WHITMAN — The Board of Selectmen voted to back Board of Health decisions about COVID-19 regulations concerning food service and public gatherings as well as authorizing the purchase of ionizing devices to clean air circulating through HVAC systems in town buildings.

At the same time, Town Administrator Frank Lynam offered to discuss meat raffles with health officials and VFW representatives, and the board tabled the issue of motorcycle poker runs vs. rolling “political rallies” to its next meeting.

Selectmen also voted unanimously to extend temporary alcohol licenses under which bars may operate during the pandemic within the governor’s limitations. The licenses expire at the end of the month.

Health regulations

“The problems we have been facing recently have been compounded by a couple of events that have occurred,” Lynam said. “It has been a difficult time for every business that’s operating today under COVID. Most everybody is working with us — although they’re very frustrated about it. …  But, at the same time, the Board of Health is really the deciding factor on what can and can’t be done under COVID.”

VFW Manager Al Rainey had sought permission from the Board of Health to hold a meat raffle, as has been allowed in Abington. Whitman health officials ruled against the request and Rainey brought the request before the Board of Selectmen.

“We’re following the guidelines,” Rainey said. “It’s an entertainment piece that were giving for outside and inside dining.”

He said the VFW is allotted 99 spaces for dining, arguing it is not an “outside event.”

Staff walks among diners showing the packages of meat up for raffle.

He accepted the health board’s ruling against his request until he noticed that Abington was allowing meat raffles, and asked again to determine if state rules had changed.

“The town has a vested interest in not seeing COVID blow up here,” Lynam said. “Wherever they’re getting crowds, wherever they’re getting a lot of people moving around and doing things, they’re getting infections.”

He argued having people walk around, selling tickets and taking money is a “high-risk operation.”

“I don’t disagree with you,” Rainey said. “Money is one of the dirtiest things around.”

“The why would you want to do it?” Lynam said.

He said they are a business that follows the guidelines, but does not have the capability to accept credit cards.

“Where is the level playing field between the two towns?” Rainey said.

“I don’t care what Abington does, Al,” Lynam said. But he did offer to set up a meeting with the health board and VFW to discuss the matter further. The VFW agreed to aide by any decision the Board of Health makes.

Selectman Randy LaMattina said Abington and Whitman are two different fields and the board has to support the Board of Health. He also said the cross-contamination posed by handling money between tables was a concern.

Selectmen Chairman Dr. Carl Kowalski agreed with LaMattina.

“I don’t question the Board of Health,” Kowalski said. “They know what’s going on in town and they take this seriously.”

Selectman Dan Salvucci said he trusts that the Board of Health does take things seriously, “but it’s not six months ago.”

Kowalski took issue with that characterization.

“It’s not six months ago, no,” he said. “We’re about to hit into late fall/early winter, and if you think things are going to get better — magically — then, you’re dreaming.”

“I’m hoping so,” Salvucci said.

Lynam noted a motorcycle event held over the weekend at the VFW, which drew estimates of about 600 motorcylists, in no way permitted social distancing when the maximum outdoor crowd limit if 50 people, or eight per 1,000 square feet.

“That stuff can’t continue and, I think if they heard it from the board rather than me or [Fire Chief Timothy] Grenno, or [Health Agent] Alexis Andrews, they might have a better understanding of it’s the direction we have to go in,” Lynam said.

Police Chief Timothy Hanlon also attended the virtual meeting to discuss events that require police presence and traffic control, that discussion was later tabled for further consideration.

A request for an upcoming poker run prompted the discussion.

Sunday’s America Backs the Blue run had started as a fundraiser for the Michael Chesna family but then turned into a political statement, Hanlon said.

“Our problems are two-fold,” he said. “The gathering that occurred Sunday was way over the [social distancing] limits, so you have to balance the right to assemble against any COVID-related issues such as not wearing masks, not social distancing and having a gathering over a certain number of people,” he said. The Police Department likes to be able to help charities with traffic control free of charge, but he noted it adds to the budget burden.

Hanlon said he would like to see a permitting process to help the department know what to expect, as some of the motorcycle runs sometimes come with no advance notice.

Grenno said the Board of Health had taken a strong line of no motorcycle runs because of the social distancing guidelines and concerns.

Air filters

Lynam said he and Grenno met with WHRSD officials last week to discuss the systems, which generate ion waves that attach to the coronavirus in the air and kills it, as well as airborne bacteria.

“These things have been going gangbusters for the last 90 days,” Lynam said, noting W-H spent $160,000 installing the devices in the schools.

Grenno has received a proposal to install the devices in all town buildings for about $40,000, reimbursable through the Plymouth County COVID funds. They would be placed in HVAC vents — three or four would be required in some buildings — to help create a healthier environment and monitoring the air quality.

“It kills strep, it kills TB, it kills COVID,” Grenno said. “It kills all kinds of common, known viruses and bacteria out there.”

He advocated installation in all town buildings not only for better air quality, but for peace of mind, as well.

The manufacturer also sells the devices for home use, saying the only negative feedback they had received was from a man who could no longer smell his bacon and eggs cooking in the morning.

“It works that good,” Grenno said, adding that the schools also report a noticeable difference in air quality. “It’s just a freshness throughout the building.”

The devices have a 20-year life expectancy and reduce the frequency in which air filters need to be changed. Some filter grades are so thick, they also tend to burn out HVAC system motors.

How did we get here?
Whitman and Hanson select boards met jointly with the WHRSD School Committee via virtual Zoom meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 15 to review the history of town assessments in support of the regional school district.
“After we discuss that and get clarity, the object is to make sure we have systems in place so that it doesn’t happen again,” Whitman Selectmen Chairman Dr. Carl Kowalski said of the mistakes made that caused division between the towns in recent months. “What happened was unfortunate and caused each of the towns to see each other with suspicion and that’s not how the towns have behaved in the past.”
Kowalksi said the object is also to ensure that the new Regional Agreement Committee continues with its work.
Whitman Selectman Randy LaMattina outlined a timeline of the issue, which he has researched.
“We got lost in the effect, and didn’t get a solid explanation of the cause, and that’s my goal this evening,” LaMattina said.
He said his timeline has been verified by emails, meeting videos and minutes, and public record beginning with the 1993 Education Reform Act, which put in place a statute regulating how assessments are calculated.
“This was never addressed in any Whitman-Hanson agreement up until this previous year [when it] was finally the first year we’ve handled it correctly,” LaMattina said. He noted the confusion stemmed from a feeling that the alternative — or per-pupil — method was an illegal one.
“That absolutely was not an illegal method,” he said. “But what we clearly did not do was follow the statute.”
The towns should have been made aware they were using an alternate method and been afforded the opportunity to vote on the method used.
LaMattina said he didn’t know why the discrepancy played out since 1993, but noted the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) provided some clarity in 2007 with and a memo affirming the correct process and their position in response to questions from some school districts.
“We don’t know who got that [memo],” he said.
An “erratic fact pattern in the filing of year-end reports” at WHRSD began in 2012.
Whitman resident Christopher George began to question the process in May 2016 through an email to former Superintendent of Schools Dr. Ruth Gilbert-Whitner. George, active at the time in the pro-override Save Our Schools group, had included a link to the 2007 DESE memo in his email. Both George and School Committee member Fred Small have both said there was a follow-up discussion between George and Gilbert-Whitner.
In 2017, Gilbert-Whitner reached out to School Committee Chairman Bob Hayes about the need to revise the “antiquated” regional agreement that referred to closed schools and other outdated information. The Regional Amendment Agreement Committee was then formed and worked on doing so from 2017-18.
“This was obviously where a lot of our answers can be found and a lot of very deep questions start to come from,” LaMattina said.
Representatives of the Mass. Association of Regional Schools (MARS) attended the committee’s first meeting Sept. 25, 2017 in which the assessment method was mentioned as a “significant issue,” and stated the district “currently uses the statutory method.” It was stressed that to use the alternative method that the district was, in fact, using “both towns would have to vote on it each and every year,” LaMattina noted.
On Aug. 14 LaMattina called MARS representative Malcolm Reid to ask why they assumed WHRSD was using the statutory method.
“We asked Christine (referring to former Business Manager Christine Suckow), and that’s what she said she used,” Reid replied, according to LaMattina. “She was using a formula, but the numbers were wrong,” Reid told him.
“There was obviously not a nefarious intention,” LaMattina said he determined from his conversations with Reid. “It appears that, at this time, we had somebody employed by the school district that didn’t have a full understanding of what she was using.”
MARS representative Stephen Hemman on Aug. 17 told LaMattina Suckow was using her own hybrid assessment method, which did not use the minimum local contribution. A fact Hemman found out in a meeting with Suckow and Gilbert-Whitner.
LaMattina said the error was never mentioned to new district administration, and it continued for two more budget cycles. Hemman and the MARS assistant director came to W-H in June 2019 to meet with Hayes and Superintendent of Schools Jeffrey Szymaniak “where an actual pen to paper was put to Christine’s numbers and it was fully discovered what she was doing wrong at that time,” according to LaMattina.
School Committee member David Forth stressed that, while both the former business manager and superintendent were named in the meeting, the problems surrounding the assessment issue were in place for years before them.
“To blame these two people is just a narrative that’s being pushed,” he said. “I think you could say they were part of the issue, but this goes further back.”
Through the summer of 2019 “quite a bit of infighting” between the towns had started to take place and the school district began an investigation on the former business manager. In 2016-18, year end reports had reflected the alternative method and were “very erratic” in previous years, LaMattina said.
He asked Hayes whether the schools, indeed had followed the statutory method all along.
“If the answer is no, what are we going to do as partners to make sure this doesn’t happen again?” LaMattina said.
“I think everyone is much more schooled on it now, than they were in the past,” Hayes said, noting the district has a new business manager who is taking a different approach. “It depends on the correct information of those statements.”
Kowalski said he was not certain that the purpose of the meeting was to ask questions like that and asked Szymaniak if LaMattina’s assessment met his understanding of the issue.
“What we really need to do is look forward more than look back, and have some reassurance that we have systems in place that that can’t happen again,” Kowalski said.
“The timeline that Mr. LaMattina has presented is the timeline that I’ve been able to track back,” Szymaniak said, who took the helm at WHRSD in July 2018. “When things come from DESE they’re addressed to superintendents and charter school leaders, so that they’re covered. Business managers might have been on this one, but it usually goes right to the superintendent’s office and at that point, it was Dr. John McEwan, who was the superintendent.”
Whitman’s passing over the Regional Agreement article in May 2018 is when questions arose for him.
Forth, who also researched a timeline, starting in 1978 when funding cases began to process toward regionalization. He stressed that the regional agreement was intended to be reviewed every five years. He said Kowalski, who was chairman of the school committee in 1993 should also have been aware of the assessment issue.
“I don’t understand why we waited until 2016-17 to update a regional agreement that should have been updated every five years since ’91,” Forth said.
School Committee member Dawn Byers said when she began researching the issue, she was cautioned that proceeding would “tear the two towns apart.”
“I was intimidated, people tried to silence me, and I was lied to and told that we were using the statutory method,” she said. “I knew these numbers were exactly why these two towns were having budget issues.”
She said there has been a generation of students in W-H who have suffered as a result.
Szymaniak agreed that, going forward, the agreement should be reviewed every five years and joint meetings with finance committees and selectmen should be used to increase transparency in budgeting.
Hanson Selectman Laura FitzGerald-Kemmett said she is questioning the checks and balances in this situation.
“To say that this is blowing my mind would be the understatement of the year,” she said. “We have got to make sure that people are held accountable.”
An open line of dialog should have been opened with town officials as soon as the problem was discovered.
Small advocated a clear action plan for the budget process and assessment going forward, including a complete audit.