The Select Board closed the warrant Tuesday night for this fall’s Special Town Meeting. The board’s four members voted to present five articles at the Sept. 27 gathering, including a repeat request to purchase land on Old Mill Road for an additional playing field. But attendees will first have to dispose of three articles remaining from the May 3 Annual Town meeting.
The three undecided articles are zoning bylaw amendments: a proposal for a new town center overlay district; a map of that district; and a form-based code to regulate development of the commercial district. They’re back because the exhausted 100 voters who remained in Cronin Auditorium at 6 p.m. chose to postpone their consideration.
The postponement has led to an unusual schedule for Sept. 27. At noon, the May session of Annual Town Meeting will reconvene to deal with that meeting’s unfinished business. The Select Board’s hope is that the three articles can be debated and voted on by 1 p.m., when a Special Town Meeting is scheduled to begin. If that is not the case, Moderator Bill Barton will have to pause the Annual Town Meeting session once again so he can call the Special Town Meeting to order. As in May, he must specify when the Annual Town Meeting session will resume, which could be later that day or a future day and date.
In addition to closing the Special Town Meeting warrant Tuesday night, the Select Board also called for a Special Election Oct. 8 to fill its empty fifth seat for a one-year term. The last day to file an intention to run and obtain nomination papers with the town clerk is Aug. 20. The last day to file the papers with the town clerk is Sept 3.
At the Special Town Meeting, voters will decide the fate of five proposals, one of which is a repeat. Article 4 asks voters to approve purchase of 6 acres of land on Old Mill Road for recreational purposes, a measure that Town Meeting rejected by three votes in May. The owners of the land have agreed to delay its sale to another party to give Town Meeting time to reconsider the purchase. The cost remains $440,000, and the Capital Planning and Investment Committee has once again approved use of money in the Capital Stabilization and Investment Fund to pay for it.
The remaining four articles include requests to:
- Appropriate $750,000 to pay for the permanent and temporary easements needed in connection with the Ayer Road Transportation Improvement Project; the money will be drawn from the General Stabilization Fund.
- Create the position of Public Works Department operations manager as a full-time position, with fringe benefits, appointed by the town administrator and under the direction of the public works department director.
- Appropriate $200,000 to support feasibility study and schematic design of heat pumps for the heating and cooling of the Bromfield School.
- Accept the provisions of Massachusetts General Laws that allow the water commissioners to assess betterments by a uniform unit method, an alternative to the method currently used to calculate betterments. This vote, the Select Board has stated, would not apply to the current project on Depot Road.
The Finance Committee has yet to weigh in on any of the money articles, but is expected to do so at its next meeting. None of the measures requires additional tax dollars or borrowed money.
In upcoming issues of the paper, Press reporters will dive into the details and impacts of the five Special Town Meeting articles as well as the three bylaw proposals remaining from May’s Annual Town Meeting.
