At this week’s Monday meeting, the Capital Planning and Investment Committee (CPIC) began its annual review of capital requests by hearing from three town departments: the Department of Public Works, the Fire Department, and the Ambulance Service. Fiscal 2020 requests received by the committee, including those reviewed Monday, thus far total $1.7 million, with remaining applications scheduled for scrutiny in coming weeks.
DPW
DPW Director Tim Kilhart requested $195,100 for a replacement heavy-duty dump truck. He explained that the town uses seven of these trucks and they each last about 22 years, so one needs to be replaced every few years. The truck scheduled for replacement, a 1999 model, will be sold for $5,000 to $10,000. He also requested $79,160 for a new light-duty dump truck to replace a 2008 truck that has experienced expensive chronic maintenance issues (costing $4,000 in the first four months of this year alone). Kilhart’s next item was $60,000 to refurbish the town’s street sweeper. Replacing the item was deemed prohibitively expensive, costing about $225,000. However, in the absence of a working sweeper, the town would pay an estimated $14,280 annually to outsource the work. Kilhart also requested $350,000 for a design and engineering study of Ayer Road, aiming to improve it with various upgrades, including sidewalks and a proposed rotary north of Route 2. He explained that this expenditure is necessary to secure a grant from the state Transportation Improvement Program for the estimated $5.5 million cost of the project, which he described as “urgent.. When asked to rank the projects in descending order of importance, Kilhart ranked them: Ayer Road study, light-duty truck, street sweeper, heavy-duty truck.
Fire Department
Fire Chief Rick Sicard asked for $25,000 for fire hose replacements. This will pay for the replacement of a 30-year-old hose, and the department is also applying for grants to upgrade newer hoses. He also asked for $48,500 for stage three (out of three) of a project to upgrade the town’s fire alarms. Stage two, which has already been completed, equipped all public buildings with radio alarms that improve response times. Stage three would also install these alarms in many privately owned buildings, such as homes, businesses, and churches, near the center of town, and would eventually generate revenue by charging owners $25 per year to be connected to the improved system. CPIC Chair John Seeley recommended that Sicard wait a year before proceeding with the project, and that he use the time to establish demand for the system.
Ambulance Service
The only project for the Harvard Ambulance Service is a $45,000 request to replace the department’s 50 portable radios. HAS Finance Director Will Stevenson explained that the current radios are 15 years old, are no longer supported by the manufacturer (making them difficult to repair), and are now rated as “business class” rather than “mission critical.. The switch would also bring Harvard’s ambulance service onto the industry standard of using UHF rather than VHF frequencies to communicate. When CPIC member Alice von Loesecke suggested replacing the radios in stages over multiple years, Stevenson pointed out that forcing volunteers to carry multiple radios during the transition time would cause confusion and might lead to a loss of equipment.
Harvard’s capital bylaw requires that any request for spending greater than $20,000 or with a useful life greater than five years, must be reviewed by CPIC, which rates each request and then recommends to the Select Board which expenditures to fund.
