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
