WHITMAN – The Select Board voted 4-1 to close the warrant for the Monday, Oct. 30 special Town Meeting, at its Tuesday, Oct. 3 session after member Shawn Kain expressed concerns about article 15, which is aimed at closing a funding gap for the DPW building project after a recent cost increase. He voted against the warrant closure.
“To be honest, as I’m thinking about our borrowing situation and projects coming ahead of us, I feel like it’s not a great precedent to set for projects to come back to the table and ask for more money,” he said.
While he said he liked the way town officials have identified money sources to free up, he said he wouldn’t mind spending $500,000 to $1 million from stabilization with the remaining to come out of the project itself by reductions to things like soft costs or other areas.
“I’m really hesitant to go back to the people knowing that, even if there are some trade-offs with a past project, it’s still going to be passed on in rates,” Kain said. “I’m not really comfortable doing that right now, given our current climate.”
Carter replied that the notice has been pulled from the printing because ARPA funds will reduce one of the rate hikes officials had discussed during the borrowing authorization meeting for the sewer force main project.
“It’s going to be less of an increase than what was initially projected,” she said. “The rates of $1.25 [in a second round of increases going out Oct. 15] because of the ARPA, doesn’t need to go up quite that much.”
After running some calculations and noting that Town Accountant Karen Clancy planned to run more calculations Oct. 4.
“Because the town is applying for $2.2 million in ARPA funds, we won’t be borrowing $2.2 million for authorization for the sewer force main, and instead, will be borrowing for this project.”
The force main is being paid for through rates, which were increased $1.50 a year ago for the first half of the increase with another $1.25 in bills going out Oct. 15. Those two rate increases were 100 percent of the projection for the sewer force main project.
Doing the force main project with $2.2 million in ARPA funds being applied, as well as it’s coming in under budget, and then having $2.2 million in the new DPW project – where the rate increase will be split between water and sewer, where reductions on the force main and proposed new borrowing plus the $1.50 we went up last year will come in under what the town projected for just the sewer force main project.
Kowalski said, that, a few weeks ago, when it was discovered the DPW needed the $2.2 million because of soil problems on the property, which is a problem that had to be dealt with, the board asked them, in a joint meeting, if they could find some ways to come back in two weeks and say it’s going to be less.
He credited the DPW, Carter and Evans with working hard to come up with a solution.
“What’s really impressive is two weeks later, they come up with a solution that’s not going to cost the taxpayer any extra money,” he said. “I think they deserve a lot of credit for that. It wasn’t an easy ask for us to make of them and they came through with flying colors, from what I can see, so I personally don’t have a problem with Article 15 at all.”
Kain said it was hard for him to disagree because he thinks they did a lot of good work that is beneficial to the town in the use of ARPA funds, but in totality, the amount of borrowing the town will be doing over the next couple of years is great.
“Any way that we can lessen the burden on the taxpayer, I think is something we should really consider,” he said. “It’s OK for you to disagree, but for me, I think I would rather go into the stabilization a little bit and keep the rates lower and have them cut some things out of the project.”
He agreed making those cuts would be tough, “but I think it’s one of the hard truths of running a project,” arguing they wouldn’t want the middle school project to follow a similar path.
“That, to me, seems more fair and balanced, considering the overall projection of debt,” he said.
Evans suggested that, because the source of funding for a lot of these articles are prior articles being returned, it might be helpful to start a Town Meeting to explain the decisions made, so they don’t have to be revisited with everyone.