The to-do list of the Town Center Sewer Action Group (TCSAG) seems to grow even as it contracts—like a glacier on the verge of a final breakup and retreat.
Draft a home rule petition for the May Annual Town Meeting: check. Send explanatory letters and betterment estimates to every town center property owner: they’re in the mail. Get a nod of approval from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for rolling a wastewater plant upgrade into the sewer plan: received. Get the word out to stakeholders and the town: under way, with much more to come.
With an April deadline for publishing the town warrant fast approaching, TCSAG Chairman Chris Ashley and committee member Wade Holtzman delivered their first working draft of a home rule petition to the selectmen Tuesday. The petition is needed to establish a sewer district and prescribe rules for its governance. If approved by Town Meeting in May, the petition will go to the state Legislature, where it would likely take four to six months to become law.
This week, every property owner within the boundaries of the proposed sewer district was to have received a letter and an estimate of the betterment fees they are likely to pay. A blizzard of outreach activities is also about to begin, including an open meeting at the library’s Volunteers Hall on March 19; broadcasts of public meetings on local cable as well as distribution of free DVDs of the broadcasts through the library; a regular committee e-mail newsletter that residents can sign up for; and the posting of all public documents on the committee’s website for citizens who want to dive into the details.
Yet new issues accumulate. What if the town rejects the plan? Because the town wastewater plant has periodically failed to meet the terms of its license over the past 12 months, the DEP will want its problems corrected. That means TCSAG needs a backup warrant article to authorize spending on a fix. But that in turn requires an engineering study to determine costs.
“The fact is that a do-nothing option is not a no-cost option,” said Ashley, speaking of the consequences of a rejected sewer warrant.
“How soon can [an engineering estimate] be ready?” asked Board of Selectmen Chairman Leo Blair.
“Next week,” answered Ashley.
Outreach to the public is a continuing concern. “That’s been one of our goals for the committee: to make sure that we actually make direct contact with [everyone in the proposed district],” said Selectman Tim Clark.
“I think we’ve been pretty good about that,” answered Holtzman. Every town center property owner was called before the March 3 meeting, he said—though only about 25 of 64 stakeholders attended—and plenty of activities are scheduled over the next few weeks.
What about the allocation of construction fees between the town and sewer district residents if the warrant article is approved? The home rule petition will specify what percentage will be borne by each group of stakeholders. Originally, TCSAG recommended private property owners pay 94 percent of the cost. But based on feedback from participants at the hearing for property owners last week, TCSAG now suggests 80 percent might be a more equitable number, given the overall value to the town of an improved town center, a move that would lower estimated private property betterments to roughly $22,000—not including the cost of a pump and connection—or a decrease of $5,000 to $6,000 per property.
“But … you haven’t determined finally how that allocation’s going to work yet; you’re working on it, right?” said Blair.
Correct, said Ashley, though “there’s not too many more directions to go.” He said TCSAG will take another look at the issue and come up with an answer.
A final issue is how to plan for a venture that still has so many unknowns. This is a different kind of process, said Ashley. “There will be a lot of information [that] can’t be known until we embark on [building the district]. How do we create a process where the public has a high degree of confidence that what they’ve looked at and deliberated on will then be what gets delivered through the process of implementation?”
Ashley thinks the way to deal with the uncertainties is to draft “a set of guiding principles and some financial circuit breakers that would allow … [a] transitional team to guide that work in the absence of a sewer commission and provide assurance that if things start to change, we say, ‘time out, let’s pull back and look at this.’”
“At some point, we’d like to bless this thing, or not,” Blair said. “We’d like to make some real progress on this at the next [selectmen’s] meeting.”
Ashley has a different concern, one expressed in a separate interview: at some point, he said, if the town center residents really want this new system, they need to campaign for it “with signs on their lawns, the whole deal.” That’s because for taxpayers, the project is cost-neutral and will even bring savings once initial financing is complete, he said. Although all residents will benefit from a revitalized center, it’s the property owners who will gain the most but who will also bear most of the cost, he concluded.
