On March 4, Scott Snow’s proposed Eldridge Estates subdivision planned for parcels located off Prospect Road failed to supply all the details necessary for a thorough vetting by the Mattapoisett Planning Board.

            Coming before the full board was G. deJesus of Prime Engineering. During previous informal meetings and hearings with the applicant’s representatives, Snow was directed to provide timely and complete documents that the board could study before the meeting opened. However, Chairman Tom Tucker stopped deJesus before he could begin, saying, “We just got the plans today – we are going to continue this plan. … There are major changes.” Mr. deJesus attempted to color the changes as “minor,” causing Tucker to react with, “Don’t even go there!” 

            Tucker said that he had instructed the applicant numerous times to submit a plan that was complete and filed with the Planning Board office at least a week before the meeting date.

            “I told the applicant, but you keep doing this,” Tucker fired. “He (Snow) had the opportunity to return when he was ready. We would have continued it without prejudice – you either play by the rules or you don’t play.”

            Snow’s first appearance before the Planning Board, at which time he floated a conceptual and very incomplete plan for a subdivision, was in June of 2018. Since that time, Prime Engineering has returned with at least two different lot division concepts, and changed roadway or driveway plans and stormwater systems, which all failed to satisfy essential questions raised by the Planning Board.

            Before moving on to other business, board member Nathan Ketchel raised further technical questions. Ketchel had, during the February 4 hearing, taken Prime Engineering’s Richard Rheaume to task over stormwater systems and calculations, an exchange that lasted for more than an hour. Those documents still remained incomplete.

            Planning Board member Janice Robbins told deJesus that Rheaume, during his presentation, “hadn’t taken any notes.” 

            Tucker read a letter into the minutes from a concerned abutter. The author, David Mee, 35 Pine Island Road, raised concerns over stormwater runoff, re-grading, drainage basins, and potential damage to existing stonewalls on his property. He also asked the Planning Board to mandate a “higher than usual completion of work bond … to ensure the applicant fulfills his contractual obligations.”

            Abutter Bill Cantor asked about a peer review consultant. Tucker assured him that Bill Madden of G.A.F. Engineering would be providing that oversight. Cantor also questioned how frequently abutters were required to be notified of hearings. He was advised that after a filing, abutters were not subsequently notified of hearings except for the public notice found on the town hall billboard or within official published agendas. In this case, however, there had been two separate abutter notifications because the project scope had significantly changed from a three-lot subdivision to a five-lot subdivision.

            Tucker said of the notification process, “This is a ploy some developers play.”

            Once again, the project was debated and questions raised by the board members for an hour. Tucker finally said, “Let’s not do their work for them. Okay, so you guys weren’t ready for us tonight.” He also said that if an early version of the project had received approval by the Conservation Commission, a revised plan would have to go through that process again. The hearing was continued until March 18.

            Earlier in the evening, the Planning Board granted a Form A: Approval Not Required to Gingras Construction for a single buildable lot subdivision located off Fairhaven Road, the site of a former gravel pit. Gingras’ plan noted a four-acre lot for the construction of a house with the possibility of gifting an unbuildable wetlands area to the Town.

            Also approved was a Form A: Approval Not Required to Arthur Harris for property located off Aucoot Road for the construction of a single-family home on four acres.

            Tree Warden Roland Cote received permission to cut down a tree located at 14 Linhares Avenue. He said the homeowner was requesting the tree be removed and would replace it with a specimen that would be less intrusive. Cote noted that the locust tree in question had a root system that was breaking up the homeowner’s driveway and shedding limbs and branches that might threaten the property further.

            The next meeting of the Mattapoisett Planning Board is scheduled for March 18 at 7:00 pm in the Town Hall conference room.

Mattapoisett Planning Board

By Marilou Newell

            At the recommendation of the Capital Planning Committee, the Rochester Board of Selectmen on March 4 approved placing four capital projects on the Annual Town Meeting Warrant totaling $98,703.

            Capital Planning Committee Chairman David Arancio and committee member Barry Patraiko met with the selectmen to review the committee’s selection process and how it prioritized the top four capital spending requests various town departments submitted for consideration.

            Topping the list is the Fire/EMS Department’s request for $28,650 to upgrade existing extraction equipment, which Arancio said scores high on the list because of the public safety nature of the equipment.

            The Highway Department’s request for $35,000 for an emergency generator to power the highway barn and Fire Station 3 also made the list as “high priority” and also “critical” as it would support “life safety operations for the town,” as Arancio described it.

            The committee also recommended Rochester Memorial School’s request for $30,773 to fund its “Go Math!” math curriculum for a three-year contract as opposed to renewing the contract on an annual basis, saving taxpayers $17,220 over three years.

            According to Arancio, this was the school’s number one priority for its capital planning list.

            The $16,000 the school budget was funding each year for the math curriculum would be removed from the school’s operating budget for the next three fiscal years.

            And finally, the committee recommended funding the Plumb Library’s $4,280 request to purchase new computers. The price includes computer setup and the Microsoft Office software, said Arancio, calling the price “nominal” with a “strong upside to those who use technology at the library.”

            “I think it’s great that we moved to having the [capital planning] committee,” said Selectman Brad Morse.

            The formation of a capital planning committee was approved by Town Meeting in 1998, but the committee was never founded.

            “It’s awesome,” continued Morse. “I’ve been doing this a long time and this has been great having this, it takes a lot of steps out of [the planning process].”

            “We hope to next year hit the ground running … so we can really start strategically planning for the Town,” said Arancio.

            “And also represent all the departments and advocate for them impartially,” said Patraiko.

            The committee also recommended adding funds to the Capital Improvement Fund, something that was also passed by Town Meeting but never funded.

            Town Administrator Suzanne Szyndlar supported earmarking money specifically for the capital improvement fund because, she said, “When [the committee is] reviewing capital project needs, there’s actually a pool of money they know they can actually work with.” Currently, she said, the committee can only anticipate whatever amount of free cash is available each year rather than a more fixed amount.

            Szyndlar told selectmen that she would have a draft budget ready for approval for the warrant by the April 1 selectmen’s meeting, but currently there are still some “unknown numbers” to plug in, such as the school budgets and anticipated Town revenue.

            “Revenues look good,” Szyndlar stated, and this year the budget will only rely on $600,000 in free cash to balance the numbers.

            Szyndlar said, when she first started as town administrator, the Town was still relying on $900,000 in free cash to balance the budget, a practice the Town had wanted to relinquish for some time. The reliance on free cash each year has steadily decreased by increments of roughly $100,000 each year, which, Szyndlar said, “To me, that’s quite the accomplishment.”

            Instead of spending all free cash forwarded from the previous fiscal year, Szyndlar said the Town could begin to move more money towards funding stabilization accounts and capital planning reserves.

            “The right direction, for sure,” said Chairman Greenwood “Woody” Hartley.

            Also during the meeting, the board announced that the developer of the proposed 40R housing project has submitted its application to the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development.

            Steen Realty and Development Corporation’s proposal is for a 208-unit housing development slated for the intersection of Routes 58 and 28, known as “Rochester Crossroads.”

            The development, also referred to as a “friendly 40B,” will offer affordable housing in addition to market rate units just like a 40B, but the 40R brings with it the opportunity for Rochester to enforce its zoning regulations while also receiving some financial incentives from the state to help mitigate the increased demand on municipal services and schools.

            The next step in the process is Town Meeting approval of a “Smart Growth Overlay District” bylaw at the Annual May Town Meeting to provide the zoning that would accommodate such a residential development.

            In other matters, the board signed a new three-year contract with Szyndlar as town administrator/town accountant/chief financial officer. Hartley said Szyndlar has done “fine work” since she began three years ago, “And that’s why she’s getting this extended contract. … This contract reflects the job she’s done handling both of those jobs.”

            While signing the contract, Szyndlar joked, “Another three-year sentence,” prompting laughter.

            “We gotcha,” said Hartley.

            The contract is for $131,094 per year, reflecting a 5 percent increase.

            “I think we’ve accomplished a lot in the last three years, and I look forward to the next three years,” said Szyndlar. “It’s been a very good experience for me.”

            The board approved the job description for full-time fire chief, and the position will be posted internally for two weeks. As Hartley pointed out, this will be the first time Rochester ever employs a full-time fire chief. Fire Chief Scott Weigel is currently only a part-time employee.

            The board voted to move forward with a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) agreement with the developers of the Mattapoisett Road solar array field. Town Meeting last year voted to allow the selectmen to enter into such an agreement.

            The board approved allowing its church neighbors to use 35 feet of Town Hall pavement, pending a nod from town counsel, to carry out work related to some forest management the church will be doing in the woods behind Town Hall. The work will begin the last week of March and take about a fortnight to complete. All the board wants is a certificate of insurance from the contractor doing the work so there would be no liability to the town.

            The next meeting of the Rochester Board of Selectmen is scheduled for March 18 at 6:00 pm at the Rochester Town Hall.

Rochester Board of Selectmen

By Jean Perry

There may be viable solutions for the long list of problems facing Marion during this time, but a quick fix won’t come cheaply. Residents planning to attend the Annual Town Meeting in May will be faced with some tough decisions with some hefty price tags, and voters will be forced to cherry pick the problems to throw money at now, decide which ones to put off until next year, or if residents should just bite the bullet and pay it all now via a funding method the Town hasn’t seen in decades.

            Town Administrator Paul Dawson and Finance Director Judy Mooney couldn’t remember the last time voters were faced with a capital outlay override, a ballot question that would fund a capital project all at once in one year with what Mooney and Dawson called a “one-time hit” on residents’ tax bills. But this year, residents could find themselves face to face with not just one capital outlay override, but three – and perhaps even four, if Selectman John Waterman gets his way.

            But what comes first is a Town Meeting vote to allow a capital outlay override to proceed, and no one attending the Marion Board of Selectmen meeting on March 5 knows what voters are going to think when they browse what the warrant has in store this fiscal year.

            But the sequence of events that night unfolded neatly, starting with three members of the Capital Improvement Planning Committee met to offer the CICP’s annual report to the selectmen and run down its list of prioritized capital projects for this year’s Annual Town Meeting warrant. And if you make it to the end of this, you’ll have more of an understanding of the state of the municipality than most.

            This year there were 41 projects submitted for consideration, all of them totaling $11.1 million.

            “I think that’s a record,” said CICP Chairman Paul Naiman, although it likely isn’t the first time the list has totaled $11 million.

            Sixteen of the projects the committee recommended are sewer-related with a total sum of $5 million.

            There were two other top projects outside the wastewater category, one to upgrade the water system by bringing the Mary’s Pond well site online, and a second water system upgrade for Mill Street involving an increase in the size of the pipe.

            “The challenge there was that many of the sewer projects are tied into our ongoing regulatory discussion with the state as well as legal issues,” Naiman said. He then explained that the committee decided to move one wastewater item to the top of list without any request – the underfunded lagoon lining project plan the Town’s engineers utterly underestimated by $2.1 million.

            “We really tried to capture every project that is on the horizon,” said Naiman, calling the CIPC’s list a “forecast planning tool” and “a starting point for planning for next year.”

            “I think they do a tremendous job,” said Selectman John Waterman, equating the results of the committee’s work as creating “order out of chaos.”

            Chairman Norm Hills echoed Waterman’s words, saying, “It is important to be able to look into the future and see where some of the stumbling blocks are,” later adding, “There’s lot of hard decisions we have to make this year.”

            The discussion continued later in the meeting with Town Administrator Paul Dawson and Judy Mooney leading the board through its own detailed list of capital projects in tandem with the CIPC’s list, only this list showed where the funds would come from with updated amounts resulting from recent returns of bids.

            Mooney said this list was presented more like a list of potential articles – mostly capital projects – but also others that didn’t quite fit into that CICP capital definition. The hard part though, was trying to figure out how to put it all on the Town Meeting warrant without completely turning off the voters.

            Some funding for some items will come from past articles with remaining balances, a scouring that Dawson and Mooney performed in order to avoid “hitting the taxpayers” too hard with requests for free cash. And although often it’s the devil that lies in the details, the presentation of this year’s town meeting warrant might wind up in history as Dawson’s (and Mooney’s, of course) opus before his retirement that looms just days away

            Aside from the wastewater treatment plant to-pay list, there is also the trash truck. For Marion residents who enjoy having their trash collected every week, one of two articles slated for the warrant must be approved – either $582,090 to purchase a new front-loading trash truck to replace the persistently broken truck the Town owns (along with shiny new trash “totes” to put the trash in), or an estimated still undetermined amount to outsource curbside trash collection to a contractor.

            The request for proposal (RFP) is about to go out for outsourcing, and the lowest bid will appear on the warrant. But voters, you must choose one of these two options because, as Dawson put it, “Without either of those, we essentially go out of business.”

            These two options will come via a Proposition 2 ½ override, or the aforementioned capital outlay override – the Marion resident’s one-time tax whack, remember?

            For this one one-time whack, Mooney said the average $400,000 Marion home would see a one-year increase of about $134. Unlike Prop 2 ½ overrides that last for years as tax hikes until the principal is paid off, the one-time whack is just that – a one-time whack.

            In addition to other “bid alternates” related to wastewater that voters will be asked to approve, Waterman wants to put approving funding for a wastewater infrastructure plan on the warrant, even though residents might already feel taxed to the max with other pressing matters.

            Dawson and Mooney tried explaining to Waterman that, never in recallable history has the Town ever taken a capital project from the bottom of the CIPC’s list and put it on the warrant

Like Waterman wishes to do with the infrastructure plan, but Waterman was adamant that the board should “let the voters vote it down.”

            This, Dawson explained, would potentially be the fourth capital outlay override for Marion voters, even though Dawson, Mooney, and Board of Selectmen Chairman Norm Hills all figure could be held for at least another year or two. But with such dire wastewater straits the Town now navigates, Waterman asserts that Marion needs a $350,000 wastewater infrastructure plan now like a house needs a plan before building the foundation, was his analogy.

            “We’re putting a foundation and we don’t know what we want the house to look like,” said Waterman.

            Then there is still the ORR “TURF” athletic complex renovation request totaling $540,000, which Mooney and Dawson recommend as a debt exclusion to raise funds for the debt service beyond the tax levy.

            “Only because, if you don’t and … it gets voted in by other two towns, [Marion will] have to come up with it from somewhere in the levy,” said Mooney.

            Also during the meeting, the board approved placing an article on the Annual Town Meeting warrant to ask voters to approve a land swap with Richard Patten, owner of Attorney A&J Boat Corp. in Marion.

            Attorney John Mathieu presented the matter to the board, saying the Conservation Commission had already approved a land swap between the boat yard and the Town to swap Conservation Commission land that A&J has been using to store boats at for decades with a 4.22-acre parcel of mostly woods and wetlands for conservation.

            That ConCom approval was pending an appraisal, which has shown the Town’s Boat Works Lane property to be worth $25,000 and the 4.22-acre Rezendes Terrace property $65,000.

            “This seems like the best of the solutions that I’ve heard of over these five years,” said Parker.

            Town Meeting will have the final say on accepting the land swap, as the item will appear as an article on the warrant in May.

            “It’s a good deal to me,” Parker said. “[We’ve] been trying to clean that up for a long time.”

            “It’s been too long,” said Patten.

            In other matters, the board granted Frank McNamee’s request to hang up to six additional Cecil Clark Davis paintings inside the Marion Music Hall. According to McNamee, the request resulted from a request from Phil Sanborn to add some sound reflecting elements to the empty walls of the main hall. McNamee, as president of the Sippican Historical Society, offered the paintings as a more attractive solution rather than simple reflective attachments the Music Hall Committee found unattractive. Sanborn liked the idea, even saying in a letter to McNamee that large canvas paintings would be an equally effective way of enhancing the acoustics in the music hall.

            The next regular meeting of the Marion Board of Selectmen is scheduled for March 19 at 7:00 pm at the Marion Town House.

Marion Board of Selectmen

By Jean Perry