2014 Town Meeting - Night Five

Tonight should have been the night when we really turned the corner and set ourselves up to finish on Wednesday.  However, for a variety of reasons, tonight dragged, and we barely accomplished our most important task for the night, approving the budget.

We started with an hour of announcements, declarations, and reports in a very warm hall.  If there was ever a recipe for lethargy, this was it.  However, this should in no way detract from the importance of this portion of the meeting.  After our nightly singing of the Star Spangled Banner, we heard a proclamation from the Board of Selectmen thanking Elisabeth Carr Jones and Edward Starr for their many years of service to the town serving on the TAC.  This well-deserved praise was very touching.  We were also introduced to two women from either Afghanistan or Pakistan, in our country to learn about democracy.  (I apologize for not noting the country.)  The town manager had invited them to come and see our local democracy in action (inaction?).  I hope they were entertained.

Our first order of business was to reopen the Special Town Meeting from Night Two to act on Article Five.  We had postponed action on this article unti the bids for the central fire station were opened at the end of last week.  As it turns out, there were two bids under the budgeted amount, so an additional appropriation was unnecessary.  We quickly voted no action on the article and dissolved the special.  Those results will be quickly transferred to the state's AG office for approval before the end of the fiscal year.

We then tabled the main budgets to address the next article which was an appropriation to the Assessor for incidental property revaluations.  I wanted to know if that office routinely checks during revaluations to confirm the number of residential units in a building, something, it turns out, they do not do.  I believe there are some properties with unregistered additional units that are not paying their fair share of property taxes.  I hope the town can try and investigate this in the future.  There was also some consternation expressed because the Assessors did not have a representative at the previous session when this article was first raised.  The department's representative was very apologetic.  The appropriation was passed on a voice vote.

We then returned to the main budget, the most important item we have before us every year.  We had barely starter when the power went out in the hall.  It was out for less than a minute, but it was long enough to clearly note that neither the exit signs nor the emergency lights in Town Hall work.  I tried to catch the inspector and/or fire chief after the meeting, but both left too quickly.  (I will write to them separately to investigate and resolve this complete breakdown of the building's safety systems.)  While we waited for the video feed to ACMi to reboot, we went to break early.

After break, we sloughed through the budgets.  This is an opportunity for town meeting members to address all the town departments, so many questions are more operations-related than budget issues.  Ed Trembley asked his annual question of the DPW chief, "So, how much salt did we use last year?"  Eighty-five hundred tons was the answer this year.  Steve Harrington had a lot of good questions tracking funds between budgets to see how money was flowing between departments.  None of the requests were very contentions, and we voted to approve the 2014 budget right before we adjourned for the night.