Longer Transfer Station hours, more permissive zoning for the Ayer Road commercial district, and a ban on deer hunting on town conservation land are among the 22 articles that will appear on this fall’s Special Town Meeting warrant.
At their Oct. 8 meeting, Select Board members accepted the nearly two dozen proposals put before them for the upcoming meeting, signed the warrant, and sent it off to be posted online and at Town Hall, the Public Safety Building, and the post office. Now it will be up to attendees to decide each article’s fate at Special Town Meeting when it convenes Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. in Cronin Auditorium at the Bromfield School.
A fall town meeting is typically called each year to deal with unfinished financial business or other matters that can’t wait for Harvard’s Annual Town Meeting in the spring. This year is no different. There are unpaid bills to be paid, budget errors to be corrected, dollars to be transferred from one account to another, and new projects to be considered.
But for the first time in anyone’s memory, the town will also get to decide, before the arrival of May flowers, how to use this year’s free cash. That decision has typically had to wait for Annual Town Meeting while the finance department labored to close its books, calculate the cash remaining from the prior fiscal year, and win Department of Revenue certification. Town officials say that credit for this year’s early certification belongs to Harvard’s new Finance Director Lori Bolasevich and the work of her staff. As a result, Special Town Meeting attendees will get to decide whether to use some of this year’s $1.2 million in free cash to pay for articles on the fall warrant or tuck all the money away for future capital projects.
Among the money articles are requests to pay for:
- Salary increases due employees of the Police Department under the recently settled collective bargaining agreement
- Extra employee hours to keep the Transfer Station open longer on Saturdays and Wednesdays
- Purchase of a water tank mixing unit and design for a chlorination system.
- Repair of a section of the town library roof that was not replaced when the new library was built
- Spring maintenance of town athletic fields prior to the start of fiscal 2021
Once the money articles are decided, attendees will be asked to transfer whatever free cash remains to the Capital Stabilization and Investment Fund, the town’s piggy bank for large expenditures, whose use requires the approval of the Capital Planning and Investment Committee. Harvard’s bylaws require the Select Board to put such an article before Town Meeting each year, but it is up to attendees to approve it.
While the four commercial district bylaw articles put forward by the Planning Board will draw objections from some members of the Harvard community, the most controversial article is likely to be Article 18, a citizen petition whose passage would ban hunting on Harvard conservation land. The question of whether to allow some hunting has been the subject of meetings, forums, and heated debate on social media. Throughout the summer and fall the Deer Management Subcommittee of the Conservation Commission has studied the matter and recommended that controlled bow hunting be allowed to reduce Harvard’s deer population. But a group of citizens wants to amend the town’s bylaws to prohibit it. (See related article and letter.) Town Administrator Tim Bragan told the Select Board last week that Article 18, as written, is defective, but he said its flaws could be corrected by a motion made by its proponents on the floor of Special Town Meeting.
Next week, the Harvard Press will publish a special pre-town meeting issue of the paper, which will include a Guide to Special Town Meeting for newcomers to our unique form of direct democratic government, special coverage of selected articles, and the Press’ own Warrant in Plain English, where we explain the reasoning behind each proposal as well as its impact.
The Special Town Meeting warrant can be viewed in its entirely HERE.
