Coordinator report June 9, 2011 Held meeting with building inspector Delorey (BI) regarding zoning and code matters on last Monday. He is not available to meet with us at our June 13 meeting due to prior a commitment. I will schedule a later meeting. BI agrees that Attorney Black is correct that there is a difference between our special permit (SP) for a mobile home while building a house and our SP for temporary living facility. In the former case it is six months and move it out. We agreed that the town should ask the ZBA to require as a condition that any renovations require a building permit and that there should be a deeded restriction to keep temporary living facilities from being converted from temporary. We discussed accessory structures which is how somebody would build a shed or other outbuilding on their land that doesn't meet zoning for a residence. That means someone can build, subject to getting a building permit, a tree house or barn on their land. Phil is going to contact Mr. Silva who owns the tree house and the little house without permits to direct him to seek building permits and at double the fee as penalty. Then Silva will need to seek temporary living facility permits if they want to sleep there more than 14 days per year. I reported to the BI that we feel, based on Attorney Black's representations, that we will be able to address the zoning matter on the properties and ownerships he represents. These are the vacation travel trailers. All four lots are going to need Health Code variances. We discussed at length the Severance court case at Hockanum and Orange Rd where an occupancy permit can not yet be issued. This is in housing court as a health code matter and the owner is under a court order not to live there. To prove that she is violating the order is a difficult matter. The court case is up for review Sept 16. I will draft a letter to the owner telling her that she needs to have a plumber and electrician sign off on the work so it can be inspected. We have options that range from giving up to giving notice that if she fails to complete the plumbing and electrical inspections we will seek to enforce the building code and demolish the structure. Municipal Lighting Plant (MLP) We need to name our newly formed lighting plant. Reva has suggested Wired Warwick. The Selectboard is the governing body. We need to appoint a manager / delegate and Reva would like to continue serving. We can appoint Patricia as alternate. Wired West wants an appointment good until revoked. That isn't legal so I suggest three years. By mid July we will need to supply a document to WW demonstrating the appointment. Our formation of the MLP has been filed with the DPU. The Broadband Committee has voted to use $1000 from its budget to pay the Wired West cooperative membership fee. DCR Forest Zone is on the agenda. To my knowledge Ted and Patricia have attended sessions. Do we want to send a letter from the Selectboard? Exemptions and ethics disclosures are on the agenda in case I recognize the need for any. End of year transfers are permitted with approval of Selectboard and Finance committee. This is different from Reserve Fund. Highway Dept. requests a transfer of $1700 from salary line to expense line to pay for repairs to the lightning damaged alarm system. We have a $1000 deductible policy and the insurance proceeds will go to the general fund / free cash. A motion to approve this transfer is requested. Some end of year matters will be before the Finance Committee. We are short on health insurance and fire department had some extraordinary repairs to make on the '57 Dodge engine 1. These amounts are $1250 and $6050 respectively. No Selectboard action required, this is only informational. It is time to make our annual appointments. The Town's significant vacancies to appoint are: Veterans Agent, Cemetery Commissioner (this is elected but we have a vacancy to appoint until next election) and Recreation Commission. I am interviewing interested resident candidates for Veterans Agent. Nobody has stepped forward for the latter positions. All have been pretty well publicized in the newsletter and e-mail list. H. bill 3438, the so called Public Lands Preservation Act may concern me. MMA opposes it. We don't want to be prevented by out-of-towners if we, as a community, ever decided we want to use a piece of one of our Town Forests to site a school or fire station. In fact we did a land swap to this effect for the school in the past. If the board directs me I will contact Representative Andrews and ask her to oppose it. In the past two weeks I have done some advocacy on behalf of phone customers with Verizon. The most recent haul of bulky waste cost the Enterprise Fund $828 dollars against $489 in collections. This was for 5.73 tons of material. We collected enough to pay for the tipping / disposal fee only. The taxpayers had to pay for the hauling, the disposal of a mattress and roll off rental for the month. Amounts collected for previous loads were: $695, $606, $508, $450 respectively. This suggests to me that we need to collect about $1.60 for every $1.00 we are now collecting on bulky waste. I think it is undercharges on the partial loads that are hurting us most. I strongly recommend we increase collections there. If that doesn't correct the situation very quickly, we need to increase the truckload fees from $50 / $100 to $75 / $150 In the long term we should acquire a scale. I am not suggesting one we can drive onto, just one that folks can load their partial load onto and we can establish a real basis for our charges for partial loads. An old railroad scale or an electronic one that will weigh up to 500 lbs will do. A scale will settle the push back that George deals with from customers at every turn by letting the customer load their stuff onto the scale if they don't like what he says it will cost to dump their bulky waste. Then we can do the math. Bottom line: We lost $340 dollars on $489 in sales and that is no way to run a business. Warwick contracted through FRCOG for fixed price on both diesel at $3.84 and fuel oil at $3.57. I have a non-profit trustee's meeting in CT at the same time so won't be attending the next meeting of STAM, the small town administrators organization. Meeting is at the Salem Crofts Inn and lunch is paid for by MIIA. I regret I won't' be able to eat MIIA's free lunch. Three years ago Warwick switched to Massamount / Trident and they lowered our deductibles, increased our building valuations, and cut our premiums by more than 20% saving Warwick over $10,000 per year. We added a $54,000 highway truck this year and the premium went up $380. We are going into year three for renewal with Trident with no increase in our cost. My friends at MIIA assured me we'd get slammed with a big increase after year one. It didn't happen and it doesn't hurt to shop. Free lunch or no. A broadband propagation model for our 2.4 and 900 systems was delivered by MBI. Brad Compton is laying this over the tax parcel data for us. Beth Gilgun added the map and parcel data to our customer database. I answered MBI follow-up questions on our grant proposal. The responses are included in the meeting package. I went up Mt Grace three times over the past two weeks to correct problems. These are just growing pains. We now have twelve access points on Mt Grace and are beginning to migrate customers and load balance. I worked with Tim and FD to and verified the list of town vehicles with insurance. I note that the tanker we declared surplus is still in service.