WHITMAN – While, the town’s new DPW building is “very close” to completion, having received its substantial completion certificate, Committee member Scott Lubker said, there are still items on a punch list that need to be completed.
The building is now slated to be completed by Sept. 30, but the department hopes to be in the building by the beginning of September.
“That list has gone down quite a bit, but there are still some open items inside and outside the building,” he said during the committee’s Monday, Aug. 11 meeting. Landscaping, moving the island, capping the hill in the back and completing the removal of contaminated soil there, among some of the larger items.
The soil must be tested for each 100 cubic yards, as required by the receiving facility – and there are 400 to 500 cubic yards still on the property. The last test result is expected any day, but the slow pace is delaying parking lot paving. The cost for removal of the tank is $250,000 in cleanup costs and removal and other punchlist items brings the net interest of the project costs, but overall the project is still within the $19,010,000 building cost, punchlist work is funded by the contingency line in that budget.
Lubker said the contractors were not liable for that cost because the tank had been slowly leaking for years.
He said Pompeo pavers have been talking to the town and Page Contractors almost daily and Boston Green Environmental is doing the managing of the soil removal.
“I expect it to be done within the next two weeks, but I don’t expect it to be done tomorrow or the next day,” he said, reminding the committee that goes into a busy time for pavers.
Soil that was contaminated by a leaking oil tank is stockpiled and ready for removal, but it is a slow process to have it hauled to a site in Chicopee.
Another problem would be encountered if the paving begins but is interrupted by the pace of contaminated soil removal. Rescheduling to complete paving in such a case would add a $5,000 “remobilization fee” to the cost of paving.
Chair Kevin Cleary asked what “substantial” exactly means, as the punch list had been issued to the company involved, Page Contracting, on July 15.
“I don’t know how our contract reads, but we only have 21 days after that to add to the punchlist and we want to make sure that some of the things that are coming up are on there, or are going to be on there,” Cleary said. Items had been added to the list after the July 15 communication.
Lubker replied that items that had been previously discussed were on the punchlist, but he was not certain why the contractor had not updated the date.
Town Administrator Mary Beth Carter asked if the list had been signed off on yet, and Lubker said it had not.
Member Rick Anderson asked if the list had been distributed to the committee. Lubker replied it was included in the substantial completion certificate in the bid documents file the committee can access.
“Once we sign the certificate, the meter starts,” said Committee member Frank Lynam.
“A lot of those items – I’m not going to say most of them – but a lot of them have been walked through with Page, and it seems like they’re complete … but we’re not responsible for back punching,” he said. “They need to come in. We’ve asked them for several weeks, after each meeting, as it relates to getting the building turned over, taking off the builder’s risk and putting it on the schedule of locations to the town.”
A Page vehicle was seen arriving at the building site on Tuesday morning, Aug. 12.
“The builder’s list needs are more current,” Carter said. “They need one dated within two weeks to when they converted on the schedule. That’s what we’ve been waiting for. We haven’t signed off.”
Cleary said it made sense to have DPW superintendents David Lemay and Bruce Martin or anyone in the department to “at least take a look at that list.”
Lynam said it probably also makes sense for someone from the architectural firm to walk the property with Lemay and Martin to get a final list, as he had received from Facilities Director Todd DeCouto.
Other punch list concerns include copper piping in the pressure washer unit, there is also some IT work to be done by the town.
“He needs to come out,” Cleary said. “He needs to tell us that the punchlist is done. … Ultimately, he needs to sign off. … Obviously, there’s still a lot of work outside, but as long as they’ve finished paving the parking lot … we’re covered. I’m more concerned with inside the building and the little stuff on the operational things and design things that need to be done.”
Committee member Dan Salvucci agreed that DPW officials should walk the building with the owner’s project manager (OPM), point out items and see if they are on the punchlist.
“They’re the ones who work with it every day,” he said. “Like the hose to wash the trucks on the wrong side. …Looking at that, someone should have said, ‘Well, this isn’t right,’ before they even connected the hose.”
“They have the scope of the building,” Lynam said. “They should know exactly [what might be falling short], because what we’re talking about are defects. We’re talking about incomplete items and defects.”
He said that, at this point in the process, it should not be necessary to extend the punchlist.

Change can be hard, but it is inevitable.
With that in mind, I am announcing that next week’s Whitman-Hanson Express will be my last in the role of editor – I am retiring from full-time journalism after nearly 40 years of working for community newspapers.
Many of you may be aware that I’ve been dealing with Parkinson’s nearly as long as I’ve been at this paper, and lately the symptoms have begun to intensify. It’s time.
As a generally introverted person, this had always been an unexpected path for me to traverse, but I came to love it, and refused to give it up, even as coworkers over the years and newspaper gigs, left the profession for more lucrative careers, but there’s another major reason why I stayed.
I come from stubborn stock – the family tree is full of bull-headed Irish from both sides of the religious/political divide in the auld sod – and I was raised by reticent Yankees from northwestern Connecticut.
None of us has ever liked throwing in the towel.
My grandfather, Norris Seelye, “retired” from dairy farming at 83. At least, that’s when he sold the last of his cows. The Shetland pony had expired of old age a few years before. Dad discovered this when he encountered his father heading to the pasture with a shovel on one shoulder on a hot and humid summer morning in 1983.
Asked where he was going with that shovel, my grandfather merely replied: “Pony died.”
I can only imagine the negotiations involved in convincing him to put the shovel down, while my dad called a local friend in the contracting business to come to the farm with a backhoe to bury poor Smokey, who had nearly been forgotten amid the goings-on.
When I was trying to think of the best way to announce my retirement, I thought of Norris – affectionately called grampy by my brothers and me. We’re not blood relatives – my father was adopted – but I doubt many people could nurture grandchildren to the point where it wasn’t clear where nature left off and nurture began.
So, here I am, faced with the same decision Norris had to make a little while before I began my career, and at a younger age than he called it a day.
Still, for years after he retired, he’d put on his work clothes in the morning, pull on his heavy Wellington-style barn boots and start meandering around the place, puttering. When he got tired, he’s stop and scan the sky, “looking for airplanes.”
I can see myself a bit in this picture.
Friends in need
This is only fitting, especially as I have promised my publisher Deb Anderson, that I would stick around for a bit and write the odd meeting story, even when the meetings are not odd themselves.
I can’t thank Deb enough for all she has done for me since buying the Express from Josh Cutler before he made his foray into politics. While I’m at it, thank you, Josh as well for giving me that chance when it was much needed.
You gave me a fresh start after I was laid off so my former publisher opted to have one less squeaky wheel in the newsroom — and he could redecorate it with what he’d been paying me, he decided.
But it is Deb Anderson’s generosity and support that has made the most difference, in the past five years or so, especially. As my Parkinson’s progressed and my medical needs changed, you gave me a way to earn a paycheck and the insurance I needed, while putting off your own retirement.
Your editorial support has also been deeply appreciated, as you have backed me when you could and corrected me when it was called for, a much-appreciated sounding board and wind at my back for those tough decisions.
I hope you can arrange your own exit while you can still enjoy your piece of heaven in Plympton, where it is so quiet, one could begin to think the world just went away.
Here’s to many years of being Ms. Debby to your grandkids and being a friend and ally to humming birds and your grand-dogs, too, whether or not the latter eat your furniture.
Getting here
I never had a plan when I started my career, and I don’t really have one now. In fact, I had never really planned anything about my life, and about two weeks before my graduation from Litchfield [Conn.] High School, which is now incorporating into a regional school. Eerie, isn’t it?
I had a mailer from Post College in Waterbury, Conn., which offered Journalism as one of its associate degree programs. That sounded interesting to this post-Watergate era student.
When I graduated there, I transferred to Bowling Green State University in Ohio. After graduation, I was among a group of J-School interns working one or both major party nominating conventions as an Associated Press photography interns. Cost prohibited me from doing both unpaid internships, so I worked at the Democratic National Convention that summer of 1980, because it was in New York and was close enough for my dad to drive me. The Republicans were convening in Detroit.
I had the opportunity to send photos to delegates’ hometown papers all over the country and chat a bit with photo editors. The last night, after hearing Jimmy Carter’s acceptance street from the photographers’ scaffolding tower in the middle of Madison Square Garden, I was handed a huge camera lens, advised of its $3,000 price tag and advised: “Don’t drop it.”
That was really the start of a career where I found that “Don’t drop it” can apply to so many things.
It computes
Computers, for one.
At Bowling Green, I had a two-minute introduction to a CompuGrapic – word processer, I guess. The professor actually let us turn it on and off as he marveled that we would soon be able to “cut” and “paste” copy without having to actually tear a paragraph from one page and tape it to another.
My first job, split between the State Line Free Press in North Canaan and Falls Village, Conn., and its big sister the Torrington Register-Citizen, reporters’ favorite feature about CompuGraphic was the ability to post interoffice memos on the command bar. Usually, the message was, “Take a chill pill,” when things got tense in the newsroom on composing days.
I can trace my career in terms of hardware.
The typewriters used in college gave way to CompuGraphic units the size of small Volkswagens. The Free Press used Apple IIe’s with their annoying absinthe-green screen and eternally blinking cursor. When the Fitchburg-Leominster Sentinel & Enterprise brought in C-Text computers, we cursed the need to do math. You had to calculate how the column inches of a story would stretch over a number of columns. I was not a fan.
Then it was back to Apple, as the iMacs arrived at the office, along with the publisher’s rain on our parade when he told us we were all getting aqua. None of the company’s trademark choice of red or orange or blue.
I was leaning to orange just to be different. The internet arrived and a choice of Mac or PC for page design through the Quark software system.
It crashed a lot no matter which software you chose.
Here at the Express, I had to learn another production software on both Macs and PCs.
The places I went
The reporting itself has been largely the same wherever you go, town boards and committees struggled with budgets from North Canaan and Brooklyn, Conn., to Leominster, Southbridge, Whitman and Hanson here in the Bay State. Graduations, elections, land use disagreements and the like rolled by.
The kindergarten pupils whose photos I would take at school events in North Canaan are middle-aged now.
But there were also the rare opportunities to cover something really cool – covering the Oct. 26, 1994 senate debate between Sen. Ted. Kennedy and former Gov. Mitt Romney in Holyoke, and with the small team of coworkers from the Sentinel & Enterprise dispatched to Hartford for the Oct. 6, 1996 presidential debate between President Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan.
At the former, a cousin who worked advance for Kennedy asked me if I was covering it for my college paper. I was 36 at the time, but he might have made the connection because the event was held at Holyoke Community College. Still…
We were wide-eyed babes in the woods at the presidential debate, even though we were stuck in the vast media overflow room and watched it on TV, like everyone else. I had been fascinated, watching the Arabic characters on a Saudi reporter’s laptop fill the screen from right to left, and was blown away by the organized chaos of the spin room after the debate.
The Sentinel & Enterprise had also granted me two leaves during the fall of 1993 and January 1994 to volunteer on Red Cross disaster relief efforts in the Midwest floods of 1993 and the Valencia, Calif. Earthquake a few months later in return for a story or two.
Assigned as a public relations volunteer at both. In Quincy, Ill., it was rather routine stuff by that time of the relief effort, that had begun in April 1993. But on the day Gov. Jim Edgar was visiting the destroyed town of Hull, I was on hand – and first was nearly overcome with heat exhaustion, and then, when the governor’s helicopter arrived, the flying dust stuck to my face, arms and any other exposed skin where I had liberally applied sunscreen.
It was humbling.
Last, but not least, I thank the Whitman and Hanson communities. You have trusted me with your truths in good times and bad. You’ve offered me the occasional pat on the back or thank you for a job well done enough times to make up for the brickbats coming my way for the errors that happen when human beings report the news.
They, happen, too, and it always helped when a call for a correction recognized my sincere efforts to get things right.
If I had to sum up these past 40 years, I’d say any career can be an adventure, and you never know what will make you laugh at yourself.
Now I know why my grandfather had been reluctant to let go, but if he were here today, I believe he’d be the first to tell me – it’s time.
What’s next?

WHITMAN — No injuries were reported as the Whitman Fire Department quickly extinguished a house fire that started in a pet snake enclosure on the second floor of a home on Morgan Road Sunday night.
Whitman Fire responded to a report of a house fire at 12 Morgan Road, a two-story wood frame house at about 10:45 p.m., Sunday, July 27, according to Fire Chief Timothy Clancy, who said a faulty electrical connection was a likely cause.
The residents made it safely outside before Whitman firefighters arrived on scene. The occupants of the home advised firefighters that the fire was based in the second-floor bedroom.
Under the command of Capt. Jason Mahoney, Whitman firefighters stretched a line through the front door to the second floor, finding a small fire in a pet snake enclosure, before swiftly extinguishing the flames. The fire did not spread to any other rooms in the house.
A python was found alive in the room, and it was removed by Whitman firefighters, who returned the pet reptile to its owners.
Clancy said the snake was found “very much alive” in a corner of the same room where the fire began and a firefighter managed to get it into a cloth bag. There had been no need to call the Animal Control Officer.
Chief Clancy then called the Whitman Board of Health, the Whitman Electrical Inspector, and the Massachusetts State Police assigned to the State Fire Marshal’s Office to the scene for inspections and to assist in the investigation.
The initial investigation by the Whitman Fire Department and Massachusetts State Police determined that the occupants had been at home during the evening, when they smelled smoke and eventually discovered the fire in the second-floor bedroom. An occupant of the home attempted to extinguish the fire with a fire extinguisher, before closing the bedroom door and exiting the building.
Inspectors determined that the home was equipped with working smoke detectors at the time of the fire.
All Fire Department units cleared the scene by 1 a.m.
Mutual aid was provided by the East Bridgewater Fire Department, including East Bridgewater Tower 1 and Fire Chief John Dzialo; Hanson Engine 1 and Fire Chief Robert O’Brien; and Abington Engine 4. The Whitman Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Rehab Unit, Halifax Ambulance and Whitman Police also provided assistance at the scene. Rockland Engine 11 provided station coverage for the duration of the incident.
“I would like to thank everyone who helped respond to this incident and commend them for their professionalism,” Chief Clancy said. “We’re glad that no one was hurt as a result of this fire, including the pet snake. We were able to quickly put out the flames before they spread elsewhere throughout the house preventing further damage to the property, which is always good news.”