now. Please encourage all your friends and neighbors to get them early.
That way we save ourselves the mad rush in July, and we could do it over a longer period of time. So anybody you talk to, tell them they can renew their stickers now. And we have put out a community post to that effect. The audit is not complete, but it's pretty nearly complete. We know basically where we are in the year, but the two last things we have open is we have not gotten our final actuarial report from Hooker and Holcomb. And the second thing is we got a bunch of more requests from the auditor to review the capital purchases because, as you know, we went through and we spent a lot of time this year getting our capital asset inventory correct because it really hadn't been. But because of that, and we're asking for a bunch of changes, now we have to go through the documentation
on that. So hopefully that will have that to them this week. As I said last month, there is a new building official on board. He's going to have, I think, a positive impact for us because Randy was just covering too many towns. John Previously, so I did sit down with them and meet with them last week and went over both what our fee schedule was and he's going to provide the fee schedule that he used in the town of Avon and then we're going to compare he has agreed that. Can review all the permits to ensure that they're paying the appropriate fee, He said that's, you know, a common problem, and and we share that same problem with Bolton. So we're gonna try to work out a solution that works kind of for both towns going forward. That was an issue that several of you brought up in the past. Overall, building department operations are going pretty well. We do have a number of zoning enforcement actions. We have kept Jim quite busy dealing with that as well as the town's attorney. The cleanup is going pretty well at Long Hill at the old Stone House. They've now taken three dumpsters worth of crap out of there. So that's good hold on we lost Jeff. I'm letting him back in. Okay.
Which stone are you talking about? The one right at the top of the hill? Correct. Right across from Bear Swamp. Because both of them are stone. Right?
On Long Hill, both of the problem. Oh, you're thinking about the other one down there. Yeah. Yeah. That's up for sale. I gotta I gotta ask Jim what the status of that one is. I have not checked on that one in a while. I have met a couple of times with Joe Dillon. We do have two applications going into the state local bridge program, the ones for the two culverts, one on Hutchinson Road, and then the Lake Road at Pasolo. So, we'll get them in in plenty of time. You know, other than that, not a lot to say on that. The town engineer is also going to be meeting with the zoning folks, because the zoning folks have a couple of things that Jed wants to discuss with the engineer about tidying up Lake Regs and a couple of other things. And, you know, building in a floodplain, making sure our regulations are current in that.
Are we are we flagging that the that consults consulting time to? Do they have a budget in their commissioner?
They have a legal and professional line item that gets paid from them. K. Great. Thank you. So that's their own budget. So Public Works is currently cleaning, that area behind the town hall. We get the room in there for the community gardens. We have had tenant in for quite a while, about two weeks ago, doing tree removal. You know, and Jay and I had been talking about kind of our overall strategy for tree work. So we should have something to bring back to you at some point in the not too distant future, hopefully. We definitely have a lot of roads that we need to address. Cider Mill is one that we have a lot of issues with. So we're kind of talking about that. So debris management, this has been on the notes for quite a while. Jay and I met with a contractor, a national contractor called Ashbrit Environmental. And basically what they do is they do essentially catastrophic remediation. So the likelihood of us needing them is pretty small. But if we ever got hit with a really big natural disaster, we need some kind of plan to deal with things that are beyond our control. And I put there, it's not really a contract it just says, you know we will. In let me back up a SEC, the state has a contract with them
And the state part of the state contract is that they will assist municipalities as needed. There's another company called Tetra Tech. They do the evaluations and basically take care of all the paperwork for catastrophic events, whereas Ashbryt does the actual work to clean up. So, it's not something we need to make a decision on right now. We are trying to line up a meeting with Tetra Tech. And if we sign a contract with both of these companies, it doesn't obligate us to, I mean, we only would have to ever pay anything if we actually utilize them. And both those companies are really designed and set up to get all their payments directly from FEMA. So it's basically if something where we got hit with a really large scale hurricane, so a significant fraction of the town is unmanageable, and our public works and utility companies can't get it, that's when we would exercise it. So, I'm just giving you this right now as information, but I think I'm going to be asking you for permission to sign a preliminary contract with them at some point in the future. The only thing that makes me a little nervous is in talking to Ashbred, they said a town of our size, you know, needs to have a between two to four acre open debris location in the case of a bad emergency. And we clearly don't have that other than using the public athletic fields,
which I think I would probably be run out of town if I suggested using them. So that's one of the things we're going to have to think about, like where we do that. And do we have a neighboring town that's close? Like
you have to roll to do in order to see that it doesn't Adrian, wrap them
you're not on mute. Okay. So, as far as the community center, most of you know that BCS Engineering is working on completing the special permit application. I think that'll probably be some of the discussion we have later on tonight. We are trying to get our ducks in a row for a special permit application at the next planning and zoning meeting, which is on the twenty second. We're still working on the RAV4. It's going to be a subject of discussion with the next board of finance meeting. Whether part of what I wanna work with the treasurer on is just ensuring that we have sufficient funds that we can divert funds to pay for the RAV four in this budget. The STEEP grant I submitted to the Department of Community Development, the form that you all signed last month. We also, as you probably remember, met with Sinexo. I've been on them to get an initial quote. They promised me again they would have it this week. So I am working to kind of keep that on track. Well, they promised me they'd have a quote by the fifteenth. So I am working with that. I do have a meeting that I'm trying to schedule with their grants people because I want to make sure we fully understand what their grant procedure is now to make sure that, you know, we keep that spread.
Work on the connectivity grant, as most of you know, that's about 90% expended. There's kind of two things that are still on our radar to complete for that. One is some landscaping, both in the front along the pathway that runs in front of public works. And the second is landscaping up by Center Street. So, Christine Randazzo of Randazzo Design will be working on that hopefully starting this week or next week. We still don't know back, you know, the DOT has not fully evaluated the grant applications for the trip grant. We were recommended from CROG to the DOT for that grant. And it appears that the legislature has more than doubled the funding for that program. So that really increases the likelihood that we'll get it. But you know, still don't know. Rut Trails, we did not get. That is not official yet, but my understanding is they've notified everybody who has gotten it. They haven't notified me. So I'm assuming I did not get that or we did not get that.
We were distinctive tree care was in supposed to be in last week to grind up the brush pile that's delayed. Hopefully they will get to that soon. And we're going to talk about the boundary line adjustment stuff later. And I threw at the end of my report, the mutual benefit use agreement, just so you can see what it is. And I'm not suggesting we sign it at this point. I still want to have the discussion with the other contractor and then come back to you with some kind of a more fully fleshed out proposal. But we are working on that. Other questions for me?
Yes, I have one. Sorry. Have we, have we used our notification system, our texting system to make people aware of town votes?
You know, to be honest, we have not used the community alert all that much lately. That's a good point. You should start using the community alerts again.
It's not about just using it again. It's about specifically having a policy that we use it for town voting.
Yeah. I was just noticing that I didn't, I didn't receive anything, and I was wondering why.
Yeah. And I actually had a couple residents ask about it, so I was going to bring that up What a
I would say is that unless we're using the emergency boats or the emergency alert, we're only getting about less than a fifth of the households in the town. There are very few people that have actually signed up for it, even though we've we've tried to get people to for years. So its use is limited, but you're right. We should be using it. But that's 50% of the total. So let's inform them.
Again, our next any mailing that we send out, I've said this a bunch of times. So just as a reminder, maybe on the flyer, we can put a reminder, sign up for the. You know the alerts and then. Just little reminders of communication in town. Check out the So Eric, you and I can work on that. Okay. When we do that flyer, okay?
So maybe when we're doing the flyer, think one of the reasons we're we're maybe it's not getting hit either is that if we're putting it on the flyer, if we're putting things on the flyer, sometimes our flyers are pretty monotone and I understand that's a cost issue. But whether it's a sticker or what you know, we just do that one line in a different color or something. You've got to get a way to to to, you know, shine a light on it. So, you know, in in in the our our conservative nature is coming to haunt us. You know? We need to get better about it. So it means we spend an extra two hundred hours to put the thing in big red letters. Let's do that, you know? So Well, but
the problem with mailers is how many people actually read it. I mean, do a quick straw poll among yourselves and say how many of you realize that you've got a referendum notice already for the referendum? I haven't taken it out yet, but sure.
Has a doubt. Is your hand up? Jeff Murray is your hand up? Can't see you. So everybody that's visual we've all I
read my flyer and I actually got it so. There you go. Excellent. So so that's like five out of six.
Just totally off the topic, do we know who this 765 number is for security purposes and for the meeting minutes?
No. Can you sit there and can like when somebody's in the waiting room, you talk to them? Well, they're also unmuted at this point. I'm unmuted.
Can you state your name for the public record, please? Yeah. Yes. This is Bradley Kelly. Last name, k e l l e. Sorry about the Indiana phone number. I just had to use my work phone until I get in the house here. Bringing my son back from, Ram Lacrosse practice.
No problem. We we can we can rename you. That's right. I know you're on the phone. Thank you. Thanks. Can we mute, mister Keller? He's muted now. He muted himself. Perfect.
Alright. So, Eric, what was so we were talking about
creative Is Linda waving to us, or is she just stretching? No, okay. Stretching.
Yes, we should we all get those flyers. Personally know it's sitting on my counter. You know I have Eric I think it's like anything I'm sure 50% of the people know it and read it you just got a avid group of people here that read it care about it. I mean, seriously, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to do something.
Yeah. Change the color. Let's let's mess them up a little. Let's make it blue or red or something next time. You know? K. Mister Mandeville will pay for color.
I will pay for Color of the paper. Color of the paper. Conservative. Adrian will pay for liberal, colorful
flyers. I think the $20 a year painted taxes covers it so. Mr. McGuire.
I'm with you, I'm with you. Alright Do we have any questions, other questions for Eric? Okay. Then we're going to move on to Item nine, Old Business. A, status of community center is going to be discussed in unless anybody wants to discuss it here, we're going discuss it in Executive Session. 9B, recognizing Andover residents. Paula, anything that you want to bring up to this meeting?
Oh, just an I sent out the link again to the board members. Are there any updates or any concerns? Because I'd like to start rolling this out. You want me to share my screen and share it? Or does anybody have any questions or comments about it? I have nothing right now.
Okay. So I'd like to start promoting it and getting some input from the public on people that they wanna send to us for consideration. Looks good, Paula. Thank you, Adrian. I'll second that, Paula. Thank you, Scott.
Alright. We'll move on to 9D, Andover Personnel Policy Discussion.
Let's table that. I hate to keep doing that, but I'm just not. Unless you all have had a chance to review it. Let's table that. Nine e senior transportation per per purchase. So I'm going to request hopefully at the next Board of Select or the next Board of Finance meeting that they reallocate sufficient money to the senior transportation system to purchase the RAV four for the town.
Okay. That sounds awesome. Nine f, boundary line agreement with the Hawes family.
So I sent to Kim Hawes to share with her husband a copy of what BSC proposes should be the appropriate boundary prior to us considering a boundary line agreement. I have not gotten a response back from them yet. Hopefully, I will, although I know there may be a delaying factor in that for a couple of weeks. So I actually wouldn't expect to hear back from them super quickly on that one. As far as the Stephen King one, I did refer that first to the town engineer. And having their survey team review all the documentation and then give us a written explanation of whether they think the boundary line adjustment makes sense based on, you know, all the underlying, you know, deeds and deed descriptions. And then we'll go from there. And then once that is, then the board can make a decision as to how they want to proceed. So that's that's not gonna be done. You know? And I know Adrian wanted to talk about that further in executive session, so we can there also. Okay.
New business event permit discussion. I see we have a permit request.
One one of the things I realized a couple of days ago is we actually have both are the new newer permit form in the older permit form on there, which is why the the form they filled out has the fourteen day notice thing. That was an old form that we superseded and we never took the other one off off our town website. So that that is our fault for, not doing it. The other thing, this is you know, we've had a kind of a robust discussion in the town hall about who all needs to review and sign off on these. And the town clerk was pushing very hard to have a bunch of other people sign off on it, more than already sign off on it. But I think we need to have some kind of administrative override, you know, in cases where it looks like there's not really any impact to the town. You know, I think I should probably just be able to sign off on this and not have to send it to the fire marshal, you know, and the fire chief and, you know, everybody in their brother if it's not something that's really gonna affect the town. I think we should keep,
you know, the sign offs on the newer Andover event permit. But there should be some way to have an administrative approval. That's what I think. But ultimately, you know, it's your decision whether you want that discretion or not.
I have no problem with you signing off on applications like this,
but that's me. Oh, feels like executive overreach by Eric, but fine. It could be. So what I would suggest is that we get rid of the two forms and I come back to you with a form that just simply has signature block for myself, and then below it, the signature blocks for fire chief, resident trooper, EMD, you know, all those things. And then, and then there'll be a little checkbox. And if I review it and I check those boxes, that means we automatically send it to all those people. Or if I feel comfortable that it's not, you know, it doesn't require all those reviews, I sign off on it. That something you guys would be okay with if I brought you back that form to look at?
Eric, that seems reasonable. I think my bigger concern with this whole situation is that we have this wonderful form, but yet if somebody puts it in late or doesn't put it in, we have no enforcement mechanism. I mean, it's sort of a joke in that sense, right? Like we have someone that three years in a row has handed in a late form and done it anyways, even when it's not approved. So what's the point of it?
Right. I mean, I think if in that case, we're looking at is an ordinance and something that triggers our fine ordinance. You know, and so we have something with some teeth in it, if that's the way you want to go as a board. And I'm not saying that's wrong. I'm just saying that I think that has to be done via an ordinance. So the appropriate thing to do if you want to go down that road is to have Dennis craft an ordinance that covers that.
It would seem appropriate. Otherwise, what's the point of having the form? It's a lot of people doing a lot of work for nothing, you know, when the next person can just come in and ignore it.
I agree with Adrian. Let's find an ordinance. Let's find let's have fine abilities to raise, fine them $500 if they don't get us the appropriate forms or use to own property without our There you go.
Okay. Excellent idea, Adrian. That's it for new business? Okay. Item 11, approval of the meeting minutes for 04/10/2023. Anybody have any comments on the minutes? All those in favor, aye. Aye. Aye.
Aye. Item 12, a budget appropriation transfers or overexpenditure requests. Do we have any of these, Eric? Yeah. There's one to Richard Timrick for $81.05.
Refund of excess payment. Alright. So I wanna make a motion on that.
I make a motion that we refund Richard Timurich for what was the dollar amount again? I'm sorry. $81.05. $81.05.
I'll second it. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Nothing. Okay. Tax collectors report. I didn't see anything. The assessor had a report in here. Does anybody have any questions on any of the I do not.
So the the tax collector does have our report in there. I mean, the the bottom line is collections are ahead of last year at this time. And for real estate, we got 2.7% uncollected at this point. So, you know, over a 97% collection rate. Personal property is over 95% and motor vehicle is at around 93% for the year so far.
Okay. On the department reports, Eric permits, I had on our permit report, we had $13,000 for the month of March. Correct. Did you do any analysis as to the type of permits or the amount of money raised?
So, haven't done that fully yet, but I asked the building admin to pull kind of 10 random permits, but to concentrate on things that were higher dollar permits. And then I've asked to meet with the building official to review them and to figure out where we are lacking in terms of our permit fees and how that relates to current prices for work. That is in the works.
We currently allowing self assessment or self declaration of value? We are. Yes. So we probably need to change that.
Yes, we do. Yes, we do. So, I mean, on this report, we have 20 building permits for an estimated cost of $670,000 So that gives you an average of $32,500 or $33,000 for each building permit. And they're building a new house on Lake Road. Doesn't seem like the estimate works for me. Well,
that's that's why I asked the building official to sit down and we'll see whether we can come with some kind of mechanism. Because what we were attempting to do two years ago when we first put in Permit Link, which was have minimum fees. We just can't practically do that with Permit Link. We just frankly never got that to work in the system. So, I mean, to me, the workaround is to, and what the building official shared with me is that he does not like publishing minimums for work. He likes to keep those in review the permit and say, does it meet what he thinks the minimums should be? Because as soon as you say these are the minimums, every single builder puts in the exact minimum for whatever category is there. So that was his concern with I don't I don't mind
I don't mind not posting minimums. I I'm I care that the permits and the values are reviewed by someone in our in our department,
it just seems way low for me. Right. How much is it, Jeff? How much is that number? Is there a separate number for that permit?
I mean, I'm the way the report just listed out, Scott, is there were just 20 total permits. Doesn't tell me which one's which. Doesn't give me the list by location. That official told us that,
new houses are 2 50 a a foot now. Somewhere in that vicinity.
K. Well, I mean That be a lot. This is this is not I mean, I I I Adrian obviously has way more knowledge about building than than I do, but this has been an issue for as long as I've been involved, and I've I've stated it before. I had an argument with the previous building official that we should do something different. And
what is what is new how housing, Adrian? What's the square foot?
Give or take 300 right now. Just for square footage. That doesn't include lot or anything. Okay.
You know? And and but the bigger numbers that we we should be paying attention to are the the more common things like like roofing, for instance. Roofing is is no all pun intended through the roof, I mean you know we're seeing $2,000 a square foot for flat roofing and and you know close to $1,000 a square foot for regular residential roofing you know, and that's more than double the pandemic numbers.
I would assume that those permits are under building permits because there's no separate roofing item. But anyway, this is just something that as a group, as a Board of Selectmen, this is something that we are losing revenue because we are not paying attention to this and we have to do a better job of it. Well, we can do
a I know when I apply for permits in other towns, they do If I don't I could put a value down, but if the building inspector disagrees with it, they can assign value and I have to show them the estimate, you know, or pay that number.
I would agree with that. I agree with that. That was always my point, is that who is reviewing the permits and coming up with a more reasonable number because any time you are self reporting, obviously you are going to go low because you don't want to pay any money. Right. So it's just something that we have to look at and look at it a little differently and get better at it. Anybody else with any other questions? Okay. Eric, I do have one other question for you. The easements that have been granted within the town, I have asked for the analysis of payments on that easement that was granted to the clerk and with Vicki's. Can you sit there and since I am asking for it now in public, can we have it by our next meeting? Thank you. I appreciate that, Eric. Yes, you can. All right. Excellent you told me it's available all I want to do is see it so put it in our package. Any other questions? Okay, Eric any correspondence? Nope, nothing significant. All right, item 16, public speak. We'll go through who we have here, Linda Fish. All set. Joanne Ebert.
Yeah, just one quick point on the application status that people are requesting. I'm thinking you're talking about request to use facilities or things of that nature and the approval process. I'm just a fan of liking to get some kind of form with signatures in case there's any kind of damage or anything to the property and just having the proper sign offs done. That's all. Thank you. Thank you. Jessica Courier.
I'm just requesting that Brad Kelly, he is a member of our board, if he'd be present in the executive session when we talk about the cool contract.
Does any other member of the board have a problem with that? Nope. Okay. We'll move on. Diane Brenier. You're on mute. You're still on mute. You're not on mute, but we can't hear you. Diane, now I'm upset about this. Come on.
If she's doing this as a comedy skit, I'm on board. It's I
don't think you're connected to your audio, Diane. Doesn't look like you're connected to Diane, try to connect to your audio, we'll come back to you because I think we only have Brad Kelly. Would you like to say anything? Public speaking? Thank you for asking. I'm all set right now.
Brad, did they get the spelling of your last name right? Yes.
Amy Knox. Well, at least on on my screen, it is. Yep. Awesome. I have no comments.
Alright. Diane Grineer. Bye. Sorry, Diane. Okay. Someone want to make a motion to move into I'll make a motion. I make a motion that we move into executive session to discuss the COOL contract and invite Jessica Currier, Amy Knox, and Brad Kelly to also discuss the King property lot line adjustment, the community center contract, and union negotiations. Second.
Adrian, seconded. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Jeff Adrian. Excellent. Five nothing. Okay. Eric, if you would, please stop the recording.