The Rochester Board of Selectmen voted November 2 to indefinitely postpone the November 30 Special Fall Town Meeting until pending legislation finally resolves the matter of the 2015 Annual Town Meeting’s lack of a quorum.
In light of the after-the-fact discovery of the absence of the quorum, the Town contacted the attorney general’s office and was required to file special legislation to accept the results of the Town Meeting votes; otherwise, the town meeting would have to be repeated.
Town Administrator Michael McCue said, with the legislation still under review by the Joint Committee on Municipalities and Regional Government, it would be best to hold off on holding a subsequent Special Town Meeting until the previous one was officially accepted.
McCue said the move was intended to “give the townspeople the assurance that everything is settled.”
“We don’t want anything hanging over the Special … if there’s any question on the legality of the Annual,” McCue said during a follow-up interview.
McCue said he would be attending a hearing in Boston with the joint committee on November 13 to hold informal talks on the special legislation. McCue said, given the circumstances, he could not guarantee the issue of the Annual would be resolved by November 30. Furthermore, with the holiday season approaching, he doubted there would be any subsequent Special Town Meeting until further into 2016.
“I felt it made more sense to make sure that we had a successful Town Meeting that is not a question anymore.”
Selectmen voted unanimously to postpone the Special.
In other matters, the board voted to accept the donation of a roughly 100-acre parcel on Snipatuit Road from the Melink Corporation, developers of a proposed solar farm abutting the land. Concerns over liability to the Town were put to rest once the town’s insurance provider told McCue that there would be no additional costs to the town’s insurance policy.
“My concerns … centered around exposure of the Town and costs to the Town,” said McCue. “The exposure to the Town would be minimal … if not non-existent.”
Concerns about the loss in tax revenue were also dispelled, given that the loss to the Town would only be $78.
Also during the meeting, Water Commissioner Fred Underhill introduced a draft of a proposed bylaw aimed at curbing local businesses and commercial entities from the unpermitted taking of water from area natural water resources for commercial gain.
The proposed bylaw comes on the heels of a number of recent complaints that local landscaping company Yard Boss had been pumping water from Snipatuit Pond and from the Mattapoisett River off Route 6 directly into its hydro-seeding equipment truck without a permit and without any visible safeguards in place to protect the environment from cross-contamination.
Underhill said all four towns – Rochester, Marion, Mattapoisett, and Fairhaven – belonging to the Mattapoisett River Valley Water Supply Protection Advisory Committee would need to adopt a similar bylaw because they are “under the gun from DEP.…”
“And here we have commercial entities that are coming in and taking out water resources, selling it … sometimes on private property,” said Underhill. “We have some serious problems…. The DEP is forcing the water departments in the three towns … to do a lot of mitigation and it’s gonna get very expensive and it’s requiring the district to monitor the flow of the Mattapoisett River and if there isn’t enough water going down there, we’re gonna have to take strict measures to cut off people from using outside water.”
The bylaw was to appear on the November 30 Special Town Meeting but will instead be reviewed and approached at the next scheduled town meeting.
The next meeting of the Rochester Board of Selectmen is scheduled for November 9 at 6:30 pm at the Rochester Town Hall.
By Jean Perry
