Last Saturday, on one of this winter’s coldest days, highway department worker Jim Holmes was a commanding presence at the entrance to the Transfer Station, his day-glo vest lighting up the gray morning as he waved through or halted vehicles heading for the town’s recycling bins and trash compactors.
“Watch this,” Holmes said to an observer as he signaled the operator of a small sedan to stop. The car lacked a valid 2015 sticker on its bumper, but as Holmes approached, the driver reached toward his dashboard and produced one for inspection. That was no longer sufficient, Holmes told him politely. Under new rules, he said, unless the sticker is permanently affixed to the front driver’s side bumper, the driver would be fined $50 if the problem had not been corrected in seven days.
Holmes then wrote down the car’s license plate number, handed the driver a letter from the Department of Public Works announcing new rules, and motioned for him to proceed. The plate numbers were to be given to Public Works Director Rich Nota, Holmes told the Press, but he had no idea what would happen after that.
Enforcement and fines
The DPW’s letter, dated Dec. 29 and signed by Nota, is one of the few visible manifestations of a policy change approved unanimously by the Board of Selectmen at its Dec. 16 meeting, which for the first time imposes fines for a missing or improperly displayed sticker. The policy and increased scrutiny at the dump have provoked an eruption of comment on the Nextdoor Harvard website that spilled into the selectmen’s meeting Tuesday night.
The amended policy says that:
- All Transfer Station stickers must be permanently affixed to the driver’s side front bumper. No exceptions. If it can’t be attached because it is damaged, residents can buy a replacement for $15 dollars or for no charge “if the faulty sticker is presented at Town Hall.”
- First offenders have seven days to correct the problem or face a $50 fine. The fine for each additional offense is $100. For these there is no grace period.
Enforcement of the policy falls to the DPW and the police. Town Administrator Tim Bragan is responsible for notifying violators and imposing fines. Details of how a resident should go about demonstrating compliance after receiving a notice of violation are nowhere spelled out in the revised Transfer Station rules and regulations.
Coming to windshields in FY16
Though yet to be posted, the revised policy says that in fiscal 2016, which begins this coming July, stickers will be manufactured to be affixed to the driver’s side windshield of a permitted vehicle rather than to its bumper.
According to the DPW letter, the imposition of fines was to have begun Wednesday, Jan. 14, making Wednesday, Jan. 21, the deadline for residents to prove they had corrected the problem. As of that date, no notice of the changes had appeared in either of the two newspapers that cover municipal government in Harvard. Although the town’s web page contained a “Quick Link” to “Transfer Station Information,” there was no visible indication that the rules had changed.
In an email to the Press this week, BOS Chairman Stu Sklar wrote that there had been “many complaints” and “personal observations” by some that Transfer Station users didn’t have or weren’t displaying stickers. He said the board thought it was “unfair to people who do pay and who display their stickers in the appropriate spot.”
Bragan told the Press he thought the impetus may have come this fall from the observations of campaign sign-holders—some of them elected town officials—standing at the entrance to the dump. “Many individuals that campaigned at the Transfer Station noticed that some 30 to 35 percent of the vehicles did not have a visible sticker,” Bragan wrote the Press in an email. Recently elected Selectman Ken Swanton, one of the campaigners, said the absence of visible stickers was a subject of conversation.
No stats, plenty of anecdotes
So far this year, the town has distributed 2,285 dump stickers to residents and other qualified users. Each household is entitled to two. Sklar said the town had not compiled statistics to demonstrate the extent of the problem. He said he had not received any email complaints, but he had received comments from people in passing at the General Store, school, and Transfer Station.
Selectman Ron Ricci wrote in an email that many residents had complained to him about people using the dump without a sticker. “Recently, a resident asked me why he should pay if others were not,” Ricci wrote. “One of the transfer station attendants, a town employee, came up to me and said, ‘You guys are missing a lot of revenue because people don’t have stickers.’”
According to Executive Assistant Julie Doucet, Selectman Ricci proposed the rules changes. He drafted amendments to the rules and regulations for the current and coming fiscal years (fiscal 2015 and fiscal 2016), and circulated the changes among his colleagues. The board took up the matter for the first time on the Dec. 16 agenda, where discussion of the changes lasted less than 10 minutes. On a motion by Lucy Wallace and seconded by Ricci, the vote to adopt them was unanimous.
Users complain, suggest solutions
At the selectmen’s meeting this Tuesday, Jan. 20, Richard Shrives of Old Mill Road complained that the stickers marred the metal bumpers of vehicles, echoing the complaints of more than two dozen residents who commented on the policy changes on Nextdoor Harvard. Shrives said a number of users want to keep their stickers inside their cars because they do not want their hometown to be known. That observation was confirmed by DPW worker Holmes, who said several residents—doctors, prison workers, and psychiatric professionals, for example—had asked to remove Harvard’s name from their stickers, leaving only the license number on display.
Shrives also said that it was contrary to state law to require residents to put anything on their cars. He asked the selectmen to delay enforcement of the new policy pending a legal review.
Meanwhile, by Wednesday morning, Jan. 21, Nextdoor Harvard was afire with more than three dozen comments, both for and against the changes. There were complaints the new policy “criminalized” those who have paid for their stickers but choose not to display them. One resident wrote that the new penalties seemed “a bit militant and not necessarily in keeping with an amicable relationship between residents and the program administrators in a small New England town.”
There was no shortage of solutions either. Several residents suggested that bumper stickers be replaced by a placard that could be hung from a rear-view mirror like a disabled parking permit. Another suggested the town spend $3,000 to install a camera and software to scan the plates of vehicles entering the Transfer Station to identify violators.
Sklar told the Press that he believes the board is open to exploring “new ways” of running the Transfer Station, such as replacing user fees with prepaid trash bags, for example. “[A change] wouldn’t be able to be implemented until fiscal 2017 (July 1, 2016), given the lead time necessary,” he said. “At this point, it isn’t a topic that we are addressing.”
