Board of Health: October 27, 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 73rd, 7 37 on the 27th of October. And the Board of Health is in session for its open meeting. Um, since I’ve got the technology working, let me go ahead and write to my, there are copies of these slides in case you need them. Thank you. Thank you. Um,

0:26 I have 3, 3, 3 elements in my report. The first one, um, has to do with, um, the, uh, creating a healthier marble plate, marble head update. Um, we are a little over 1500 surveys completed. That’s where UMass Boston thought we might be, but it’s less than we want. So we’re very eager to try to

0:56 do a couple more bumps to increase the survey responses. Um, we’re gonna hold the survey response system open till the week of, uh, 1111, and we’re doing as big a push as we know how to get more responses in. We’re gonna run ads in the local newspaper. Um, Andrew’s bringing a rolling billboard to the football game, uh, on, uh, Halloween night. And I’m gonna hand out, uh, um, postcards there. We’re asking different restaurants to see if we can put table cards at the restaurants. Um, we have permission to give, uh, again,

1:45 postcards as people drive through at least one of the banks in town. We’re gonna try to get the second bank to allow that as well. And any other issues that people think might get more people, particularly the young people, uh, the 18 through 30 and even the 30 to 40 are below the average of the rest of the age groups. So that’s our goal. The more we can get in those areas, then the higher the statistical value. If we wanna say, gee, the nons don’t agree with the generation GZ, that we need

2:32 statistical significant numbers on both of them so that UMass Boston can do that comparison for us. Right now, we can do that for five deciles of age group in the, in the town. We have enough there, but we need, uh, uh, more for both younger age groups. So we’re doing everything we can to try to make that happen. Um, but so far it’s, uh, I, I think the, this, well, people are not gonna say to me, it’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever seen. Uh, people have said, you know, it’s a little bit long, but they’ve, uh, understood why we’re doing it, and it’s a good idea. So we’re, we’re, we’re pushing along trying to get it done,

3:17 get it, and we hope if we can, I would really love to get the 3000, because everybody thought that 3000 people at the town meeting last year gave it a legitimacy because enough voters were there. So I think we can, A stretch goal is probably 2000, maybe, uh, uh, 3000 maybe too, too high. But we really had to do everything we can to get as many people’s, we paid decent money for it. We might as well get our money’s worth. So, um, that’s where we are there. Um, the Marblehead Mental Health Task Force was a creation of this board during the pandemic.

4:03 The sense was that there were, obviously, there was an awful lot of stress in the community with all the, um, stay at home issues and all of that. So the Marblehead Mental Health Task force was established, and it really has had some very, uh, productive first years. It, uh, developed a, an informative website, which unfortunately was hacked into oblivion. And apparently you’re working on trying to buy that site. Yeah. We’re trying to recover that site and open it back up. Yeah. Well, but not only from the hack, apparently it’s now back in the marketplace. If we own the site at one point, we lost the ownership. Yeah. So We have to take, take a look at and who, you know, who’s using it now,

4:50 and it might just become Marvel head Cares, ma slash you know, r Yeah. Okay. So we’re working, they’re working on to try to get that we’ve, the, the mental health task force was the initiator of running specific columns in the current, um, and the way it was run. Um, it was really working around to, to to, to be a think tank ideas. What can we, what can we learn differently in the town? What, what might we help the town do to, to survive mental health issues? And, um, a lot of practice orientation, uh, different providers came to the mental health task force. And one of the things that, what ran through was to try

5:37 to reduce the stigma. Um, we’re still, we think we’re modern, but we’re still have, uh, a concern in public when people say, gee, I’ve got a mental health problem. I’ve got depression. That sort of thing. But the mental health task force was working at that, but recently, in, in part because of these frustrations, um, the, the Mental Health Task force suggested to the Board of Health that, gee, it might be better for it to move to an affiliation with the Marblehead Counseling Center, which is right out there, active face-to-face with the, with the clients, with the patients, with the people who need the help. So the board publicly endorsed that

6:24 a couple of months ago, and there now have been, uh, two meetings of the Marblehead Mental Health Task Force, but it’s now going under the shortened name of Marblehead Cares. Um, apparently town cares, city Care cares is the colloquial way of describing jurisdictions accesses to mental health services. Apparently, there’s Gloucester Cares and a couple of other places. So the team basically wants to say they wanna be known as Marblehead Cares, and that’s the way we’re gonna try to put together the website. So the, the question for the board is how do we either

7:11 deactivate or just eliminate the reference to, um, the Marblehead Mental Health Task force on our own website? And I talked to Thatcher about, uh, email Thatcher, and his recommendation was that we vote to just discontinue Marblehead Mental Health Task Force and let him know that, and he will take that committee off of the town website. And so I thought I’d proposed that. Um, I don’t see any real downside. Um, um,

7:58 um, but I’m open. How much does traffic does it get on the, I I’d have to talk to the company that’s managing the site right now to see if they can, so they’d be able to tell me how much traffic it’s Getting. Yeah. So I was gonna say, if you, if you can, if you’re getting any traffic, you, you’d wanna redirect it for a little while, phase it. Yep. Um, but that, that, I think even no matter what, you might wanna just Redirect probably. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s, at least for a while, It was a pretty robust source of where you can go for help. Yeah. If you’re feeling depressed, if you’ve got suicidal worries, all those sort of things. Um, mark, Dr. Lab Obama was really quite good at bringing in other sites

8:45 and putting them on the website. So it’s worth the trouble. I I don’t think I’ve ever heard how many visits, but, but If it’s, if it’s hacked right now or it’s still go to it and all this stuff is there, you just No, you can’t get, you can’t get there at this point. Yeah. So redirecting it wouldn’t even redirect it to No, but so what you would do is you’d be redirecting people to the Marblehead Counseling Center website that has all that information. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. So, because that’s the goal is to get people to the information. Yeah. Yeah. But eventually we’re gonna bring back, Try to bring back formal cares. Okay. And even with the cares, you’re, you’re gonna probably have a, it’s either gonna mirror the Marblehead Counseling Center with all that information on the Marblehead Cares, or it’s gonna take you there and it’s just gonna bring you to all the relevant information.

9:30 Okay. Mar Yeah. ‘cause I, I’d like to get some substance abuse stuff on the Marblehead Care site, whether that’s part of that. Yeah. And so we, yeah. So obviously the, the big part of the Public Counseling Center website Yeah. Is the substance abuse, is all the extra information that goes along with that. Okay. And they, they just run their own site, Right? Yeah. They’re running their own site. They, you know, they have their own, you know, team that runs that stuff. Um, so I, I would suggest you take a look at that. Yeah. And then we can maybe pick and choose what we wanna be brought over, but, you know, or we can just redirect everybody to that model end. Okay. So you would go to the Marblehead Cares. Okay. But it, it would eventually, like, you know, click here for more information and would take you to that piece.

10:16 Okay. Yeah, I’ll take a look at that. Okay. So I’d like to entertain a motion to, uh, deactivate discontinue the, um, Marblehead Mental Task Force on the town list of organizations. Can I have a motion? Second. Second. Any other, any further conversation? All in favor? Aye. Uh, I don’t think we need we roll call. Okay. We’ll do that. All right. The one of the reasons why the Marvel Head cares has been meeting fairly regularly recently is the de the State Department of Mental Health

11:02 has issued, uh, uh, request for, uh, proposals to allow municipalities and other organizations to apply for grants to improve the, um, behavioral health of, of the Commonwealth. There is an Office of Behavioral Health Promotion and Prevention, and its mission, it’s in the slide, is to promote behavioral health and wellness in the Commonwealth residents committed to statewide coordination and implementation of innovative evidence-based, data-driven and trauma-informed strategies to advance the promotion

11:49 of behavioral health and prevention of mental health conditions. Okay. So that’s the background. Um, they have, in their website, they have seven SI seven objectives, improving mental health wellbeing, reducing stigma and discrimination, advancing behavioral health equity, preventing suicide, preventing violence, prevent substance use disorder, and to promote positive childhood youth experiences. So that’s the big picture for this statewide organization. Now they’re putting out an RFA for,

12:34 specifically for behavioral health promotion and prevention. The website, the, the, the RFA will ask individuals, organizations or collaborative groups to decide which tier of activity their organization or collaborative, collaborative exists in. Uh, tier A is the be beginner, uh, to, that would allow the, the organization to design and develop support for emerging programs. Tier B is, if you’ve already got a program out there, this would allow you to implement that.

13:20 And Tier C is, if you’ve got a, an established program that you’ve already implemented, but you wanna expand it, that would be tier Tier C. From my perspective, Marblehead is clearly Tier A. We, we are at the baby step level. Um, but I think we do have, with the, um, uh, more activist board of health and the wellness, uh, program that, that, uh, Tom ran in the fall and the articles that we’ve been putting in the newspapers and calm to trying to find more information, we are beginning to be much more active in this environment. So I, I, I don’t, I don’t want to suggest

14:07 that this is gonna be easy to get funded. There. Were over, well, about 300 people on the website to hear about this grant proposal last Friday, or two Fridays ago. And I think at best, they’re gonna give 15 grants. They have $3 million total. And if you take the median amount of money, the Tier A gets a hundred to 150,000, B gets 150 to 2 53, gets two 50 to the amount in each of those five grants in each tier A, B,

14:53 and C, you’ve got $3 million spent. So it is gonna be pretty aggressively, um, competed. Competed for. In addition, there are some challenges, uh, that, um, well, let me, the, they will give some preferences to organizations that specifically have certain characteristics, those which serve populations disproportionately affected by behavioral health disparities. Um, people do they wanna encourage advancing health equity in Massachusetts. They want my multilingual implementation.

15:41 So the, the preferences don’t exactly tilt toward Marblehead. So the, it’s gonna be a very competitive program anyway. And these RFA preferences don’t help us much. Nonetheless, I believe that we should go ahead. The benefit of this, um, is I think that it will allow us to project how we want to do all other things being equal. How would we like to improve mental health wellness in the town of Marette? And we’ve really never sat down and talked about that, put anything down on paper.

16:27 We do increments of that. So I’m in favor. I would like the, the support of my colleagues that we would try to develop a TRA proposal for this grant. The grant, the, the proposal will be due three o’clock on Monday, November 17th. So it’s a very short period of time. The, the answers to the grant description web, uh, uh, webinar that they had last week are still not on the website. So not so, so others don’t have much of an advantage in terms of having this already done, uh,

17:14 before, uh, before the timeframe, because no one really understands the details. So I think it’s worth our while to go after, um, a tier A grant and the focus of this particular grant proposal, they list as these seven, uh, different, um, different skills. And, um, I think that we can be at least, we can at least put realistic, um, proposal together, whether it’s funded or not, it can still be something that we work, work from.

18:03 And we move, we get a feedback, we, we call pink slip. We had pink slip back from a grant grant agency. They’ll tell you what could have been done to make it stronger. Okay. And if you get the $150,000 for TRA, what they ask us to do is to allocate at least a half an FTE to this project to conduct the small scale needs assessment. We’ve, we’ve actually been doing some of that with the best practice grants that we have. And they want us to initiate local partnerships. We’ve, we certainly have been starting to do that. Um, uh, uh, the superintendent of, uh, the school, uh, the, the schools has worked with us on co com.

18:50 He was very active, involved in helping us develop the survey and other things. So we’re beginning to reach out across the board. And then, um, they, we, we would have to develop a small scare pilot and, um, um, collect pilot evaluation data. Now, the real benefit of this, this grant, if it’s possible, the funding agency believes this will be a 10 year evaluation. So a a hundred thousand dollars over 10 years each year would allow us to do some fairly sizable

19:36 increments over time. Now, with the current situation, with all the stuff that’s going on in Washington, of course the, the Commonwealth is gonna have a budget problem. Who knows if they’ll be able to do it. But that’s why there were so many people signing up for the webinar, because there must 10 different ways of asking the same question, can I use this to pay for people who have gotten furloughed by federal grant cuts? So it’ll be competitive. But, um, what I would like to suggest is what I, where I think our strength is, I think that trying to promote early intervention with youth and young adults,

20:22 and then I think what we can do is put a very creative spin on that and talk about integrating education, training and skills development. We, I, I believe that we can argue that even just having these columns in the newspapers now and, and having, um, our small audience, but our audience getting in, getting more interested in public health issues than they have before. So that, and, and there’s clearly, with the tragedy in town, there’s clearly a baseline. I mean, I’m gonna use, I would use a, a a part

21:10 or all of the editorial was in the current about it’s time to change the culture that, that, that we can say Marblehead is ready to go. We’ve got a new board that’s working together, it’s pushing public health issues into the community. Then this is exactly what the, they want to have done. Whether we’re competitive with the other, well, how many are there, 370 pounds in Massachusetts? Whatever. Nonetheless, I think we gained something by doing that.

21:49 And I think, and I don’t know how to, uh, until Friday, or actually, I didn’t know, I didn’t go to the meeting on Friday. Uh, I had my grandkids here this weekend, but until Sunday, I thought actually Marblehead cares wanted to write this grant. I learned Sunday afternoon that they decided that they don’t have the horsepower or they didn’t have the time. They didn’t think they could be competitive. Uh, one of the, one of the benefits being retired is I have the time to try to make this happen. And I really think that if we can put a, a, an inno way, an innovative link between the green line on,

22:35 while you don’t have green in your, your printout, the last line of, of the priority areas to the prevention, promoting early intervention, we can try to be creative. Um, so I don’t, I don’t know, um, in, in your med school at UVA once a year, we had, uh, a program we call the mini med school, where the community would sign up. We could take about a hundred people every year. And they agreed to come four nights for three to four hours. And we gave them basic coursework, laboratory epidemiology, that sort of thing. And they got a certificate for having gone

23:23 through a mini me school. Okay. I think we can put something creative together to do like a, maybe not even a mini, but a nano or a micro, um, public mental health program. We, we, Dr and I, uh, wrote that one or one of the columns was about the concept of public mental health. It’s a, it’s more robust in Europe, but even there’s several American communities that are trying to do this, that we would, we would be able to, to, to frame, I think a, uh, program where at some point we could go to the community and say, give us 12 hours of your time

24:10 and we’ll give you a micro or a nano education in what public health scientists do for a living. I mean, I’ve done it in several places. Uh, it’s, it’s exciting to teach and it’s, uh, generally well received. Um, so that would be, uh, my proposal. Um, yeah. I, I love this idea of applying for the grant, but how, how do we bring it back more to the substance abuse? Um, could we do something like the arrival live? That’s what it’s just writing down. Like this could pay for arrival. Yeah. Because it’s early childhood intervention. Yeah. So, well, youth, youth and Well,

24:57 Youth intervention. Yeah. Youth, youth and young adults. I don’t, you know, we have the one best practice grant in child and maternal mental health. Right. It’s tougher. Yeah. Because there aren’t as many babies and they certainly, the, the care of the moms is much more diffuse. Mm-hmm. It, it, it, they get carried and they get care in Salem that care probably could care from you and all of that. But I think that if we focus the public health on promoting early intervention, yeah. If you, if you, if we agree, I will go to the school committee, uh, tomorrow, send an email to the school committee to ask them if they’ll participate in this.

25:43 Yeah. I think that’s the right thing. Like, they’re very specifics in the, in the, the next level of detail. Like they talk about, uh, social emotional learning. We had a visit, we had, uh, someone from the superintendent’s office come at one of the meetings last year to talk about the new social emotional learning, uh, program that’s going on in schools. There. There’s enough information out there, I think, in marblehead of things going on that we should be able to make a reasonable, credible, um, proposal. Mm-hmm. Um,

26:24 and we lose nothing except my time, um, if we can’t do it. But I, I, I just think it’s worthwhile. I think what we want to pe let people know that we’re going to five people on the board next year, we’re gonna have a lot more time, uh, collectively, we already have changed the en I think the energy level of the, of the community, or at least our little community. And we want the town to see the benefits of having that extra energy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Sounds great. Yeah. Alright. If we agree to do this, this is due on November 17th.

27:09 It’s a Monday. We need to figure out a way to work through it with open meeting laws. I’m happy to work at the first draft and get a draft to you guys. We talk about it in a, some sort of legal forum. We may have to just do an open meeting on Zoom for a half hour, set it up couple of days, maybe not next week, but, but in the, in the, certainly the second week or November, we should be able, we, we sort of have to meet once or twice to be able to read what’s going on. It would be great if we can set up a pos if, if I could work through a rough draft. I mean, the, the details of what you have to put together

27:55 for all of this, uh, are immense. But the conceptual stuff, I, I think we can, I can share it pretty quickly and then we’ll fill out all the de and, and there’s a lot of the detail they asked for that we’ll just say, uh, to be developed because we just don’t have,

28:18 ‘cause the same, the same questions are asked of, um, a town like sale or Gloucester. Gloucester’s got a big, excuse me, big program. Now the question also amongst us, should it, it is,

28:38 should I get my bias first? But my bias is that this should be Marblehead. One of the debates in the Marblehead Cares, uh, environment was do we reach out and partner with many other people? I just, what, I’ve only been here three years, but this is a unique town. Mm-hmm. Lake Boag gone by the sea. Um, and we should stress the uniqueness and how we’re gonna customize the uniqueness and build, build a program for the people that we know and care about. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And if we end up looking like we aren’t far enough along, well then we just learn, have learned something. Yeah. Mm-hmm. No, I, I think that’s right.

29:24 Like, we’re vastly different from, than even the neighboring communities. So Yeah. Like Swamp Scott, they don’t, they don’t have a board like a a, a where they meet, but it’s a pretty low keyed and, and, and they don’t have anybody like you. Right. Every, everything’s, you know, It’s mostly restaurants and selling tobacco and stuff. Yeah. Mm-hmm. They don’t, they don’t even do beaches, do they? Or they Do beaches. They have, you know, obviously the main, the main beach there Anyway. Yeah. Anyway, I, I think that, that we ought to be comfortable in our own world and think all the way to how we can make this world better, not copy what somebody else did five years ago. Mm-hmm. And it has now has grants. Mm-hmm.

30:14 Alright. So if we go to a calendar

30:22 of November, this is due now on the 17th, I clearly need to be able to talk with the board, certainly on the 13th of the 14th. And it would be ideal if we could at least give each other feedback sometime during the latter part of next week. The only day I’m not available is the 13th. Okay. So, um, but I, and I think that we can do all that if we post it, we can do it all on Zoom. We don’t have to meet in this room. That’s correct. Yep. And people can go and listen to what we’re talking about. Yep. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So that’s, um, w

31:10 what about Thursday the sixth for a half an hour? Do we wanna do an evening? We’re gonna do a midday, whatever it works e evening or Friday the seventh? Or I may, I I would like to have something to share with you by that time. So I have, I’ll be at a conference the fifth, sixth is in seventh. But that doesn’t mean you guys can’t meet, right? It can be all set up for the zoom and all that stuff. Yeah. I, I’d say the sixth would be ideal. Uh, I a maybe for that date, um, or I can do eight. Is eight too late? Well, eighth is a Saturday if you o’clock eight, eight o’clock. If it’s 20 minutes, half hour. Yeah. And it may not work.

31:58 I may not have enough that it would be worthwhile. Okay. And, or I may be sending you stuff that’s kind of simple enough that it’s not very creative. Mm-hmm. It won’t take much time at all. But the more important we would be the following one that I have, well, I don’t, the town charter committee may not be working, but it, it technically it does meet on the 13th. Um, so the

32:29 eight o’clock then would be ideal because that’s when, that’s over. Or, or on the 12th if we want it or something like that. Should we just do that tentatively on the 13th? The 13th is the only day I Can, oh, that’s when he came in. The Only one, the one During the day on the 12th During the day. On the 12th, the Afternoon. Uh, it would depend what time, if you can, uh, what day is the 12th? We Don’t need to know the time until the morning of the 10th, right? Two days? No. Would’ve to be Friday, depending on the time. So you need 48 hours to post the meeting. So the longer you wait, you just keep pushing it. The Oh, the time back. Okay. So if it was like a noon meeting, if we posted it at 11 o’clock Monday morning, that would be okay.

33:16 Uh, yeah. I would just you pushing it, but Yeah, You’re really pushing it. I would, I Don’t wanna push, I mean, I, I, I think we just,

33:27 uh, what do you think I can make during the day work? I just need to give you, which I can do tomorrow. The, the timeframes that work, I’m pretty open On the 12th. Mm-hmm. Okay. Why don’t we say sometime midday on the 12th and to be determined on the latter part of next week. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And we’re doing the sixth too. Sorry, sixth As well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If we can, yeah. Yeah. Hopefully I’ll get, I’m gonna try to get my one column I’m working on, um, to try to, as part of the calm bolus, uh, to get people more interested, uh, in responding. I want to try to get one

34:13 or two columns out the second week of November. So I’m working on one now that, uh, is a little more rigorous science than it has been. So it’s a little harder. But, but I think I’ll get that done next week and be able to work on this, our Next board of Health meeting. It’s, uh, falls on Veterans Day. So the 11th. Yeah. We’ll have to, we’ll have to change that. Should we move that to Monday? And we can always meet a little earlier. We can do, because That’s, that’s The, well, Monday I thought we decided we couldn’t meet that day because that’s a holiday. Yeah. The 11th. The 11th is the holiday. Oh,

34:55 So do like a seven On the 10th. Mm-hmm. That’s fine. Oh, so our regular meeting’s gonna be on the 10th. Yeah. So if I get lucky and productive, I might have a lot done on the 10th. And you, you, we may not have to meet later in the week at all. That’s probably unlikely, but, you know, pediatricians are optimists.

35:23 Okay, great. Look, this the, the conceptual framing I’m cons, I’m really convinced I can do that. The details of all of the check boxes that the state is gonna require. It, it, there’s gonna be a lot to be determined. And the, the they, if we don’t get funded, we don’t get funded, it will still, if we have a strategic, even an embryonic strategic plan for dealing with youth mental health in this town, uh, at the end of this process, I think we will have made progress. Mm-hmm. And if we don’t get it, we have a template to apply for The next one, next one, and we can then find, uh, an NGO or, you know, a little nonprofit that might give us half of that, or, uh, might help us some way.

36:11 And if you think about, you know, what, what can we do to make it innovative? Um, and that’s why I was thinking of my mini, mini, middle, mini med school approach. If we were gonna be willing to have in a different room, perhaps invite 50 people from town to go over the basics of public health wellness, um, I think that would be positive. Mm-hmm. I mean, we had a waiting list in, in, in, in Charlottesville. Wow. Um, well at, well, this 71% of all marble headers have college degrees and another 20% have some college education.

36:59 So only 9% of the time are not, the population don’t have, uh, college training. And my experience is everybody I meet is pretty smart. And, you know, and, and that lives around here because it’s, it, it’s certainly an expensive place to live. And so they have to be doing pretty good to enough good things to be able to afford it. So I, I think we can do that here and have some fun at it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, we can find,

37:37 uh, I’ll have to work at this, but the, the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard School of Business Administration publishes business school cases on healthcare. And if we can figure out a way that we can buy some of those, that’s a, that’s a great experience for a group. Um, uh, uh, the ones I’ve written in the past are probably a little dated. Right. Um, okay. So I don’t think we need a vote or anything, but this, we, we will go ahead. We’ll do this. Um, and, and if nothing else, we’ll learn about ourselves and the town a little bit more. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that sounds great. Okay. Alright.

38:24 That is, um, my report. Um, the report. Um, why, why don’t we take the report from the vice chair from Community Health?

38:40 Um, so we talked a little bit more about the signage. Oh, thank you. And here,

38:48 thank you.

38:52 So that this would be posted

38:58 to, um, that’s a, the wa the warning water not suitable for swimming the picture of someone, a universal no swimming sign. And then just letting people know that their bacteria levels are not monitored at the location of Riverhead.

39:17 And these would, this would be the sign, but they would also be some thing that they, the renter of the equipment would be waiving or acknowledging Renters. Really just for the, I think for, uh, parents of young kids. Yeah. Okay. Right. It was, yeah. So anybody that would sign up to, you know, for sub would get the, the waiver Yes. But not to, for canoeing for adults or any of the other Okay. Rental equipment. Um,

39:47 Yeah. So I mean, as long as the, yeah, that’s it. I mean, I You need an approve, you need a vote on it. Yeah. We would need a, an official vote. Okay. So I’ll take that as a motion to approve. Uh, second. Second. Um, all those in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All unanimous approval of the board.

40:12 Okay. All right. Um, to the vice chair for waste management. So we’re gonna, uh, Andrew and I are gonna make ourselves available on, um, this Thursday, three to 4:00 PM at the community center. Sure. It’s not ideal for everyone to be there, but people can still reach out to me or whoever and ask questions. You don’t have to show up from three to four, but if you do, like, I think we’ll bring the barrels. Right. Um, I have been, so we’ll see what people say. What, who kind of shows up. I think, um, I have definitely been, um, reaching out and getting a lot of feedback on it so far. It kind of seems like there’s not much of an appetite for the every other week recycling, which is fine.

40:59 I guess it’s, you know, I, I,

41:03 I think people are just a little nervous about that. Um, so it really sounds like people are, you know, I haven’t heard, I haven’t gotten too much pushback on just the idea of, you know, getting, you know, um, uh, the barrels for everyone in general. They just want both trash and recycling done every week. And the only concern is naturally in the historic area, which, um, you kind of expect that. So I don’t, do you have any of the smaller barrels that would Yeah, so I’ll bring a 35 gallon barrel. I’ll bring a 65 and I’ll bring the 96, um, so everybody can see them. Yeah. Um, again, you know, we’re just making ourselves available. I can do a quick presentation on the different options that we’re looking for for the RFP. Um, we can, you know, answer any questions that come.

41:50 Um, so yeah, just a quick question and answer open house, kinda, you know, come and talk to us again. You know, this isn’t the only time that we’ll answer these questions. No, please feel free to reach out to Tom or myself. Yeah. Um, if you have any questions regarding this, if you have opinions, this is really what we’re looking for. Yeah. And I think the only other concern was that the, um, you know, the non unlimited recycling, which I’ve tried to make clear to everyone, is, is kind of like that’s going to happen no matter what option you choose. Yeah. So we will be limiting recycling at this next option. Yeah. So that’s, it’s just the way it is. It’s not a valuable commodity at the moment. So, um, yeah. But again, people can dump as much as they want at The transfer station, correct. Yeah. I mean, again, we sell a huge number

42:37 of transfer station stickers. Mm-hmm. You know, we have a great facility. We want people to continue to use it. Um, again, this is just going over and none of those options up there are changing. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, this is just curbside trash and recycling collection. Yeah. And a lot of people think, you know, the, it comes to question, well, shouldn’t the transfer station be available to everyone? It doesn’t work that way. You know, it, it has a cost to it. Correct. So if you’re going to be bringing additional things up that we have to pay to get them removed, so that’s where the, um, sticker, um, comes into play. We not change the price of the sticker Every year. We do not change it every year. Occasionally we, we will be upping it at certain times, but we have no plans to do that at this time at all. Yeah. How has the, um, uh, the

43:23 license plate reader, The license plate reader has been going really well? Yeah. Um, we assume that we’ll see another tick uptick in tick sticker sales coming for, you know, fall leaves. That’s juggling what we see the last kind of uptick. Um, but it’s going really well. Um, I know we have sold, so when we look at sticker sales, we look at it for, uh, the calendar year. ‘cause that’s kind of how stickers are, are run. Um, and the last time we looked it was over $600,000. Yeah. So we’re doing very well with sticker sales. Um, you know, the idea that, like Tom said, is you’re covering the costs of, to run the transfer station for people using it for that material. Mm-hmm. Has there been any like, stopping people with, with the license plates?

44:08 Yeah. So there’s always gonna be stopping. That’s the whole idea behind it. You know, the guy has to be in the booth as the car comes into the facility, it works very quickly. Um, you know, if there’s, if it’s a, a license that has been registered, um, allows it to go through on the screen, it shows green, does a license that has not been registered, it pings up at the booth, and then it also shows a red license. It, it’s a red box around the whole picture of the vehicle. Okay. And so the idea, obviously at that point, as the car’s coming up, the attendant gets out and speaks with them to say, you know, this is the situation. It’s required that you have a sticker. And also that, you know, it can be, oh, I’m here to drop off a tv. I’m paying the 25, you know, the $35 for this tv. Okay. That can be dropped right here, you know, and exit this way.

44:54 Can they look at vehicles that have come in, or is it only the one at that time? No, they can look at vehicles that have come in. Okay. Yeah, just wondering if like, you step Out for a second. No, you, there’s a huge list. You, so you can just kind of roll back a little bit and take a look at everybody. Yeah. Okay. That works. It is a really nice system. Yeah. Um, and it’s been going really well for us. I would get to handing out calm things at the senior center. Uh, some very nice person came up to me and asked if we could develop a more limited, uh, facility license. She said she only uses the transportation station three or four times a year. And for her, uh, what is it, a hundred dollars

45:41 was pretty expensive. Could we say $20 per visit for a limited license or something like that? And I just said I would bring it up. I, I think something like that is worth exploring once we get used to it as being like, here’s a onetime fee coming in. And it would really be like, So there’s, there’s, we already kind of have this in place. Yeah. Um, so depending on what you’re trying to throw away. So if I had a tv, obviously there’s a one fee for that. If I have a mattress, there’s a one fee for that. If I’m trying to get rid of a little bit of trash, I can go through the commercial side and do way and pay. Mm-hmm. Now we say $320 a TA ton, but we’re charging you by the pound. So it’s 16 cents a pound.

46:26 So you drive across the, you get on the scale, we weigh you, you throw your items away, and then we’re gonna charge you per pound for the items that you just throw away. That’s really how we can handle those. Kinda, I only use it a little bit. This is what I need to do. Not a problem. Just go into the, what we consider the commercial land based side. Okay. Let me try to remember. It’s Cheaper than like a twin dollar person. Yeah. Yeah. Well, while you guys are doing, but if, Like, but if these questions ever come up, we can try to No, it, it’s good for us to hear this and we can explain it to the person, um, and maybe, you know, have language out there so they can understand how it works. Well, when you, while you’re doing that, if you could just keep notes and then we put Yep.

47:13 All these items in a column in one of the newspapers, or probably both. That one should go in both newspapers at the same time. Yeah. Then you could say tips for recycling, tips for trash under the new contract or anticipated Yep. By the new contract. Yep. I think that would be really important. And a good use of our columns. Sounds good. I’d like to explore in the future, I don’t, I don’t think this year is the right time, but like a per bag, leaf bag type thing. Yeah. So the per bag leaf piece is, you know, I, I don’t have a problem exploring that. Yeah. We can, you know, do the calculations on all that. Mm-hmm. The hard thing is that if you were to have, allow people to do that during the leaf’s time,

48:01 which is a very popular, your, your line is just gonna become very long, long because it’s one car coming in, the attendant’s gonna stop you and say, all right, how many leaf bags are gonna count ‘em and charge you for that. Um, but that is something that we can take a look at. Yeah. Yeah. How does collect leaf bags for free? Yeah, so we do seven weeks of, um, curbside leaf collection, and then the new contract, we’re asking for eight, But the bags aren’t free. You have to buy the Home Depot. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The paper bags, you have to, so it’s required. Yeah. You, you have to bring curbside, it has to be in a paper bag.

48:37 Do we sell them? We do not.

48:41 Market Basket does, I think Market Basket does. Home Depot, Costco, you know, home Depot. You know, we, we try not to get into some of those markets, whereas a lot of times I can never compete with Home Depot. No, it’s saturated. Six for $3 or $5 or something like that. They’re a little less than A dollar. I think it’s five for two 50. Yeah. Its a little less than a dollar piece I think. Yeah. Um, so yeah, please come out and again, you know, if you’re unable to make that day, please send one of us, or, you know, message Tom and, and we can get all your questions answered. Mm-hmm.

49:18 Um, and that’s it for that. I can run through the bills real quick. Um, a one experiment is for rock control. The transfer station 751 Agri source for the grinding and compost removal was, uh, 3,200 at and t for internet access, $80 black earth compost for food, composting $1,018 and 88 cents bloom. The wellness app, which we’ve talked about before, I’m gonna put more out online, was, uh, 14,500. And that was covered by a grant, right? Yep. Yeah. So, um, home Depot for some disposal area maintenance supplies, uh, $398 and 12 cents. Um, the John Deere Financial, and now I’m guessing lease to own the loader.

50:03 Is this closer to the owning side? Yeah, so, um, so the way it works for our heavy equipment up there is that we always own Yeah. It’s called leasing. Mm-hmm. Um, it’s a seven year, seven year lease payment, but it’s always an own, it’s not, it’s just a way, so if we were to buy the vehicle, we just buy it outright. Right. $300,000, you know, bam. Otherwise it’s called Lease to Own when we make payments. No, I was just thinking like, these ones seemed higher than usual, so I was wondering if it was closer to the owning the, the, Nope. So they the same amount every year. Okay. So one’s like 24 and one’s 29. Yeah. So it came up to 55. Yep. So one comes out of the waste revolving account and one comes out of the, um, town appropriations from town meeting. Okay. So they’re not both coming out of our department.

50:51 Okay. Marble Counseling Center for Psychological Counseling, $3,566 80 cents. Uh, meet Teleman for some legal $564 and the Trident Environmental for Hazardous Waste Day $10,672. WB Mason for office supplies, $67 80 cents. And William Scottsman, um, for the trailer, $861 85 cents. I Think that’s everything. And we did have a very successful, uh, household hazardous waste day. Um, again, um, the service is all done through the state of Massachusetts. Um, it’s all on combines. Mm-hmm. The setup fee, um, is a, is a large fee just to do the initial, you know, just to have the event in itself.

51:38 Um, and then everything else is covered by fees when you drop material off. Um, unfortunately the way we are right now with the whole program, the fees are creeping up and are relatively expensive. So people really need to remember that when I’m buying products, pesticides, um, gasoline, all that stuff, you really should be making sure that what you’re buying is what you’re gonna use up to have to pay for that leftover is generally gonna be close to what you’re paying for that material. That whole bag. See, that’s another pearl to this article, Pearl Truth, but that you guys have to write. Yep. Mm-hmm. Uh,

52:24 transfer station project update. Um, so we did some test fix at the transfer station last Friday. Um, those went relatively well. Um, no, you know, no, we didn’t encounter anything that we weren’t aware of. Um, we are looking to issue the notice to proceed to the contractor in the next couple of days. Um, this means we have acquired all the documentation from them. Um, and so that that project will really begin, um, the time the clock will start to tick on them. Um, so again, the projects, um, the idea is that we’ll always be open to residents. Now there are gonna be some days that we have to close the whole facility down due to traffic. We will try to reroute resident traffic if possible. Um, but again, we will be running into a, you know, a,

53:10 a large construction project up there. Um, and because of this, there will be days that will be closed, especially for the commercial lane pay. Um, we will try to do our best to notify all of our customers post notices on the website, send out emails. So please, you know, understand that we are running, you know, about to begin a large construction project up there. Um, so we’re look, looking forward to doing that. Do we have a blanket mailing list for, um, all of our commercial customers? We do. So you’ll let them know when? Yep. So anytime we need to send messages out, we do two things up there. We send out an email to the account owners for the commercial side, and then we hand out flyers at the window when people are coming actually to do the way and pay.

53:59 You have any estimate of when you think the first time will be? I do not. So as soon as we kind of next week, I really am looking for a schedule out of the contractor. Yeah. And that should really be, I’m hoping like with that schedule, I’ll be able to put a kind of a calendar together to say these are the periods or that are gonna be, we will be closed for that and try to have something so everybody can kind of understand that it’s a really busy place a lot, you know? Yeah. We have 400 counts. Um, we would love for them to continue to try to dispose of as much material as possible.

54:39 And that’s everything I have. Mm-hmm. Any new business or pending, uh, issues that we wanna have listed for future meeting

54:53 open to the public, Um, the classes that you’re thinking of that you get down in Virginia, perhaps, is that gonna be similar to the police academy class that we just had? I, I know I took it, it was very informative. I’ve heard it is, I’ve not talked to the police people, but when I mentioned it to others, they’ve said the police do this. Yeah. I would assume that The time. How, how is it one night or, Uh, we met on Fridays, so the last class night took, they do it different days, but it was Fridays from like nine till 1130 ish. And it went on for nine or 10 weeks. Well, we did a couple of road trips. We went over to like the courthouse, things like that.

55:39 Went to the police station, they had speakers come in, dogs from the sheriff’s office, things like that. It was really, it gave you an insight on what the police department really does. And I, uh, it was, It sounds like exactly similar Type of thing. It was at the cons and agent and it worked out fine. That’s what I envisioned your thinking of doing. And did you pay for that or did you get something for, did you get a badge or? We got a little coin, like a challenge coin, and we got a little certificate. Okay. A cake at the end type of thing. It was, uh, and the way that they did it is some people that were in previous group that missed a meeting when it was like, say the sheriff was coming, they could show up at our meeting to see it.

56:26 It was pretty flexible. It was, it was good. I, I enjoyed it, But how many people went through at a time? My class was like 17 or so. That was okay. And they varied from the one college kid that was there to people that were even older than me. So it’s quite a range of people. It was Charlottesville’s much bigger than that. So that’s probably appropriate for, but it, it, it’s exactly, I I think there’s same mystery about what public health do, public health people do as there is what the police do. Right. And The, to the, the fact, the ability to demystify what we do, I think is, is a real positive. Well, I know personally, until you started talking at

57:14 previous meetings, I had not that much of a clue of what the health end of it was other than, you know, they did vaccines or something. It was mostly issued with a dump, but now I can see there’s a lot more to your jobs than, uh, I previously was aware of. The other thing I’m interested in up at the transfer station, the large metal dumpster that’s up there, is that part of our Roberts recycling contract? Or is that something similar to the mattresses? The large metal Dumpster? Yeah. You know, where you can throw wash machines or whatever. Oh, so the the the metal bin. Yeah, The big metal bin. Uh, So yeah, obviously, so, um, the metal bin is handled by Second Street Iron. Um, so they take the material away

58:00 and pay us for, uh, it’s the, you know, the going rate for mixed metal for that material. Yeah. It varies. Yeah, because I know, So the metal market is down Big overflow. Yeah. There, I don’t know. So, so what I, well, so what should, what we’re looking to change over to, so currently we do not pay any trucking fee at all for that metal bin. Um, and because the metal market is where it is right now, we are being inundated with the, the amount of material we will need to start hauling ourselves essentially one day a week to try to stay on top of that. Would you take that to turn or something Like that? Yep. Yep. Okay. Yep. Could you say more about the metal market being innovative?

58:47 So we follow, you know, that’s, it’s actually like in the metal market, there’s many different markets and different products that are being sold on the free market. So I, if I were to separate everything out, um, I might have a pile. I’m gonna just say lead. And so I, if I brought in just lead, I’m gonna make more money on that than what’s, what we do is mixed metal. So it’s mixed Ferris metal that’s in there. And so it can be everything from aluminum to iron, a whole bunch of different i items Machines too. I figured it was just, Oh yeah. All that stuff. So it’s all that stuff mixed together. And on the open market, there’s a price tag that actually has a ticker, just like the stock market

59:33 that gives a price per day for what people are paying for mixed metal. And so we get that rate. So we’re paid out just like Wayne pay trash, we bring our mixed metal there, we get scaled in, they pay us the tonnage for the pounds for the mixed metal. What’s the most desired metal? Uh, copper, aluminum. Yeah. Should we set Separate? It’s not, we don’t have the location to separate it all out. It Wouldn’t be worth the personnel to do. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What, what sort of Money did you make on that? So when I first started here, we were making quite a bit. I think we were making, I think the most, I think it was supposed to $50,000 a year. Um, I think it’s way down. Um, you know?

1:00:20 Mm-hmm. But again, one of the things that we’re not paying for is the trucking. Right. So every time a truck comes in and pulls a dumpster, the, the going rate for that is $500. We don’t pay that at all. Yeah. So we have a very good deal. It’s gonna take two and a half hours to go to. Correct. Yeah. But it’s still worth us, you know, that metal pile gets, we’re seeing so much material come in there. We need to start to do a, a run once a week to just kinda stay on top. Well, They’re pretty good packing down too. They’re really good at packing it down and stuff like that. I mean, the, the big things that we need make to make sure people are doing is that they have to, all the engines and stuff that come in there need to be empty of any oil,

1:01:05 um, antifreeze. Um, there can be no mercury in there. Um, and there can be no paint And it should just be metal. It’s amazing number of people that try to flip other things in. Yeah. There, that has been a real problem recently with a lot of people leaving a lot of household goods there a lot of wood, um, lot of, you know, because it’s kinda a big pile. People like to leave anything there right now. So we get stuck with a lot items, items that should be paid for. Whenever I speak to ‘em now. Oh, I didn’t realize it. Well, you call ck she’ll explain It. Yeah, exactly. All the acs, um, obviously they have refrigerated in them. You need to pay for those to be dropped off. We have to remove the refrigerated before we’re allowed to put that in that metal pile. Um, so we put them in a certain location.

1:01:52 We have a company that comes in, they don’t want us, they don’t even want to come in until we have between 15 and 20 pieces to pull all the refrigerant in. Once that’s done, we’re allowed to throw that in the, the mixed metal pie.

1:02:06 But it’ll be, you know, EPA violations for me to bring any mixed metal there that has refrigerants, oils, all those, all that. SEP violate EPA violations

1:02:20 About separating paper. ‘cause that’s a, Yeah, so really the, the big one is, you know, so we, we used to separate some, we always separated cardboard out. Cardboard is a, a decent market. There is some, um, market for paper. Um, so what, when we are looking at new contracts, we are looking to get pricing just for cardboard. Um, we might get a price for just paper. Um, and depending where the markets are, it might be beneficial for us to have what we call commingle. Commingle is everything that you would see curbside. So that’s your glass, aluminum, plastic, your paper, your cardboard, all mixed together, that’s commingle. And when you bring material in at that rate, there’s a, a commingle rate. If you separate the materials out, yes, you often do get better rates for it.

1:03:07 So depending on where pricing is, it might be advantageous to start separating items out. Um, cardboard is one of those items at a, we get a lot of it. And so yeah, if you can kind of keep it separated, you, you end up doing, getting a better price For it. I thought there was a good price because of all the Amazon bucks. You’re Still is, it’s still a, a no. Still getting good. Yeah. Okay. You’re saying doing that curbside or just at the No, just at the truck. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You Can’t do Curbside. Mm-hmm.

1:03:38 Okay. Um, we are not prepared for a, an executive session this evening. Uh, we didn’t have all our material. Um, um, and, uh, so other, are there any additional comments, uh, from the audience? No, not at this time. Sorry. Not at this time. Not at this time. Uh, I guess then a, uh, motion to adjourn is in order. So moved. Second. Motion to adjourn. Seconded. Mm-hmm. Ian Standing. Motion to adjourn. Okay. Thank you guys,

1:04:35 You know, once calm gets done, I, that’s what I wanted to, you know, the first one, it’s those see of you are, are much More out there if it or not. Um, I think that’s Happy to do it And it would because show that this, so I was, I would spend time trying to take notes.