Board of Health: July 10, 2025

Transcript captured from MHTV’s Vimeo auto-captioning. No speaker labels; proper names and dollar figures occasionally misheard. Click any timecode to jump to that moment in the source video.

0:00 Um, but I’d like to open the open meeting of the board itself on on July 10th, 2025. We all have had the agenda I’D last. Um, I’d like to tweak it a little bit since, uh, uh, one of the major goals of today is to expand on the public understanding of the issues around the, uh, trash and recycling, um, pickup strike that we’re going through. And so if everyone’s okay, I’d like to move the director’s report up to the beginning so that we can have time, uh, for Andrew

0:48 to report the various aspects. Andrew has agreed to take questions, um, after his report, but if you just have comments and things, let’s wait for them to, to the end of the session. We hope to go into executive session, um, as close to eight 30 as possible, sir. No, I was just gonna say that I, I have some comments that will relate to become probably questions. So I certainly, I don’t know, but don’t, I’m not you, you’re in charge of the meeting, but there are some things that I think could, all right, we’re gonna, we’re gonna try to be as flexible as possible. Yeah, sure. Mr. Chair, Mr. Director. Uh, so, yes. So unfortunately, Republic Services

1:33 and the team serves, we’re unable to come to a contract negotiation. The contract with the Teamsters ended June 30th. Um, they went on strike, uh, July 1st. Um, so we have, essentially today was our 10th day of the strike. Um, again, we have been very lucky. We have two things that have occurred for us. We’re very lucky that we have a transfer station. Um, we are very lucky that we actually had Republic Trash trucks in town and last week during the first week of the strike. Um, so essentially what happens is that Republic brings drivers or employees from other parts of the country, flies ‘em in, puts ‘em in a trash truck, gives ‘em a list, and sends them out. Um, our route manager was also on vacation last week.

2:20 Um, and so these guys were literally given a list and said that, you know, have at it. Um, so obviously, you know, a combination. So there’s close to 300 streets in Marblehead. Um, you know, four square miles, very densely populated, a lot of tight roads, a lot of roads that don’t even look like roads. So it becomes very complicated and very challenging for the drivers to understand where they’re going. Um, and so collection has been very challenging. Um, they start on the Mondays route, and as they continue and progress through the week, obviously we receive phone calls and emails to say that they’ve missed collection in these locations. Um, the agreement that we have with Republic Services is that at the end of the day, we will email over to Republic Services the missed streets list,

3:08 and that the drivers would go back, essentially try to pick up those missed streets and then continue on with their collection run. Um, again, even with the two drivers, uh, generally they’re able to do collection. You have one trash truck driver and one trash truck, and one recycling truck. We have one small truck that comes in on Tuesday to deal with some of the small streets, but they really are able to do all the collection, both trash and recycling with those two vehicles, uh, minus the schools a little bit, uh, with just a trash truck and a recycling truck. Um, it has been extremely difficult. Um, at this point we have suspended service for recycling and we’re just concentrating on trash collection.

3:53 Obviously that is the greatest health concern. So we wanna try to get the trash off the street as quickly as possible. Again, we’re very lucky that we have the transfer station. Um, the transfer station operates, um, six days a week, even before the strike. All the curbside trash comes into the transfer station, dropped off there, and then we transfer that out using Waste Management. The thing that we can’t, that we’re being overloaded with is recycle. So curbside recycling’s picked up by JRM and they own that material, and that goes back to their facilities. So generally it goes to Greenworks where it’s suited, sorted, and sold on the commodity market. Um, but because we don’t have that,

4:39 everybody’s bringing a quite a bit of material into the transfer station. Um, the other piece that’s going on right now is that Greenworks, where what is owned by Republic is where they do all their recycling. Sorting is also under construction. They’re doing a $25 million construction project there. Um, so we’re unable to bring our transfer station recycling to that facility. Currently, the way we’re handling our, uh, transfer station recycling material is that we’re working with Waste Management. Um, in the past they would come in on a daily basis, uh, take a 30 to 40 yard container of recycling and haul that to build up because of the strike. We’re being inundated with so much additional material. We have waste management coming into haul those bins

5:27 two to three times a day. We’re really looking for at least twice. Um, we’re, you know, obviously really overloaded with cardboard. And yes, we have a co-mingle up at the transfer station on a regular basis. So, recycling’s an interesting piece. Again, it’s all a commodity. Uh, it gets sorted. There’s different values. Um, co-mingle has a blended value that they can sort out, but by sorting it out and keeping it separate, so when you go to the transfer station, you’ll see a paper, you’ll see a cardboard, you’ll see a co-mingle. Um, we get a little bit more value when we haul just the paper or just the, the cardboard. Um, but yes, we do have co-mingle. So you don’t have to go up there and sort your product. You can just dump it in the bin. Um, but again, you know, we, we would generally see, um,

6:13 our busy days at the transfer station. We’ll see a thousand cars. Um, I don’t even know, I, we were trying to figure out how many cars are coming in at this point. It’s a couple thousand a day probably. Um, again, we’re, we are operating guys show up at seven o’clock. Um, the facility closes at three 30. You know, that’s the end of their work day. Many days this week. We’re into, you know, later in the day, 4, 4 30, uh, trying to get ready for the next day, coming there, gnarling trying to get ready for the morning. Um, obviously this morning was a difficult day ‘cause it’s pouring rain. Um, so that adds to, uh, the chaos of it. Um, but the, the employees at the transfer station have been really good and really helpful and I’m really thankful for the dedicated team that I have up there.

6:58 Um, we did have a new ploy that started on Tuesday up there. Um, Jason Young, so he’s our new heavy equipment operator. Um, so he’s learning the ropes, how to drive the raw off truck, how to use the heavy equipment. Uh, but he’s a great addition up there as well. The other piece that that has happened is that Marty Flanagan, who used to be the clerk, has now transferred over to be the assistant waste, um, director. So that’s a huge step in that direction as well. Um, so that’s a huge help. But again, we’re, you know, so that means we no longer have a clerk. Um, and so everybody is trying to help out in the office as much as possible. So we showing up to work. And with these strikes, we’re seeing 500, you know, a hundred to 500 emails a day. The phone, we have four phones, and it’s ringing nonstop from start to end.

7:46 Um, you’ll always be able to leave a message. We really enjoy our new phone system because if it leaves a message, it actually sends me an email and I can respond to it much quicker than if I sat there and listened to all the calls and stuff like that. So as we go through the week’s collection, things are missed. Again. We put together a missed streets list. Um, public will only go out, go back for a full street, essentially. Uh, we’re also getting calls about, Hey, my trash was missed. So if it’s kind of a one-off, we go out and investigate that. If it’s, you know, a one-off, um, we call that a missed, um, pickup. Um, that’s the like standard lingo that we use in the industry. We’ll go out and take a look at that. If it’s just a single home, we’ll take that. If it’s a couple homes, we’ll take that. So two of us are driving around town,

8:32 taking a look at trash, seeing what streets are missed, trying to figure out where the they are, and then collecting trash at the same time. Um, and this just goes on day after day. Um, we do not have an understanding of how long the strike will last. Um, but at this point we’re in a pretty good groove. And this will continue on. Um, again, our biggest challenges are up the transfer station dealing with the, you know, the huge amount of recycling that’s coming in. Um, Republic has given us an additional recycling container. Um, they dropped off a 25 yard open top this morning. Um, and so we’ll fill that up first thing tomorrow morning, set that to the side and whenever they can come and get it, they can come and get it and hopefully replace it. But again, we are working with waste management to haul recycling out there on a regular basis.

9:20 Um, just other pieces about the transfer station, again, we’re gonna leave the swap shop closed, um, during the strike. Um, that will alleviate traffic. Um, so yes, there’s often a line when you pull into the transfer station and we wanna remind people to use the residential engines is now off of Green Street. The old entrances is now the commercial entrance. Um, so we’re always watching both lines. So if we see cars queuing up with the commercial trucks or other commercial vehicles, we quickly go over there. Hey, just so you know, this is for commercial trucks. Are you looking for the residential entrance that’s down over there? Please get outta line and go down there. If you do come into the transfer station and there’s a line all the way up the hill, um, it takes about seven minutes to go from the gate to the top of the hill.

10:07 So it’s really not that bad of the line. Um, we’re really asking people to be patient up there. Um, I don’t know the exact number of spaces, parking spaces up there. Um, but we don’t want people to park on the right hand side and walk across traffic. We want you to be patient. I’ve often stood up there for several days direction or several hours, uh, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, um, at different times just making sure people are patient, wait for a space, pull ‘em through the space and do your stuff. Um, again, like employees are trying to walk the line, help you take your trash outta your car, help you bring your recycling over, um, just there to tell you, you know, explain how things are going. Um, so it has been a pretty smooth process. Again, if you come up and you just need to go to the yard waste, which we see often, um, you just have

10:54 to be a little patient and as soon as you can break off, you can do that. Um, but again, the swap shop will remain closed during, um, the strike. Uh, questions from the board. So I’ve heard nonstop good things about the workers up there, so that’s good. Um, and for everyone that’s wondering, there are little tricks to catch people from out of town. Now, I’m not gonna tell you the secret sauce because then you, then they’d know. But I will also be up there on Saturday checking for residency, um, all day. So, um, that’ll help. ‘cause that will likely be the busiest day. So, um, that’ll help make sure it’s just marble headers coming in. And, um, yeah,

11:39 but I, I think, I think a lot of people are losing sight and I get a lot of text messages and emails and stuff like that of people losing sight of the fact that this is a strike that’s ongoing. So when people ask, Hey, are they gonna be back to normal next week? It’s like, no, no, just assume it’s not happening. Assume that this strike. And the message I keep saying is like, if, if you didn’t have trash service ever again, what would you do? We have a transfer station, what would you do? So it’s, it’s just that simple. And if you are able to do it, if you are able to get up there, you have, you have a, my 78-year-old mother, I did it before I could ask her. And that she, it was two days later, 78 years old,

12:24 lives alone, tossed it in the back of her car, went up there, and she’s been doing that regularly. There are some people that can’t, there’s some people, you know, elderly, disabled, don’t have a car. If you are able, you make it that much easier for the Republic people, Andrew, Marty, to go to the, get those people and prioritize them. So you’re doing them a solid just if you can just do it and you know, that’s the easiest way to make it go, you know, smoothly where everyone gets covered. Uh, so we are pushing out information on a daily basis. Mm-hmm. Uh, we really want everybody to sign up for code Red. Um, so that’s on the Marblehead website. You can sign up for it. Um, it’s a reverse 9 1 1 system. We are on the general side. Um, you know, we don’t consider this an emergency

13:11 because we’re pushing out information on a daily basis, but we give an update of what to expect for the coming days, um, what’s going on. Um, so we want, wanna remind people to sign up for that. Um, we also have a listserv, um, for the health department that we can push out emails. We’re using that on occasion as well as posting the press release on the town website under the news. Now sometimes what happens is that there’s other additional news items and so things get pushed down. So you just have to kind of look at that column and that’s on the front page. Um, the other big thing that I wanna remind everybody is that we do have trash regulations. And that’s the regulations are about how to put your material out at the curb. So it’s required that all trash is bagged. Uh, so in trash bags is what we’re looking for.

13:57 That’s placed in a barrel with the type fitting lid. Um, the reason why we have this is that, so during these situations we can easily clip that material in any type of vehicle. If it’s loose trash, it becomes really a bad situation. The other piece about the barrel, the tight fitting lid, is that it’s protected from the elements. It’s protected from the animals. That’s what we’re trying to protect it from. So you can leave it out there overnight. The neighborhood dogs is not gonna get into it. The raccoons aren’t gonna get it. That’s why we set up these regulations in this place. All that came from issues that we had in 2015 during some of the long ongoing blizzards. Um, so we, we look at the situation, we address it, we try

14:43 to make regulations to address some of those issues that we find. Yeah. And I emphasize that for Andrew. Put it in the bags if there’s reporters in there or watching, you know, I know there are, I, you know, I, I tried to help someone out and their barrel was half bags half loose and there was thousands of maggots in there. Thousands. It was absolutely disgusting. You each just gotta bag it. You just, I mean, it just, it’s common sense. But like apparently you still have to tell people like, really bag it, it might be out there for a day or two. So Bag it. The other piece is like, if we open a barrel and it’s full of plant material, we we’ll grab the trash bags, but the plant material gets left. Uh, plant materials not allowed to be in,

15:28 um, household trash. Um, recycling, recycling needs to be loose. So if you’re bringing it up to the transfer station, you can’t throw bad recycling into the bins. You need to take it out of those Paper bags. Paper bags are fun. Yep. So we’re talking plastic bags and stuff like that. Um, if a street keeps getting missed, should residents post it daily or Yeah, just keep emailing us. ‘cause literally what we’re doing is like we’re taking that email, we’re putting into a list and we’re sending that to Republic at the end of the day. Every day they Get it. Do they check it off and get back to you? Or, we don’t get to see that. So that’s where we’re, there is some frustration with that. We’re providing the list and the next day the street’s coming back up, we’ll go and take a list. You know, what we’re being told is that they’re supposed

16:15 to prioritize that street, go back to that street first thing in the morning and then move on with your collection route. We understand that’s not always happening. Yeah. And who’s the route manager? Are they from the Town? They are not, no. They’re a Republic employee. Yep. Okay. And they cover multiple towns. Okay. Yep. So they’re not driving around like we are, um, trying to take a look at things and assess situations. Is there for our, uh, handicapped residents, should we encourage them to also email for individual pickup? Yep. Because that can’t go to the Yep, of course. Yeah. We call ‘em our special population. And of course, you know, uh, wheelchair blind, any of the situations where you, or you don’t have a license or you don’t have a car, please contact us

17:01 and we’ll make, um, arrangements to help you out. I’ll tell, I, I’ve grew up in this town, whole life bike ride as a kid, all that. I still find new streets. Like, you’d be shocked to tell me sometimes, like, like where the hell did this street come from? Like, there’s these tiny little, those are gonna get missed. And you know, There’s so many streets that look like driveways. Yeah. Oh yeah. And currently we can handle the amount of trash coming in Yes. At the transfer. Yeah. So, you know, obviously, so, um, we can handle 50 tons a day. So we have two large 18 wheel wheeled trailers that we fill every day and leave. Um, now obviously we have, they, so they go to Wheel Liberator Saugus, uh, resco. Um, it’s a waste energy facility.

17:47 Um, and we use Waste Management to haul that, the hauling company’s CWT. Um, and so obviously we, we have, we own three trailers, um, occasionally. So we have a trailer that’s down that has to, you know, do some mechanical issues with it. It should be back up in a couple days. Um, but this is the constant flow. We try to run the trailers early in the morning when traffic is low. Um, but you’ll often see the trailers leave early and then often coming back, sometimes late in the afternoon. But yeah, we’re filling up those two trailers and getting them out every day as much as possible. Um, Mondays tend to be an issue, um, because you’re coming off the weekends, they’re not always running on Saturdays. Uh, like we’re working and depending on how much material, but we’re worked with Waste Management to say, I really need you guys to come in here on a Saturday

18:34 and I really need two trailers every day. And would we get to a point that we would start obtaining bids from private companies to help with the overflow? So there’s, it’s not possible, essentially. So there are no extra trash trucks out there. You are building a, when you, so a trash truck runs anywhere between 600 to a million dollars per unit and you’re building them for a route, and then you need employees for that route. And so essentially with all the large companies, they’re buying those trash trucks to put ‘em on a job. So currently when we will talk about this next, when we’re talking to companies about, Hey, we’re interested in, um, talking to you about potentially bidding on our contract next September, they want these contracts finalized this fall

19:21 so they can get those vehicles built for us for next September. What about not the typical trash trucks, but I saw like the Marblehead movers truck come out. So those are very hard to deal with because, so, um, again, with trash, you shouldn’t be putting any more, A bag shouldn’t weigh more than 50 pounds. Um, everybody has toters. Um, a toter can weigh, um, a hundred to 150 to 200 pounds depending on how much trash is in there. Um, so you, you know, trash trucks are made to handle trash on a daily basis. So they have toter tapers so they can roll out those large toters up to ‘em. They get dumped into it. Yes. A lot of the guys will pull eagle bags out as soon as you start to have to reach up and stuff like that. It just becomes more onerous on the individual

20:07 and you’re looking for more injuries and there’s all these little pieces that come into it that become spills Yeah, spills and problematic inside of the bag on the truck collecting trash and an open truck can become problematic with animals and a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. Okay. Okay. See, I think these are the questions that everybody needs to sort of understand the, uh, in, in my year on the board now, I’ve learned there is a technology and a process that we follow that isn’t, isn’t in the general marketplace. Mm-hmm. So, so one of the nastiest pieces about trash is what we call leachate. Uh, leachate is the juice that comes outta the trash and it is the stinkiest, nastiest rotten material. Uh, during the summer, occasionally you’ll see a trash truck

20:54 that has a bad seal and will have slop in the back, um, and it will get on the street and it will smell for days. Uh, it’s high in nutrients and so it’ll immediately start to grow bacteria when we have a rain event that’s washing right off into our, our beaches. And that’s where some of our bacteria, uh, grows and, and comes from as that’s good. I encourage private companies to do this, we want it done, We want it done the right way. Yeah. That makes, Yeah.

21:24 Line, what’s your sense of the commitment of both sides to reach an agreement? I Think everybody wants a fair contract. Um, I think if you’re paying attention to the news right now, obviously Republic is a large national company, um, California, uh, you know, union employee just went on strike out there in the Bay area. Um, you know, republic’s gonna have to really work to get this back together. Um, you know, these are, these are tough situations at this point. Stinky situations. The public doesn’t like ‘em. Um, but everybody deserves a fair contract.

22:05 Yeah. Any connections to Bill Gates? He’s the biggest shareholder in Republic Services. Right. For real. For real. $200 million in dividends a year,

22:18 As you know. I frequent. Yes. I can’t say enough about how great those guys amount that a super, super hot day. Yep. My grandson and I took up our rubbish, five of our neighbors rubbish. So they don’t need one list put to carpool and you’re rubb it and he’s only three and a half. He said, it’s hot, let’s get popsicles and we don’t get Popsicle and brought ‘em up here. So if you can carpool with your neighbors, your trash, the lines will get longer. Yeah. It was 86 degrees Monday, Tuesday. It was a hundred degrees on that. That was all day long. They were super, can’t say enough good things about ‘em. They’re always good, but they always, Yeah. How many employees are there? Um, so there’s three heavy equipment operators. Um, there’s two, what we call transfer station operators, uh, and then one scale house. Okay.

23:05 Yeah. So I, I have a question, some comments. The first question is, one of the big questions I’ve had a lot of people ask is when is, and myself, if your route gets missed, there’s trash everywhere, all over town. Yep. If your route gets missed, do you just leave it there? Yes. Or do you So Oh, I thought that’s, I thought you put it back in. No, so we are telling people just to leave your trash curbside. We’ve asked people to remove the recycling from curbside, but just leave it there. That’s the whole reason why we have the regulations about in the plastic bag, in the trash bags in a barrel with a tight fitting lid. It can, it, as long as it’s on your property in your driveway, it can survive it just as it does next to your house. Cool. So Now the regulation says at the end of the day,

23:51 but we’re under a strike condition, so we are allowing people to leave trash curbside again Until it gets picked up. Until it gets, yeah. Okay. I think that, so I guess the comment follow up on that is that, you know, I got a couple code red messages yesterday, one today, every day. And the message is don’t put your recycling out and we’re get doing our best to pick up trash and we’ll get to the streets that are missing when we can. But that message, I mean, it’s the same message every single day going out it seems. So it’s a different message, but yes, Generally. Yep. I mean, the, the question about should you just leave your trash out until it gets picked up has not been addressed in the code red message. So if you change the code red message and says, listen, once you put it on the street, leave it there until it gets picked up,

24:37 that would probably help everybody. Did you hear it today? I thought it was addressed today. Yeah. Yeah. So what, what we don’t want people to do is to just leave their barrel there and then they, they don’t bring it back so their trash gets picked up and they just leave their barrel there To be Sure. And I think it, and so you can follow up and say, leave your barrel on until it gets picked up. Once it’s picked up, bring it back. Okay. So again, with the code red, we try to keep it about 60 seconds. You have a very short period of time that people are gonna listen to. So again, yes, we push up that press release, but it’s all we’ve worked with, um, public information companies, it’s a very small specific point of time that people are really gonna, so I’m glad you mentioned that because the follow up to that, and I, I wanna compliment the crew at the transfer station, and Tom in particular has been on Facebook

25:23 answering people’s questions. I mean, it’s really been incredibly helpful to the community. But the one thing where, I’ll be honest, it’s been inadequate has been the town website for the board of health because these kind of longer narratives could go up and honestly they should be updated every day and say, this is the update for today. Nothing new, but please keep, leave your trash out. If it’s been picked up, bring it back. If it’s been picked up, please bring it back so we know it’s not, you know, still need to be picked up and these streets have been hit. I think getting that communication out is incredibly important. Maybe set up a Facebook. Yeah, So we don’t have the bandwidth for a Facebook page. We only have a very limited number of employees. Well, How about a webpage? So we have a webpage. We post our press release on a daily basis. Um, that’s adding information from the code red

26:08 and pushing that out there as well. So it says right now to bring your barrels back, leave them At home? Nope. It doesn’t say that, but yep. Okay. But it will tomorrow Bring your barrels back? No, I’m not gonna say Leave your barrels on until they’re picked up and then Yeah, we can take a look. I’m not gonna say it’s gonna be done tomorrow, but we can look at that something for next week. Yes. Okay. So just to, to follow up on that, and this is just, I understand that you’re three member board and that you can’t interact outside of regular meetings, but we’re sort of an emergency and given that one solution to that is to post daily meetings that you use if needed. So you post ‘em 48 hours in advance, but every single day and you say something changes, you need to make a contract, you need to spend money, you can do that. There’s a second method, which is to delegate an individual member of the board who you trust

26:53 to say you can spend up to X thousand dollars that you need on this. And then when it comes to money, the 10 has a reserve fund. We’ve had emergencies in town before and the selectmen have been fairly generous about providing those funds. That’s what the emergency funds are for. So if there’s an issue with not having enough overtime money or being able to bring in some casual labor, you know that this is the time to ask for that. And I think that they will be very forthcoming. Everyone is dealing with this challenge. So it’s really, you know, a suggestion, um, with regard to out of town people coming in, the word is definitely getting out and notwithstanding Tom’s comments, I know you’re probably catching some people, but the word is out there. And so if you look at the cost of disposing of out of town residents trash plus the delay of Marblehead residents who have to wait in line between,

27:41 behind people who aren’t even residents, it probably would be worth it to hire some casual labor and just say, look, you gotta, if you don’t have a sticker, you gotta have your registration ready when you go in and you’d show it to them and have someone checked in. Even if it’s, you know, you put that message out so that people from out of town don’t all, it’s gonna get worse and worse as the strike goes on and it, it’s gonna cost us a lot of money. And when you talk about how your budget is squeezed for trash removal, this is easy money, right? You hire someone for $20 an hour just to check registrations. Think about all the amount of tonnage that you’re not gonna have to send. That’s a win. Right? And so, and it’s something that you ought to be able to find some money for because it’s, the return on investment is many, many x the amount it’s gonna cost to do.

28:27 Um, yeah, I mean, I I guess the only other thing I would ask for you, and it’s, it’s a question, a request is, given the situation, have you considered adding some additional overtime to keep the dump open continuously on Saturdays? Because that one hour break really, it doesn’t make, given what’s going on. And, and, and possibly even on Sundays, I know that you have to cart away the, the garbage I, and it may cost some additional money, but during this situation, you know, this would be a good time to bring in some overtime and extra staff and keep the dump open all day long on Saturday. Maybe even It becomes very challenging with employees. So you have your crew that can understand how the everything works,

29:13 but you need all those people there for it to operate. You need to give ‘em a break. You can’t overwork them. You have to understand that they’re working, they’re at work quarter to seven in the morning and they’re leaving at times five o’clock at night. You, you have to be very careful about how much you overwork. And I think that that completely makes sense. But the answer to that may be bringing more staff, because this is an issue all year long. People only have one day a week. They can bring their, their trash their broken Six days a week. Right? Right. But six, but one of those days on the weekend, a lot of people do their yard work. I mean, this isn’t for now, but on the weekend people do yard work during the weekend and they can’t bring it till the following Saturday. If they’re doing work on Sundays or Sunday afternoon, it, this is a downstream issue. But right now, if, if you had additional funds,

30:02 it might make sense to bring in some tents to keep it open. It’s just a public health emergency. Right. Understood. We, we don’t have the capacity for trash. That’s like one of the gonna be the biggest issues. Mm-hmm. So I have 50 tons a day for, you know, five days a week. We really push Saturday. If I use all my tonnage up, I’m for that week. We show up Monday morning, I have no trailers and I’m shutting down and sitting there until I get trailers. You set by more tonnage. No, I can’t Can you limit it to trash only in those days? It’s only limit a minute to trash only. Um, On the, like if we did extended hours not doing recycling, You would never be able to limit that. Yeah. Least that. But I like the idea if we could add additional employees from DPW or

30:48 Else. Yeah. The hard thing with the DPW employees is that we’ve been using them for the small, uh, small route, small truck route. Um, you have to understand that DBW employees are not allowed to take vacation during the winter. So they’re all taking vacation during the summer. So they, they go down to a very small crew. They also have work that they have scheduled that they need to get done. Could you offer them double time? I can’t offer them any, anything. Could The board offer them double time and with additional funds provided under emergency basis from the board of Slackman? Uh, I mean, I have no idea. I, I mean, I understand the concern.

31:29 I think calling it an emergency when, when it’s, it is a tough situation, but I honestly think like if people put in a little more effort, we don’t need to do all this. We don’t, an emergency, I think is when someone’s bleeding out to death. Like this is not, it’s trash, it sucks, it’s gross. We gotta be a little more self-reliant in the town. And yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s not open Sundays, you know, it is a problem with employees and when you do get the one-offs, Andrew’s a hundred percent right. That, you know, they come in, they do the smallest job there because they don’t know how everything works there. So, um, you know, the Sunday thing is the future thing. It, you know, it’s on my radar when everything gets restructured.

32:14 It’s not something I think you can just throw in here and just do it even though it, it’s an emergency sit. You know, I, I go air quotes emergency, but um, you know, yeah. You, you get that question from everyone being being like, oh, can we extend the hours? Can we do this? Can we do that? I mean, would you do that at your own job, really? Like, would you, would you say that? But, you know, I don’t think a lot of people would on something that they really can do. They we’re in a work from home environment now. So when everyone says they, you know, I work five days a week in Boston, I’m a freaking unicorn. No one I know works five days a week in Boston so someone can find the time. And even I did today, you know, before I went to work, um, I drove up to the transfer station and I still made it to Boston before nine in the morning and I was there when it opened. There’s no special treatment. And,

33:01 And there certainly are people helping out. I think there are just a lot of people who can’t do that themself. And I think those of us who can, should be helping our neighbors and do, and I have, but I just think that it becomes a question of, you know, there are people who can’t do it. And, and just the last question I’ll, and I’ve been asking a lot of questions, but with regards to recycling, you’re saying don’t put out recycling. So there are people everywhere with recycling that’s piling up. Mm-hmm. Ultimately that’s gonna end up in the trash stream if they can’t put it on. So what are you telling people to do with these overfill bins of recycling right now? Uh, so that, that’s a personal thing. Yeah. So we’re, we’re asking people not to put recycling curbs aside ‘cause we don’t have the capacity for it. What you do with it. That’s a personal thing. Um, I mean, honestly, my recycling’s clean, it’s dry.

33:49 I can throw it in a plastic bag and it can live on the ground for a week, um, until or until I make it up to the transfer station. Um, but obviously I’m different where I treat my recycling the way it’s supposed to be treated. Most people don’t. They leave food waste in it. It’s nasty.

34:07 But again, I know, I know it’s what now what people want to hear, but it’s like a little more self-reliance and helping your neighbor. And that’s really what it comes down to. And then we cruise through this. I can’t express having friends that live in s Swamp squad how lucky we are that we actually have, you know, everyone, you know, there’s other people being like, why didn’t you have a backup for this? We do. It’s called a transfer station. And you know, I know we’ve come into a world where people are kind of hold back on really, you know, getting their hands dirty. If this is an emergency situation, get your hands dirty. You know, it’s, it is the how it gets done. And so, and help someone that can’t and that’ll make it so much easier if, you know, if, if the republic truck goes down the street

34:52 and one out of every five, six houses has trash in front of it because everyone else did it on their own and those are the houses that need it, they’re all getting done. Right. So that’s, you know, really, if you can step up, just step up, you know, we all have it in us. My 78-year-old mother had it in her, so you know, we can do it. So Andrew, sorry, you have the ability to collect 50 tons of trash a day. I don’t have the ability to collect 50 tons of trash a day. I can take 50 tons of trash a day. Sorry, not collect. You’re right. The transfer station can, can accept. Yes. I was permit for 50 tons a day. And how much before this happened, do do you typically accept a day? So we’re at 10,500 tons generally a year.

35:38 10,000 tons a Year. 10,500. 500 tons. Yeah. Okay. Um, And during COVID we’re as high as 13,000 tons. Okay. Okay. A year. Yep. Okay. And then my question is, what are you getting now a day? We we’re still doing two trailers a day. And so is that equals to 50 Tons. So yeah, the, the amount of trash in town does not change. Right. I’ve always taken the curbside trash and I’ve always taken the, the transfer station trash stays the same. Okay. It’s just the way it’s getting to the curb. Yeah. That should also be clear too, if you fill the trailers And can you talk, what is the trailer? So The trailers are at the bottom of the compact. It’s a hundred yard trailer. That’s the 18 wheeler. It’s what we call use the large compact building. One 10.

36:24 Okay. So like from a, from a complete lay person’s point of view, 18 wheeler. An 18 wheeler. It’s a truck. An 18 wheeler truck. Yep. Okay. And who and it’s Waste Management is the name of the company that removes that. Yeah. Waste Management has the contract. The company that’s hauling is CWT. Now this, this is new to a lot of people, but like when those trailers get filled, sometimes you go up there and there’s a big gate on the pit. Yeah. Because they can’t accept anymore, anymore. So that also kind of talks to the, you know, the degree of the work that we’re getting now, um, when you say extending the hours and stuff, you might be extending ‘em for absolutely nothing. Right, Because I, I don’t Have any room. There might be, you know, recycling’s already overflowing and if the pit and the trailers are full, it’s, it’s game over. People are just driving in and we’re saying, see you later. There’s no Room. Generally at three o’clock I’m maxed up with recycling

37:11 and my beans are overflowing. Okay. And I don’t have capacity. And Then Republic is just the hall or, or, or the collector. Yes. So where do they like collection collector? They bring it to you or they bring it to Trash comes to us. Recycling goes to them. They, they own the recycling curbside. Okay. The s the pickup our are rubbish, like at your house. They go up to the same pit that I dump into. Okay. Empty there. Okay, go on. They Weigh and dump. And so now when you think about that, because the recycling doesn’t, they’re, those trucks are just filled and drive away. Now all that recycling is coming up there where we only have X amount of bins and now it’s getting 2, 3, 4 times as much. Yeah. And that’s why they’re filling up so fast. So, So when’s the last time there was

37:56 a a trash strike in town? Oh, I remember one. No. Do you know the last time that, um, the Teamsters went on strike with the, with with Republic? Nope. So you really like, have no context. We, we Didn’t, we weren’t associated with Republic. Yeah. So Republic bought out Jar. Oh. Our original contract was dairying. That’s What I was wondering. Okay. And so is is, is it the Republic contract that you guys are about to, that’s about to end. Okay. It’s not going to the calculation. They’ll come back down to the cost. I mean Any, any anything’s possible. But, so it’s worth, you try to overthink the, the contracts and say, all right, we’re gonna put penalties in here. You’re just adding to your contract. Yeah.

38:43 You’re just gonna take those penalties and add them to your contract. So there, there’s no win with that. Yeah. Um, so yeah, currently our contract is with Republic. You know, maybe we have a, you know, the next contracts with is with X, Y, Z and we have start with them and, and they have a, a strike. You know, it, it’s impossible to get That. You can, you can definitely think about it in the fact of like watching how they handle it and being like, you know, if they hold out six months, you might be like, aren’t these guys are a little ridiculous, but You don’t get a credit when they don’t pick up. You paid regardless. Or Republic doesn’t give you a credit. We haven’t talked about that yet. Obviously we will, But the contract doesn’t call for that. They don’t, the service level guarantee, it’s called software, right? Mm-hmm. You have to, if you don’t deliver, then you don’t have to pay. I mean, just like if you went on an airplane, no,

39:31 Those are things that you will be exploring, But it’s not in the contract. Then There is definitely language that says they have to withhold curbside collection. Okay. So, you know, obviously we will be, we will have to analyze how they’re gonna bill us for this, you know, time period. Have you paid for this time period? No, we, we don’t pay until syllabus is rendered every meeting. So we have a brand new truck outside. I don’t pay for that till I, it’s sitting here. Okay. Uh, waste Management is providing another container. Yep. And then bay haul it away. Waste management. So Waste manage. Yeah. So we have a, um, because of what’s going on at, at Republic, at Greenworks, we’ve been working with Waste Management, um, to haul to Bill Ell for the material in the transfer station.

40:17 Yes. We’ve been asking them to do additional hauls for us to try to keep up because that costing us. Yep. Ah, Okay. Yep. And again, there’s only so many drivers out there. There’s only so many containers. There’s only so many employees. So you can say, you know, Hey, I need, you know, five of these. Like it’s, we don’t have, But the tonnage is the same or it’s up, It’s same. So It should, So you gotta, you gotta just their trash tonnage versus recycling two different things. Understand. So trash tonnage, you would expect to stay the same consistent because the trucks do dump in the pit when they’re regularly collecting. Yep. So if it’s consistent, you know, um, which it sounds like the, you know, we do weigh it.

41:03 So it’s sounds like it’s been fairly consistent. Um, Someone had posted this on Facebook and it was great idea. So this is a great time to start composting and doing black Earth because then your trash won’t smell with all Your Yeah. So we, we compost at our house, so Yeah. My trash does not smell. Yeah, This is a great time. Yeah, they they have a compost fan up there, so Yes. You have to pay for that. It’s $120 a year for weekly. Curbside. Curbside. Yeah, That’s curbside. But we have don’t the chance you Don’t have to that you could just bring it up Station, you dump it yourself. They have bins up that’s free. So you guys are under staff people all of this, correct? Yeah. It’s not like you were saying, oh boy, I want up strike so I can nobody staff people. Sorry, my last question is, so there’s one, um, there, there’s a recycling truck and a trash truck out every day. Normally. Yes. Normally. And now both

41:49 of those trucks are being used for trash. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Before I came to the meeting, I was listening to the select board last night, and one of the more colorful residents of town stood up and said that one of the TV stations is saying you can bring your trash to Marblehead because we, I don’t know if that’s true, but, but let’s say it’s not True. Yeah. Well, but, but both, both of you who know more. Sounds like that may have been confirmed. It was on Patch Also. It was patched last week. They had a thing. We contacted Patch right away. Yeah. As soon as we saw it, we, we notified Patch through. We were not open To even if you got the tv, word of mouth is gonna say Yep.

42:34 My my only concern. But both of you are saying that we can’t, we can’t assume This’s gonna be a short strike. Correct. So more and more of the swamp spotters are gonna want to try to sneak in. Shouldn’t we have something we can try to do? So, Yeah. So at all the beginning of this week, I was standing up at the top of the line, um, and directing traffic and we’re asking everybody address, address, address. That’s we all be doing Saturday. Okay. And there’s ways without Andrew saying it Yeah. Too without Andrew saying it. There are ways to find out Swamp Scott. Okay. So it’s, I Just think, uh, you know, I spent my life as an ICU doc.

43:20 Yep. And basically you, your rounds are what can go wrong. Yep. Okay. And it’s your job to figure out what you’re gonna do when it goes wrong, before it goes wrong. Yep. Okay. That’s all I’m trying to do here. That’s so see a way you can give me the secret sauce. Yeah.

43:40 A cruiser shot. Uh, oh yeah. Non-residents will be ticketing. Yeah. Doesn’t, wouldn’t even cost anything.

43:50 But that’s important I think. Agree. I think the town needs to know one, that they have a jewel and two, that we should keep the jewel as healthy as it’s possible. Especially it, it, it, it’s really great to hear your sensitivity to your, to your workers. And we, we certainly the board endorses supports cheers that, um, and in fact we had to take a motion to offer our gratitude after this is all done to pass it on. Um, but we still ought to be thinking if it’s gonna be a long strike, people will get tired and we, what, what can we say is phase two?

44:36 So phase two obviously, you know, we, you continue operations. Um, our biggest thing challenge right now is dealing with the additional amount of recycling. That’s the biggest challenge. That’s what’s taking, um, you know, the guys picking up at the end of the day when they don’t have containers for the residents to throw into. Um, or the other areas that we are unable to police and people are dumping paint cans into the metal bin, um, where they’re dumping trash or tires up in the, um, yard wastes ‘cause we’re not watching and stuff like that. You know, we really want people to follow the rules. We are very lucky that we have the Juul. Um, you know, obviously we’ll continue to work with waste management to try to get as many halls in a day as possible. Maybe people could start taking their cans and balls that actually get money

45:22 and I mean, I know I don’t typically do it, so it’s like I’m just as much to blame Boy Scout space, start making some money. Yeah. Don’t, don’t Bring them in the past. And then there’s something we will look at. Um, so Joanne Miller always had this idea that we had a redemption, um, shed where Marvel had residents could leave their redeemable. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, we can take all the cans in there, get the redemption on it, and then that could be a special form that could be used for other things with the transfer station. Wow. That sounds great. Yeah. Wellesley does that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. But they don’t have curbside There. Yeah. Wellesley, you have to bring everything there. So that’s, yeah. Yes. Everything,

46:07 Uh, uh, your questions dying down. I think this has been terrific. Thank you for the detail. Yep. It’s clear that you we’re doing everything we possibly can. We’ve got the best people that we can possibly find. They’re well trained. They’re, they’re attitude is, is magnificent. You got people I guess who, so Jack,

46:40 so Jack, you should be able to talk. Good evening. Oh, can you hear me? Yep, we can hear you. Oh, great. Um, I think we have the, the best people working at the dump and just a reminder that when, and it might even be worth putting on the code, red is to thank them, um, when you go up, they, they are so friendly when they meet. I think I’m up there every other day bringing a neighbor’s trash up or my own trash up and beginning of the day, end of the day, they have the same disposition. Kay’s doing a great job and it’s, it’s just, it’s fantastic. Um, and it doesn’t hurt to bring ‘em coffee either or, or some treats.

47:26 Um, secondly is, it seems like the, no pun intended, but the tipping point on this or the crisis and all this could end up being capacity. Um, and I’m glad you’re focusing on that because if the Gates ever got shut down up there during the day, that’s when I think it would hit the fan. Um, I think it was back in 2022 that I talked about people from out of town using our dump a lot. And great strides have been made since then. Um, and uh, and it’s just, it, it would be great to really focus on that now, especially seeing how we’re not needing stick people with stickers, um, to be up there. And then finally, I, this is just, this is a great test for the new flow up there.

48:12 Um, you know, every time I’ve driven by, with the exception of a couple times, um, all of the traffic has been off of Green Street. You get up to the top, you wait for somebody to pull out, you pull into their spot, you go around the loop and you go out by the, you know, by Woodfin Terrace and, um, bravo to the, to the new flow because it’s working. Great. So thank you for all you’re doing, but, um, just remind everybody to be friendly and and appreciative to the people at the dump. Thank you. Thank you.

48:51 That was the only one. Yeah, that was the only one. Okay. Okay. Uh, so other discussions about, um, also as we’re talking about all this, I wanted to just quickly talk about, um, the curbside collection contracts as we’re looking to that next September, 2026. One of the things, so I’ve been able to meet with at least one company to discuss it. Um, one of the things that the board will really need to evaluate is motivating to what we call automation. So automation is a trash truck with one driver using an automated arm that reaches out of the truck, grabs that trash recycling and puts it in the, in the truck. The big piece with this is both safety and reduction of costs.

49:36 And so let me just finish what I have to say before we talk about the other piece of it. Um, so when you think about the cost of the truck, yep. We, that’s a set cost, but then you have the cost of the driver and you have the cost of the laborer. And sometimes there’s two laborers on the back. I’m just gonna use easy numbers. So if the trash truck driver is making $50,000 and the guy in the bank is making $50,000, that’s a hundred thousand dollars in labor. If I eliminate one labor and just have the driver, that’s a huge savings across town. Mm-hmm. Um, so that was something that was really recommended to us that we really need to consider moving in that direction. I understand that we have a downtown dress strip that is extremely hard with that.

50:22 Mm-hmm. So the idea is that we would separate the downtown district from the other areas of town, continue with the normal operations in the downtown districts. Um, we would work with the company to evaluate the downtown district. They would tell us where they could make, use the automation and where the automation’s not gonna work. Obviously a lot of us know where that is. And so we would have just like we have a five day collection route that would be a day collection where you’d have a regular collection of regular trash truck with a guy driving and people on the back and then looking at the, the rest of the town to say, Hey, we really need to move an automation over in these areas. The pieces that add to that is that the barrels,

51:09 so you would have to move to standard size barrels. Now, currently you’re allowed to have two 30 fives or 1 65 gallon toter. You say you’re allowed to have 70 gallons, but nobody can find a 70 gallon toter. You can only find a 65 and Recycling’s Unlimited. Currently in our contract, we do not own the recycling curbside that is owned by the current company. So Republic owns that. 10 years ago when we put this contract out, we were very smart about this. We saw the running on the wall. We were concerned about where recycling was going. At that time, we were making money, we’re concerned that it was gonna go in the other direction. And the contract, it says the collection company owns the recycling. So we have had a very great contract.

51:55 It’s essentially costing the collection contracts company right now, $300,000 for that curbside material for the recycling. Going forward, we’re going to need to share that cost mo most likely. So there is some value. Um, the value goes up and down based on the commodities market. Recycling is a commodity. It gets broken down to the different items and sold on the commodities market. Um, however different things come into play. Everybody has Amazon, Amazon trucks come to the house. We have a gluttony of cardboard. Cardboard used to have high value. The value is going down. Um, glass used to have no value. That value’s coming up a little bit. Um, plastic water bottles have a little bit of value.

52:41 Paper has value. Most everything else has no value or less value or deleted value. Really ‘cause it’s flavored to deal with it. Um, so what we’re gonna need to also do, is that we’re gonna need to cap the amount of curbside recycling that’s out there. Um, so when we talk to several companies, you know, you’re looking at a cap of either, again, 65 gallons of recycling, or you could go up to like a 96 gallon toter. I believe a automated truck can pick up a 96 gallon toter for recycling. Um, so we’ll continue to look at all this stuff. Um, for the Toters, you can buy, we could buy Toters for the whole town. Um, you could share the cost. You could, you know, this is where we talk about town meeting, um, override votes.

53:27 You know, you can buy barrels and spread the cost out of ‘em for over 10 years. You can lease barrels. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to look at the barrels. You can buy the barrels from the trash company. You can buy the barrels on your own and potentially get a little bit better deal. Some of it comes into the rollout of all those barrels. We’re talking 8,000 homes in town, so 8,000 barrels for trash in the 8,000 barrels for recycling. So 16,000 barrels. So you can imagine the rollout that it’s actually gonna take to get those te every house. Now, when we do this, we also want to take a look at our regulations. We wanna know when somebody puts that trash recycling out who it is. We wanna make sure that we can kind of track that. We wanna make sure that people aren’t sliding additional

54:12 barrels out there, um, that we’re not supposed to be paying for. So we’re gonna take a look at rules and regulations regarding, do you need to put an address on your bar? All that stuff needs to be evaluated. The other piece that we’re looking at right now is that in the downtown district, we allow businesses to place their recycling curbside that will need to stop, or we will need to start to charge them for that. And so that is something that we’re gonna have to take a look at. Um, we believe we do have software currently that we could add vendors, continue to charge vendors, but that’s something that we’re gonna have to consider as well. Um, so you could have, um, and again, we can never handle a restaurant or anything like that, but you could, you could handle a,

54:59 you know, a commercial establishment. Um, so that is something that we will be taking a look at. Again, um, we need to do this in a shorter time period because we wanna try to have this contract resolved this fall so trucks can be built and we’re ready to go in September of 2026.

55:20 Questions. Yeah. See, uh, is there any, And again, like this is like, I want you guys to think about this. Yeah. You don’t have all have all your questions tonight. We’ll keep this as a kind of a standard agenda item to talk about the curbside collection ideas for the contracts. Um, but yeah. Yeah, no, growing up and living in downtown, I know the issues down there. It’s, you know, every, for those that don’t know, like every house is unique. Sometimes it’s a very narrow area to get it in, sometimes very wide. I also have a house in Salem where it’s the standard arms and things like that. It works great, but it, it wouldn’t work at every house downtown. Right. Um, what one thing I was thinking of, like, so Salem does trash every week. The bins are a little smaller.

56:06 The recycling bins are bigger Yeah. Than they go other week. Yeah. Um, I know you couldn’t, you definitely couldn’t, you know, the smaller bins for trash, you could probably do, most of the downtown people would probably do it. Um, but there’d be some areas in Marblehead, you know, say like there is over here, um, where you could go the bigger recycling and do every other week maybe. Yeah. That is something that, so the only concern I have with the 96 is so, um, again, I’m a composting household. Yeah. But I fill up my recycling bin every week. Family of four to the top, um, you know. Yeah. And so that’s the only concern I get it. Can I go two weeks with the 96, you know, would it work and stuff like that. And The other question I had, is there a way, is it an all

56:53 or nothing contract with trash and recycling? Or can you split, like say do a 10 year trash recycle, uh, contract in like a five year recycling because of the commodity market constantly changing? You can, most of the companies, I don’t think you’ll be able to find a company that’s gonna be willing to do a 10 year contract again. Yeah. The reason is, is that most or all the landfills in Massachusetts are gonna include Yeah. In 2030. Yeah. So nobody has an idea of what’s gonna happen after that. Mm-hmm. And so they’re not gonna be, wanted to be locked into collection costs. E even disposal costs. Um, when we’re talking to contracts, we’ll be releasing a, um, request for proposal.

57:38 Um, we don’t have to do normal bidding and stuff like that. We will do requests for proposals. We’ll look at larger companies that can handle this. They’re gonna wanna bid on everything. Okay. They’re gonna wanna bid on curbside, the transfer station, the tonnage going out. Everything that makes everything more attractive. Um, there’s more into it in it for them as well. So likely that recycling and trash would be on the same contract time. Yeah. Prob probably a five year for both. Yeah. Okay.

58:11 Okay. I think this certainly was a great con conversation, information sharing. Hopefully this will be on the TV as as well. And it will be in the newspapers. The town needs to know, um, all of, all of this. So thank you very much. And, uh, I really do think the board ought to have a motion to thank, uh, our colleagues at the treasurer. Mm-hmm. So moved. Yes. De all in favor? Yep. Mm-hmm. Uh, okay. We’ll just minutes. So have the report that, and please let them know that we, uh, we certainly,

58:58 uh, made that motion today. Okay. We’ll move to the rest of the agenda quickly. Okay.

59:08 Um, community health, um, and the comm comm, we’re meeting regularly to, we have a sort of mid-August that timeframe where we hope to be able to handle the, the this 40 45 question surveys. We’ve got a, a little steering group that we’re putting together, uh, working re meeting regularly with the UMass Boston. Um, I, I think it’s, it’s going along, uh, really quite well. Um, I, uh, as some of, you know, sit in on the town charter committee, and, uh, I’ve been asked to make a regular report from the charter committee.

59:53 Um, every, every meeting, uh, the charter committee has finished. Well, the ch ch charter committee is looking to develop what, what in effect is the town constitution. We, we haven’t had any organized structure, um, like that. We have bylaws, of course, and we have enormous amount of Massachusetts general law. But the time charter will put it all together in an organized way. The charter committee has met 24 times since it was put together, uh, last year. Uh, it’s great committee, well chaired really terrific. We, we have finished, um, version A and I got an email this morning that version B will begin

1:00:42 to review version B in our July meeting. No, our August meeting, August 20 something. Um, and, uh, the, the, the town charter Committee has a website, and you can go on the website, you can read all of charter a, um, I believe the board of health is chapter, chapter, chapter eight, six. Uh, I’m not certain, but I think that’s it. It’s organized in a whole, whole different way. But I will report on a regular basis, and I’ll make certain that all of the elements of, of the town just, we’ve made a decision in the charter community. We’re not gonna change anything.

1:01:28 We are just going to codify what’s being done today and possibly make recommendations of what might be done in the future. Okay. But there’s a parallel issue that’s taking place that, um, actually even Andrew didn’t know as a senior member of the town, about, um, an advisory group that’s been put together that, um, Mr. McMahon with all of his sources and all of his network found out about, Yeah. Um, oh, you want me to speak to it? Please. I, so I, from what my understanding of it is, so it’s called the, uh, master Plan Advisory Group. Um, is that they’re kind of going to be organizing, um,

1:02:19 picking up from all town, uh, departments, boards, whatever, maybe finding redundancies and trying to combine them. I think, um, that’s kind of my understanding, to see if they can, to find areas where they can. Um, there’s definitely some skepticism with it. Um, I, the planning board is taking the lead. There was some pushback from town administrator on that, and the planning board did win out on that. I have a lot of faith in the planning board. So, um, you know, I, I don’t, I don’t like everyone in every board, every, you know, the responsibilities of every board being consolidated and reporting to one, one person, a town like a mayor or a town administrator.

1:03:06 I don’t like that. So I don’t think, I think having, uh, people conscious of that, which when I’ve talked to other board members, they are conscious of that, that they, you know, they were elected to do some, a particular job and they, that’s their focus. So making sure that they don’t lose control of that while making their lives a little easier, saying, you know, um, think a couple examples were like building maintenance. There might be a couple different building maintenance crews. Why not just come, you know, have them all be the same type thing, things like that. Now to be honest, it doesn’t really touch our department too much, I don’t think, Andrew. But because, So my biggest piece I think in this, um, would be the solid waste side. Yeah. So that’s why I say like, you know, you know, when you talk about sharing employees responsibilities

1:03:53 and stuff, the transfer station workers are seven, you know, well, six days a week and 365 days a year. There are other boards and committees that have employees that are seasonal, where, you know, you look at a park and rec or something where the summer’s a lot busier, things like that. We, we don’t have that. And there’s specialty things here. So like, you know, you could combine, you know, building operators and, but if our compactor goes down, they don’t know what to, to do with that. Like, this is a total, I I, and I’ve had conversations with select board members about this, where they’re being like, well, where’s the redundancies? Where’s the overlap? And like, there really isn’t any for us. So I, um, I do believe that. And, you know, I don’t know if they wanted to cut our grass. Maybe they, that’s about all I can think of.

1:04:38 But, um, but it, it’s good to have someone sitting on, on the board, uh, or in this group. Um, I definitely volunteer. We Have been Okay. Well we, we’ve been asked to submit a Board of Health member. Mm-hmm. And, um, if we have a volunteer, I, otherwise, I was gonna nominate the senior member. We’re a very junior board, but Tom is the senior member by virtue of time and place. Yeah. And he also is the very senior board time in living in Marblehead, that’s for sure. So I think he’s really the obvious person. So my, my motion would be to ask him if he has time Yeah.

1:05:24 To serve on this committee. I Can make time for that if you agree. Second motion. Perfect. Okay. Yeah. Uh, I’ll unanimous vote. So thank you very much for agreeing to that. Um, I, I, especially, I’ve got calm ‘cause I can fight all the public health battles. Yeah. But I can’t in, in any way, shape or form talk about the Yeah. Was issues the way you, and also, You know, obviously I will be, you know, I’m required to participate on the, in the employee side As well. Yeah. I guess there’s like three, three levels. Yeah. There’s staff, senior staff. Yep. Board members and the public. Yep. Yep. And I, and I have worked for the town before very briefly, but I did.

1:06:11 So I do understand some of the areas where, you know, they might be discussing. So, Okay. Um, we’ve been asked, the board has been asked to participate in, um, a program, um, called Menstrual EE Equity, which, which really has to do with, um, uh, the, the cost of, uh, supplies for, for women having a period that the sense is there are a significant number of people who can’t afford to manage those costs. The, uh, we were asked to partner, or at least con consider partnering

1:06:56 with the school committee because the schools are where they’re probably gonna start. So if it’s okay, I’m gonna continue to talk to them. Yeah. To bring something back, we actually do have a, a sort of an expert in town. Uh, one of our colleagues that has a daughter who graduated from one of the local universities and is her senior thesis was to do this around several universities. So we, we, I will invite her back next time if that would be okay. Alright. Um, um,

1:07:36 I think that’s the agenda. Um, and we can move to, uh, if there are any other, oh, Do you want me to read the bills? Oh yeah, sorry. Fire them up. But, um, exterminators, we had $890 75 cents agri source for the grinding. We had, uh, 12,940, um, Amazon for other disposal. 2 95, 57, uh, internet access at and t $80 Atlantic Vet, um, for testing $240 Black earth compost, uh, residential food composting $1,649 73 cents. Um, how do you pronounce this logic? Rod? Logic. Logic, yeah. Bonsai Logic. Oh, did I put a typo? Okay.

1:08:21 $24,902 50 cents East Coast compactor for compact compactor repair, a thousand dollars 70, uh, thousand 75, um, gamblers for uniforms. Uh, 4,160 Haley Ward, uh, the engineering firm for the transfer station. Uh, $2,534. Helene Haslet stipend, uh, yearly stipend, $200. Uh, home Depot commercial, um, for disposable area supplies, $14 27 cents. Marblehead Counseling Center for counseling. Uh, $9,464 48 cents, Marblehead Light for electricity. 8 77 32. Uh, mayor Tree Services for grinding and uh, compost removal. 3020 $4 McKeen, uh, that’s custo, uh,

1:09:11 custodial and house supplies. $2,447 72 cents, me ment for legal. Um, $4,806. Uh, Minuteman Press for printing forms $39 91 cents. Uh, MT. Equipment Solutions for supplies parts, uh, for the mower. Uh, $1,980 10 cents. Uh, pottery Gardening. What is it? Is that par tear? Um, they handle the land landfill and wetland maintenance. $8,036 73 cents. Pick Fence building. Um, repair is what, that’s what I guessed. Yeah. Alright. $510 Republic Services. This is not for the current one.

1:09:58 Right. These are older pre-strike. Um, $69,596 and 9 cents. RMG Enterprises, uh, the company that recycles the TVs monitors things $1,253 98 cents. Um, Thomas stipend a hundred dollars, which he has not. I’ve never had that in the mail. He hasn’t got it yet. Know it goes fast. But yeah. So he hasn’t received it yet. I got my stipend for a hundred dollars. Last year was a shock to me, um, to get it. So this year I knew what to do. So I gave mine to the counseling center, um, T-Mobile for telephone, uh, $33 and 5 cents. Tried it. Environmental for household hazardous waste aid, 2,102 $12 Uline the barrels

1:10:44 for the school’s kitchens, uh, $200 36 cents. United Construction, uh, repair and maintenance for non highway vehicles. Uh, $8,010 96 cents. Utech Mattress Recycling, uh, $168 United Cents, Violia s technical, uh, company that recycles fluorescent lights. That seems wrong. I may have mis done that wrong. 82. $82. 82,000. No, That’s not idea. I put that on the Wrong button. That that should have been Waste Management something. Yeah. Um, I’ll fix it up. WB Mason, uh, office supplies $180 37 cents. And, uh, William Scotsman for the trailer. 32 9 54. That seems high too. I have that on. How much is it?

1:11:31 32,000. Yeah, That’s not All right. I put a couple of these and I’ll fix ‘em, but glad I did that. Pretty good. Thank You. So, Um, we had questions and comments. Are there any, uh, additional comments from the floor? Just one comment when you’re doing all the kudos, Include Andrew and Marty. Yeah. They’ve been doing all. Very true. Yes. Thank you. I appreciate you. I know you and I don’t always speak. You’ve been doing a super job. Thank you. Good, good job everyone. They do talk about also how like responsive develop, been in the office. Like as much as they kind of, I know you guys are running around like crazy. So trying not be bug. We had, I had received some extra help from the co OA so we have a individual that’s comes over on a daily basis to answer the phone.

1:12:18 Yeah. Um, even with, you know, four people answering the phone, we couldn’t even keep up with it. Yeah, no, I’m doing my best not to bug you guys. No, it’s, yeah. So The only other comment, uh, and I don’t know if this came up in a previous meeting, is there’s a real Japanese, not wood Invasive. Invasive Yeah. I brought it up with the last one. Yeah. That can’t go in the compost or in the yard waste area. It has to be thrown in trash. Mm-hmm. If it isn’t, it’ll go everywhere. And I don’t know if you can get some signage up at the transfer station. Let someone takes a piece of that and throws it into the, It is a real struggle with DEP, um, to kind of manage that. So yeah, we do have some agreements. Um, but that is a waistband item. Um, as far as like you are technically not allowed to be throwing, uh,

1:13:04 plant material into the, the waste stream. Um, but yeah, we try to deal with that appropriately. But it shouldn’t be throwing, can there be a sign at the transfer station? Please don’t throw jet. And certainly with a lot of landscapers who are more knowledgeable about this. Yeah. I’ll try to work with partier and DEP to see how the best way to handle some of that stuff is. Couple quick questions. Um, this is the number everyone’s gonna wanna know. What is it per week? And if, I don’t know how you could break it down, but that we would, that we pay Republic. That we’re not paying Republic. Yeah. That we’re not getting, um, our money. Hundred $37 per house. 8,000 house annual per year. That’s the year, uh, per house. How much is it for the whole year?

1:13:50 So year nine. So, um, October 1st, 24 to 9 30 25, uh, is $987,670. $987,670 million. 20,000. 20,000 a week. Okay. About that. I think it was. Yeah. Less than $3 A household per week. Per week. Yeah. That’s great. Um, and what’s the percent about, obviously you don’t know yet ‘cause you’re, you’re just starting the process of looking for a new company and for a new contract. What, what do you think you’re anticipating like 15 to 20% increase? No, we Had given that projections during, uh, fin comm meeting. Right. Um, I’d have to go back and take a look At it. Okay. Okay. Yep. Any, um, funky water test results? Yeah. Um, so today we had test results come back from

1:14:39 um, grace Oliver’s. So Grace Oliver’s is currently closed. Um, crocker Park came back in high. Um, that is being retested. It’s allowed to currently stay open. Um, but depending on the retest that may need to be closed. Grace Oliver’s will is posted to close today and will need to stay closed until we have a pass water sample. Can you test Riverhead? We do not. It’s not a bathing beach. There’s rubber it.

1:15:06 You Need to understand the regulations behind it. So I mean, you, you can call and talk about it, but it is not a public bathing beach. Um, okay. So Grace Olivers disclosed at least until next Thursday. No. So we will test again tomorrow. Oh, tomorrow, okay. Yep. And then, okay, well think we’re actually gonna, yeah, we’ll test again tomorrow. Um, and potentially have it open on Saturday, but, okay. So what’s the best way for me to find out if it’s gonna be open on Saturday? The beach is open. The sign removed? Yeah, but like Okay. Drive by. Huh? Drive by. Right. I can do that. Um, um, So the state will closer the, on their state website, the results. Yep. And then last question, the $240 to the vet for testing, what was that? Uh, It was for rabies. It was, yep. That’s like, that’s you guys not the,

1:15:51 um, animal control. It’s animal control, but we pay for the testing. Oh, okay. Was someone bit I do not, it mostly. Could we get a dog? Um, Okay. Yeah, I’d have to take a look to see what, what was that? So generally now, the, um, if you’re in your home, in your bedroom and you find a bath the next morning, yeah. You have to, um, it is required that the, you know, the bath be tested at that time. Um, so that’s where a lot of the testing is coming into at this time. Oh, who, who does the Water sampling at the beaches? You, you do. Yep. Who gets the bat? Uh, We should encourage patients. Yeah. Don’t, don’t get it.

1:16:34 Anyone on the, okay. We then, um, uh, I move to enter into executive session pursuant to Massachusetts General Law Chapter 30 a paragraph 21, A two to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiation with non-union personnel for, to conduct collective bargaining sessions for contract negotiations with non-union personnel, specifically the health director employment contract. The board will not reconvene in open session, uh, once this executive session concludes. Thank you all for your attention tonight.

1:17:20 You one of the most informative meetings, uh, we’ve had, and I hope it can be shared with the broader populations popping. Thank you very much. Awesome. Just need to go for a poll vote. So I need a second round of motion. Second, uh, Amanda Trump. Steve. Tom. Tom? Yep. Okay. And we’ll take notes so we don’t need to record. Yeah, that’s fine. I have it set up to record if you guys want. Whatever we’re make, we’re not gonna make you sit in another room.