Board of Health: March 24, 2026

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.

0:03 Good evening. It’s 7:00, and we’re pleased to open the open meeting of the Marblehead Board of Health. I would like to make some adjustments to the agenda, however, for two reasons.

0:26 The first of the reasons,

0:31 probably one of the best things that’s happened to the Board of Health in a very long time. Yesterday, last night, at the Massachusetts Medical Society, our colleague, Dr. Rizzo, was named the Community Clinician of the Year by the Massachusetts Medical Society. But Dr. Krueger is here. He can vouchsafe to what I’m about to say. Doctors will say nice things about each other at certain levels, but it takes a very special doc to be

1:15 called a great clinician. Right? Correct. And in the state, which is recognized as having probably the best physicians in the country, to be the best Community Clinician of the Year is a great honor. If we had a crowd, we would all stand up and applaud. I know. Congratulations.

1:45 They don’t need to come. They can stay with the crowd. And now we go from the sublime to the ridiculous.

1:58 Given where we are in the fiscal year issues around the town, I think we all agreed that we wanted to spend as much time as necessary today to hear the relative positions and the background of all of the issues that are out there regarding the waste and trash pickup and how it appears in next year’s cost structure for the town. Then usually we’re pretty cavalier about Robert’s rules and

2:43 things, but I’ve listened to Andrew present this a couple of times, and it’s worth listening hard for the entire time because, again, I’ve heard it several times, it is a complex picture. And every time I see any new news, “Oh, yeah, but then they said…” So we would like to move the agenda and have our director give us the best perspective of today for the situation. Sounds good. So I handed you guys a whole stack of documents. Mm-hmm. And we’ll start with the easiest first. So first, I’m going to review the health department budget for

3:31 FY27. So that’s the single sheet.

3:36 At the very top, it has salaries, and then at the very bottom, it’s kind of split into two pieces. It has expenditures. So I’ll go down through every one of them, and then after the top, you guys can ask questions at the bottom with the same. So very top, you have department head. My position is split 70/30. 30% from the health department, 70% from the waste department. There’s an additional stipend that comes out of the waste revolving account. So I will be paid $42,604 out of the health department next year. Line two, this is actually two positions. So it’s called assistant department head number two, but that consists of- Is this confidential or could I share? You can share that. Yeah.

4:24 And you got kind of have it while we go on? Yeah. I’ll look at one. Sure. So the assistant department head number two is both- Do you have it for everyone? No, we only have… Yeah. Okay. Is both the public nurse and the health inspector. So those two, again, you have admin salary, you have MMEU salary. These are contractual obligations. That’s where you get to that number. The next line is the senior clerk. The senior clerk is split 50/50. 50 from the health, 50 from the waste. Again, contractual obligations. But so yeah, you’ll see that $38,506 again in the waste department budget.

5:10 We have a nighttime clerical person that does all our meeting minutes and stuff like that, and so that’s the cost of having somebody do our meeting minutes. I have to carry some overtime for my public health inspector. There is a chance that he could get called out during off-hours. It’s generally around food establishments. They can have a water break. They can have a variety of things. It can be a fire. We need to go out and conduct an inspection, and that’s why we carry that. And then the next thing down is longevity. We have a longevity package both for MMEU employees and ad employees. That follows a whole salary table that’s part of that. And then the last one is the sick bonus annual.

5:57 Sick bonus annual is only for MMEU employees. And so depending on how many sick days they use, they might be eligible for the sick annual bonus. Again, I need to cover it for every employee, and then obviously if it’s not-If they use this percentage of sick time, then they don’t get the bonus. Now, this is all out of the waste revolving, right? No, this is just health department. Okay. So this is general funds, town meeting appropriation. Okay. Yeah.

6:29 Going down is expenditures, costs, stuff like that. In-service training, so both Steve and I and the public health nurse, we all have credentials. We have to continue with training. We have to continue on with our credits. That covers the cost of it. We’re part of a coalition for public health excellence, so that’s the North Shore Public Health Excellence Group. We receive a sum of money from the State of Massachusetts. We are able to use some of that for training as well, so this is just a small portion of that. We do have an inspectional vehicle, and so that’s repair and maintenance for the vehicle. That’s really the annual inspection and an oil change and stuff like that. It’s a newer vehicle, so not much. Repair and maintenance of

7:18 office equipment, generally it’s printers and things like that that we need to repair. It’s pretty basic stuff. Repair and maintenance of computers, again, pretty straightforward. Doctors, again, with the health inspector, if he gets hurt on the job, I have to send him for a physical. We use the town doctors to review all that stuff. I have to carry costs. Again, if I have a new employee coming on, we do a physical beforehand. And that’s what those funds are used for. Legal, so this year, legal is being allocated all to the select board budget. We used to carry $2,000. Again, we will still have access at our whim, but we’re no longer

8:06 going to carry that line item in our budget. Advertising, promotional, this is really for if we’re having public hearings. This is to advertise for those public hearings, anything that requires that. Anything that has to do with regulatory review, if we’re holding a public hearing about a foul permit or something that comes up, we need to post that in the newspaper, and that’s where this comes from. Other professional/technical, well, again, we’re not doing anything. Legal notices, again, depending on the situation, we have to provide legal notice. Information and technology, software, we do have some software that we cover. So we are now using iPads for inspections, and we have an annual

8:54 FoodCode Pro software. And you’ll see some other things that come up, but again, this is all due to software.

9:06 The next big one is the Marblehead Counseling Center, the $60,000. That is one of our largest expenses. Again, last year when we talked, we were really hoping to increase that to $120,000. We had the agreement with FinCom. Unfortunately, there was a budget shortfall at the very end, and we had to go back down to the 60. I assume that we will be staying at the 60 for some time. Mm-hmm. Now, when we talk about overrides in the future at this town meeting, when we’re asking about a tier approach, I will ask for an additional $60,000 to come out of one of those tiers. Okay. I mean, we’ve always talked about pushing this up.

9:52 Again, there’s a huge benefit for us to have. It’s a benefit for Marblehead residents. Mm-hmm. The way it works is it’s a sliding scale. All Marblehead residents, Marblehead employees, have access to it, but depending on your income dictates your sliding scale and what you pay. Mm-hmm. This is a huge piece. Most health departments do not have access to a counseling center in this way. It’s a huge benefit to Marblehead residents, and we service quite a few people. Testing services, so during the summer, we do beach testing. That is the cost of that. The other piece about this is that we do cover some rabies testing if it comes up.

10:36 It used to be in the police department budget. We look over it a little bit better than other departments, so we do have some spare money in there to make sure that if somebody does get bitten by a dog and they’re unable to pay for rabies testing, we would cover that cost. Or if we needed to test an animal, we would also be using that to cover some of those costs. Basic phone costs, basic postage. Again, we do a lot of certified mail on enforcement notifications. That’s where the postage really gets hit hard. Internet access. HAWC, Healing Abuse Working for Change, longtime relationship with HAWC. This is there to make sure all residents in Marblehead have access-

11:22 Mm-hmm … if they need that, and it’s really important that we continue on with that. Printing forms, we do a lot of printing. Again, we’re trying to move to a lot of software tablets and stuff like that so that that printing and stuff like that is going down a little bit, but we do a lot of printing. Paper, miscellaneous office supplies, miscellaneous medical and surgical supplies. This is a pretty large item. It’s going down from 3,800 down to 3,000. This is the medical supplies for all our flu clinics and stuff like that. Again, we do get some supplies from our North Shore coalition. That’s why we’re able to bring it down a little bit. But essentially what you’re doing is that you’re supplying these medical

12:07 costs, these vaccines, and all that stuff. It’s generally a reimbursement. We’re able to charge and ask for your healthcare cards. We’re able to bill on that stuff. And so yes, there’s a cost, but generally, there’s a refund.What we do charge for or pull your healthcare card for vaccines and stuff like that, generally the flu, that’s our main one that we’re doing right now. We used to do COVID. We’re not doing that much. The income from that goes into the health revolving account for vaccinations. So we do have a health revolving account of $10,000. It does allow us to buy vaccines on an annual basis. We buy both high dose for seniors and regular dose for employees, and

12:56 so we often have clinics to deal with that. And we always try to make sure that we use it up and stuff like that. Sometimes we will hold joint clinics out of town. If we’ve gone through all of our employees and we still have some left, we can bring that there and use it up, and we still get the contributions for that. In state travel, we do have to pay employees for their travel when they’re going to seminars and clinics and stuff like that. Again, if you’re using the town car, that’s not a problem, but we do have to cover that cost. Elected officials’ expenditures, that’s the payment that you guys receive. So that’s divided out. That’s $200 for the chair and $100 for each employee.

13:43 So the one thing I did not do was I did not increase that for the five members. So we’ll work on that moving forward. Take it out of mine. I give it to the Catholic set anyways.

13:56 Dues, I do have some dues that cover, so that’s my licensure and stuff like that, public health nurse licensure and stuff. And so that comes down to 86,481. So the total cost for the health department is 339,320. That is a 4.07% over last year’s budget. We do have a senior clerk job position that’s bumping that up a little bit, and that’s where that’s coming from. Mm-hmm. The Bloom app, was that paid for by the- Oh, Bloom app. Yeah. Yes. So the Bloom app was paid for with opioid settlement funds. Is it a yearly fee? Yes, it is a yearly fee. Covered. And that is covered, yeah. Okay.

14:41 So again, we’ll come back. So that’s covered for one year. At the end of the year, we’ll come back. My instinct would be going back to the opioid settlement funds to continue to use that to continue to support Bloom. How much is it per year? It’s $14,000. Okay. But if that is no longer covered, we can- Yes … eventually. We can eventually add that in, yes. Okay. Do you know the usage that you’ve gotten out of Bloom? It’s pretty high, but I’d have to go back and get numbers from them. And again, it’s more about hits in the- Yeah … in the service and stuff like that. I’ll see what I can get for reports. Yeah, just curious. Any questions about the health budget? Mm-mm. So I- Yep. What are the various columns?

15:28 Oh, so the various columns. So the first column is the 2027- Okay … so FY27 budget. So there’s an original 2026, and then a revised 2026. So what happened was that we had put forward an original budget for 2026, and then we had some changes later on. And so you’ll see revised. We had a shift in employees, and so I ended up taking on an employee that was paid at a higher rate. So you’ll see that, like in the senior clerk line, you’ll see that it went from 31,942 to 37,442. Okay. Just curious. That’s the biggest one. And then the final column is where we stand today. So the 2026 actuals. That’s

16:17 expenditures up to today. Right. Okay. Thank you. So again, on Saturday, we will be having what’s called Super Saturday with the finance committee. We have a budget hearing before them. It’s scheduled for 9:00. We could go on as early as 8:30, 8:45. I’m okay. We can do- Yep. Um. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s going to start at 8:00. It can be anything. Yeah. It’s going to start at 8:00, and we’re very close to the beginning, but we do have that meeting coming up on Saturday. Are we all supposed to be there? In the past, the board has requested that I attend and promote the budget for the board, which is totally fine,

17:02 or board members will need to go. If two board members are going, I will post the meeting. I will post it anyways. Mm-hmm. And then if we don’t have a quorum, I won’t call it to order. I don’t need– Saturday mornings are busy for me. Yeah. I’m good with- Tom and I. Okay. And I’ve been to the two finance meetings. Yeah. So we can take care of that. That’s not a problem. What I do need is a vote by the board to approve the health department budget for FY27 in the amount of $339,320. Motion to approve the budget. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Unanimous approval of the health department budget.

17:52 Are there similar two pages for the waste? Yeah. So there’s two pages for the waste. Yeah, you can share those. So the waste- We want to be as open as possible. So the waste is much more in-depth. So there’s three pages to the waste. There’s also some supplemental information for the waste department. So you will see Copies of the transfer station revenue to single page. You will see waste revolving information, which is a packet.

18:38 You will see curbside collection costs on one page.

18:47 Revenues. And you will see an FY27 waste cost. These are costs that go into the revolving account. Mm-hmm. Those are kind of all the documents that I’ll be going over, walking you guys through the budget for FY27 for the waste department.

19:09 Tom and I attended the select board meeting the other night. The select board

19:16 decided that curbside collection is not going to be part of the basic budget. Mm-hmm. Obviously, the concern about that, obviously it’s going to be going to town meeting as an override vote. The concern with that is that if it does not pass the override vote, we have to have curbside collection. Unfortunately, through the strike this summer, we saw the burden that would be applied to the transfer station, the amount of recycling material that we could not handle at the transfer station, let alone potentially 8,000 homes coming to the transfer station on a Saturday.

20:02 Mm-hmm. If we do not have curbside collection, we have a potential for a public health threat. The board needs to take this up and they will need to essentially review and look at a fee-based system for curbside collection. Mm-hmm. When we did the RFP for the new curbside trash and recycling, we asked for a lot of different numbers. We really wanted to understand where all the costs stood. So when we received all that information, we got costs for almost every little item. We got costs for curbside

20:49 collection of trash. We got curbside collection of recycling weekly. We got curbside collection of recycling every other week. We have MSW, or municipal solid waste, or trash disposal tonnage numbers, and we have two different numbers, and it gets a little complicated, and I’ll cover that going forward. We have the cost for picking up the trash at the schools. We have the cost for picking up the recycling at the schools. We have the cost for picking up the recycling at the municipal buildings. We have the cost for picking up municipal trash at the buildings. We have costs for recycling processing. We have costs for curbside collection of leaf and grass. We have the costs to send out a flyer to

21:36 educate the public about curbside collection. We have the cost to do the maintenance of the barrels that we’ll be distributing out to every household in Marblehead. So again, we have a lot of information, so we are able to break a lot of stuff out. So with that, moving forward, there’s a couple little things, mechanics that have occurred. We have a waste revolving account, but that’s to handle commercial waste that comes in from the transfer station, and we’re able to spend that money that comes in from that source on disposal costs for both trash and recycling, employee costs, and upgrades to the facility, software and things like

22:23 that. It is not set up to take in the fee that the board would set up to handle curbside collection. There needs to be a mechanism to be able to pay out on the contract, an appropriation. So what we did is that I calculated out the cost of curbside collection with curbside trash, curbside recycling collection on a weekly basis, and that is this curbside cost. So you have curbside trash collection, curbside recycling collection, curbside trash disposal, and there’s two numbers that go into that. There’s curbside recycling processing. There’s also curbside collection of leaf and grass.

23:09 And then because if we were taking this on as ourselves, we have to bill and receive and process 8,000 bills on a quarterly basis. So we’re asking to include a senior clerk curbside collection person to handle that. With the curbside trash disposal, the agreement that we have currently with Republic is that curbside trash is 4,500 tons of trash. We now have a number to handle just the school department. So it’s 500 tons, but we know and we’re paying that at a different line item. So curbside trash is estimated to be 4,000 tons.

23:56 The way the agreement with Republic stands is that the first trash truck, so generally it takes two trash– we have five days of collection. It generally takes two trash trucks. So a trash truck goes out, collects all the trash, fills up in the morning, comes back to the transfer station. It goes back out, fills up again. This time, it’s going to go back to Republic’s yard and dispose there. Mm-hmm. When they come to our yard, the cost per tonnage is $123 per ton. When it goes to the Republic yard, it’s a cost of $110 a ton. So you have two separate numbers. So I took the two different numbers and added that together, and again, that’s how I came up with the $466,000.The

24:42 benefit, the additional benefit of that 2,000 tons, estimated, going back to their yard is that that’s freeing up 2,000 tons at our transfer station. So there’s different things that we want to do with it. We are going to try… Again, we’ve been trying to run the commercial side as a business. The town has asked us to look for additional revenues. That’s our additional revenue source. The plan with that is to start to collect additional construction and demolition material, and they will go into different trailers. So we have a cost to handle C&D, and that’s 175 bucks a ton. The cost to get rid of

25:27 MSW or commercial trash, just what we consider residential trash is 123. But these are the true costs to curbside, or the estimated costs, because that’s the way it is. Is that curbside recycling, is that weekly or biweekly? That is weekly. Okay. Yeah. So we’ve talked about that a little bit. Mm-hmm. We’ve talked to a lot of people. They really are looking for it to stay on as weekly. Yeah. And to be clear- And so we do have a cost for doing it every other week. It’s about $386,000. There is a cost savings. When we have the public hearing, we will talk a little bit about that, so I can provide scenario,

26:14 this would be scenario A, and that could be scenario B, with the numbers and stuff like that. As you go down, we estimate that there’s 8,000 homes, or there are 8,000 homes essentially that we should be picking up from. That’s single family, two family, three family, and four family. No others essentially. Now, there’s always a lot of talk about once we institute a fee, we are going to allow people to opt out. So opting out means once you’re out, you’re out for the year. You can’t come back in till the next fiscal year. Essentially what we believe is that people would be opting out to say, “I want to bring my stuff to the transfer station.” They have to buy a facility sticker for that facility, but that would be how they could opt out.

27:03 It’s estimated that it could be somewhere between 3% and 5% that opt out. And so using that $2,186,516 of the total then gets divided out by those households. So at 3%, you’re talking about 7,760 households. The cost per household would be approximately $281.77. Now, there’s a couple little things that go into this, and we have to factor that out as well. We have a small number, it’s an estimated about 160 homes, that pay reduced taxes on an annual basis.

27:49 They’re approved by the assessor. We will need to set a reduced rate for that group of homes, and that group of homes only- Mm-hmm … because they’re already approved, and we do not need to go through an approval process. So when we take a look at numbers, we are just looking at basic math. We would suggest a rate of $260 for those homes. That makes trash collection $5 a week for the year. $5 a week is about a cup of coffee. So that would include your trash removal, your recycling removal, your eight weeks of leaf and grass removal, and all the processing and all that stuff. Again, we don’t have to dive into that.

28:36 We’ll talk about that later during the public hearing. But again, I’m just showing you the numbers and where it potentially could go. No, just- The big number is that 2,186,516. I think you might want to put out a couple higher percentages. I don’t know what it’ll be. Just- Like removal, like keep going down like 3%, 5%, 8%? Oh, fine. Yeah. Easy math. Yeah. Totally. It’s not a problem. Because I- It’s all done at the transfer station … I suspect that the first year opt-out will be higher, and what I’ll say is, I think people have short memories on how chaotic the strike was. Yeah. And being like, “Well, I’ll just take it off and save 270 bucks.”

29:23 Do not say. Good luck. Yeah. You’re going to be down Green Street on a Saturday. The swap shed was closed during the strike. It’ll not be closed as far as I’m concerned during this period because this would be a decision- Yeah … rather than a strike. Correct. So good luck. It’s not ideal moving to this. It’d be great if it was still in the budget, but for less than 300 bucks, it is well worth it for peace of mind to just have your barrels out. I think. My opinion. Yeah. Even at that 3% and your 7760, you’re down to $5.42 a week. I know my time- Yeah … and my coffee and my gas- Yes … is probably going to exceed that number on a weekly basis.

30:10 Yeah.

30:12 And then people have talked about concerns about rising costs each year. It’s going to be- Oh, yeah. So yes. So it’s a 5% increase every year. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Which is based on the contract. Just based on the contract. It’s correct. Yeah. What I mentioned before is like, when the cost for the sticker is calculated and advised on, that’s based on the cost of the transfer station. Yep. If you have a huge opt-out rate, those costs increase. So sticker, you might think like, “Well, I’m already paying for a sticker, I’ll just use that.” You’re paying 100 bucks now But next year- Right …that cost is reevaluated. Yeah. We track all the numbers. Okay. So right now, it’s an estimated about 2,500 tons of trash goes into the transfer station.

31:00 That’s kind of how we set numbers and stuff like that. So when you look at the transfer station revenues- Mm-hmm … so if you look for, again, the hard thing about stickers that they’re sold from January 1st to December 30th. So we always try to… Yeah. It’s for a year. So for FY25, we sold $612,720 worth of stickers. For other disposals, so other disposal is mattresses, tires, computers, monitors. The other disposal brought in $117,558. Household hazardous waste, we brought in

31:45 $10,185. This is the last one that is crazy to me. CMRK, this is what we bring in for clothes donations. We get paid five cents a pound. Look at how many pounds of clothes are coming into our facility. That’s because my kids are growing so fast. Right. So we are bringing in- That’s good to bring up so people know- Oh, yeah … it brings us revenue. Yeah. I advertise it big. Yeah, that’s fine. I have this memorandum. Yeah. Books too. Yep. Yeah. Yep. So our revenue for the transfer station for FY25 was $751,351. Mm-hmm. We’ll go back and talk about that later.

32:32 Again, FY26 where we are, these are today, is where we stand today. So we’ve already sold $337,000 worth of stickers for the year, and we’ll continue on. Again, huge with that license plate reader implementation. We are on track to continue to make sure everybody has a facility sticker. There’s no freebies. It’s a great resource for us, and it keeps everybody on a level playing field.

33:03 So as we go through the budget, those are some of the numbers that you’ll start to see, and this is how we came out to it. But because of the appropriation, I have to take that curbside number and bring it back into my budget. Mm-hmm. But that’s going to be paid through either the fee or the override. Mm-hmm. So as you go down, same thing. The way it works is that this is broken out into three different sections. The first section is salaries, the second section is costs, the third section is actually landfill. Landfill monitoring, landfill maintenance, and stuff like that. So again, coming down, department head, again, that’s 70% for me.

33:49 That’s $98,640. The assistant director is paid completely out of the waste revolving account. Senior clerk, this is the 50%, so this is, again, 38,506. And this is where you’ll start to see the senior clerk curbside billing. And so we’re just pulling a number. Again, we’re using the MMEU salary scale. It’s estimated to be $69,000 for a full-time employee to do that. So this will be the person who will handle the- The billing, the calls. Chase this money. Chasing down money. For the new- Yes … machines. Yes.

34:29 The special clerk. Special clerk runs the main scale house now.

34:35 Temp labor, we don’t have. Lead operator, so this is my foreman of my heavy equipment operator. Next line down, heavy equipment operators. There’s actually two of them. They both have CDL license, heavy equipment operators. So that 133,080 is two positions. We have a transfer station operator. That’s the other guy in the other booth who verifies stickers. If you want to get rid of a TV, you’re paying him. So he’s in charge of that piece, and so he’s called as transfer station operator at $58,000. Overtime, so again, we operate six days a week. I have some crew that’s operating from Monday through Friday, and then a crew

35:24 that operates Tuesday through Saturday. Unfortunately, because of how many people that go through the facility, I have mandatory overtime on Saturdays for at least two employees every week. Sometimes what happens is I have mandatory overtime for another individual that does a lot of our hauling. He operates our roll-off truck. And so if we have a really busy weekend or if somebody’s out, he has to come in on Mondays. But again, we operate six days a week, and so that’s why you see that. And so the overtime and then scheduled overtime. Scheduled overtime is what I know is going to happen for these guys to come in, that they have to come in, and then overtime is anything like equipment broke, or they had a really heavy load and they had

36:09 to take care of it and took them longer, and so they worked into lunch and stuff like that, or they worked through the end of the day. Holiday pay, longevity. Out of rank. If my foreman is out on vacation for the week and the second person in command steps into it, it’s required that he gets the out of rank pay per union contract, and so that’s what that is. It’s a calculation that we do to get that. Again, sick and illness is in the EU, and then vacation owed. The vacation owed is if there’s an employee that’s going to be retiring for the year. I have two employees on the verge of retirement that-Technically could have retired at any time. And so I have to carry that cost. Again, it only gets paid

36:54 out if I have to pay them out for retirement.

36:59 So the total top is 649,649. It’s funny that worked out that way. Going down in service training, again, some of us are required to continue the training. Electricity.

37:13 Over the last couple of years, the way it used to work is that we would cover a basic amount of electricity, and then the town would use their energy reserve fund to carry the rest. The town’s trying to get us to cover the costs of that. This one, we’re going to be upside down, and this is really one of the first years that we have to track electricity, and that will kind of become the true budget. If you look over all the way to the right, my 2026 actuals, you’ll see that I’ve already spent $10,657 for electricity. So I’m going to be over. Water and sewer, I got to pay my water and sewer bill. Repair and maintenance for buildings and grounds. We have a new building. So again, that’s great.

38:00 There will be some maintenance for that. We have an older compactor building that constantly needs some repairs. We’ve made quite a few upgrades to that. It does not have siding, and as things come up, that’s where some of those things would have to be paid out of. Repair and maintenance for non-highway vehicles. We have two non-highway vehicles. Actually, three. We have a loader, we have a backhoe, and we have a yard donkey or a yard tractor or a hauling truck. That doesn’t leave the site. The loader and the backhoe do leave the site. The loader and the backhoe also plow during the winter. So some of those are your maintenance costs for that. Repair and maintenance of other motor vehicles. That would be for my truck or the assistance truck.

38:46 Repair and maintenance of gas pumps. Again, we don’t have a set of gas pumps at our facility, but we use the town’s gas pumps, and so we all share the costs associated with that.

39:01 Repair and maintenance of hauling equipment. We have those two trailers. The other hauling equipment really is the roll-off truck. That’s our big hauling equipment. So yes, occasionally there does need to be some repairs to that. Most recently, we had to replace the winch cable for that, but there are some costs associated with that. Repair and maintenance of scale. Again, we use that scale on a daily basis for all commercial weight, any weight that comes across the trash trucks, everything has to go across that scale. We have to know every pound that’s going into those trailers when we’re transporting. So again, it’s really important, that scale. And again, we have to go through annual calibrations and stuff like that.

39:48 Repair and maintenance of other equipment. That’s really our compactor repairs. We have one really large or 20-yard compactor, and then we have two smaller compactors in the back. We run vegetable oil in the compactors. We are very close to a wetlands, so we want to make sure we’re as environmentally friendly as possible. So with that vegetable oil, if we have a large leak or something like that, I don’t have to report it. We have to clean it up. It is a little bit more friendly for the environment. But again, those are really due to all that equipment’s generally up to date, especially with that new compactor being only about a year old, but we have to do annual maintenance with that.

40:35 Trash disposal. So we have curbside trash disposal, and then this is disposal for trash at the transfer station. That’s where this number is coming from.

40:53 Disposal for the transfer station of other disposal. Sorry. Yeah. But we imagine that’s going to go up with the outers? Yes. So this is where- Can we- No, you can’t. Well, it’s kind of a numbers game a little bit. So we are hopeful that it’s going to be there. I do have a line item in my landfill maintenance and supplies. We call it like grinding and compost removal. Again, we can use it for grinding and compost removal. We can also use it for some of the other costs, but we could also look to spend a little bit more money out of our waste revolving account, depending on where we are and stuff like that. But that is a number that we really have to pay attention to, cost associated with the transfer station versus cost associated with curbside.

41:39 Those are two big variables.

41:42 And same thing with the next line item, other disposal. That is the cost for recycling and all the other items up at the transfer station. So it’s recycling processing. The recycling processing for the last 10 years, we have not had to pay for any material curbside. We get a very low rate, and we haven’t really had to pay for recycled material at the transfer station for some time either. The new charge is $125 a ton just for processing. Now, there is a chance, depending on markets, and it’s a blended market value, of all your recycled materials that go together. There is a chance that we will see some return, but it’s an unknown because it’s a market-driven return. And so we just have to imagine that this

42:31 is what we’re going to be spending to deal with our recycling and other materials to get out there. I can provide you at some point, like the number of mattresses that we recycle up there. I think we recycled over 1,000 mattresses last year. So that’s a pretty high cost. Did you notice a sizable difference when we increased charge for out of town? I did. We’re still just breaking even on it. Yeah. So, it is something that we will need to always pay attention to. So yeah, for FY27, we spent… I’ll have to take a look. This is what the revenue is. So it’s probably pretty close to this for the mattresses.

43:17 Right around $50,000 we had to expend for disposal of mattresses. Mm-hmm. How much do we charge? So if you’re a resident and have a transfer station sticker, it’s $40. If it’s a non-resident or non-sticker holder, it’s 80. We will recoup the cost. Yes, we will recoup the cost. Yep.

43:37 So that’s the other disposal. All right. Now you’re getting into the next line, is trash collection. So this is the items that are actually associated with curbside trash collection. So that’s that part of that 218. So the curbside collection, that’s both trash and recycling collection together, gives you that 1243.016 number. It’s 621.308 for trash, 621.708 for recycling. I don’t know why it costs more money to recycle for the collection versus the trash, but that’s how the numbers roll down. You have your curbside trash disposal again. That’s the 4,000 tons that were anticipated, 2,000 at the 110, 2,000 at the 123. Curbside

44:25 recycling processing, again, we have a known number of how much we’re recycling curbside. So again, we track all those numbers on an annual basis. Again, these are always estimates. Anything can change depending on the subscription numbers and stuff like that. 312.500, curbside leaf collection. For eight weeks of curbside leaf collection, it’s $96,000. The contract that we have today, again, they essentially zeroed this one out. We pay $1,200 a week. That’s a huge loser for them. So they’re losing about $300,000 a year on the recycling processing, and they’re losing a large sum amount on the collection of the leaves. When you do the math, the $96,000

45:12 divided by the 8,000 homes, that’s such a low number. And again, we’re trying to look at the usage of the transfer station and not have too many people up there at one time. So I really do feel that we should include the $96,000 of the collection and the cost of curbside. Mm-hmm. Going down, grinding compost removal. We have a very large yard waste area. Huge pile of leaf and grass. We do a huge amount of brush. We do charge for brush coming in, but please remember, we also have a tree department that brings material in. We also have an electric department when they’re trimming stuff, that all comes in. When

45:58 Park and Rec cleans up all their parks, all that material comes up to us. We truck all that material out. Yes, we grind on-site to reduce, and then we’re trucking everything out. Do you charge the brush on the way in? I’d have to take a look. I didn’t bring the numbers with me. No, no. When does that charge– Is that with the landscapers or? No. So as a truck comes up, the guy, they have to check in, and they get pinned for truckloads. We have three different truckload size. Okay. For commercial. It’s not for residential. For commercial. I was going to say- Yeah. I was going to say, “Oh, s**t, I haven’t been paying.” No. It’s not for your residential sticker holder. It’s for your commercial guys and anybody looking to get rid of brush. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

46:43 So it’s a tremendous amount of trucking that we’re doing. We get low truck rates. We’re paying $8 a yard for 100-yard trailer. It’s about $800. Those are low rates in trucking and stuff like that, except for we do do a tremendous amount of it. So again, it’s all the material coming from Park and Rec, it’s all the stuff that’s picked up through the sweepers when they’re picking up all the leaves. It’s all the stuff coming from the cemetery. Again, it comes to us. We’re the ones disposing of that.

47:16 Doctors, again, if employee gets hurt on the job, we send them to get physicals, or if I have a new employee, that’s another cost of that. With the legal, the legal is now zeroed out. Andrew, for like workman’s comp- Yes. That is low. It is. So the workman’s comp, so essentially– And it can be much higher, but this is just what we cover for a basic physical and stuff like that. Are they getting our guys out? Not very often, if at all. No. Yeah. Okay. Yep.

47:49 Advertising promotional. A lot of the advertising promotional is around household hazardous waste, different events, and stuff like that. We will do some advertising, stickers, and stuff like that. Other professional and technical. This is a lot of software. That’s technical software to run the scale software, the billing software, and stuff like that. That’s why that number is so high. Telephone usage, very basic. Postage, pretty low. Again, that’s to– we have 400 commercial accounts in town that we bill on a monthly basis.

48:28 Printing and forms. Printing and forms is pretty high. Again, we have a lot of people that go through the transfer station. Everybody gets receipts. Again, that’s part of that printing and forms. Paper, office supplies, landfill building repair and maintenanceAgain, we have some small buildings. We have some landfill stuff. Again, we try to pay a lot of that repair and maintenance out of our landfill. Custodial house supplies, very basic. Landfill maintenance supplies, again, very basic, making sure things aren’t running off into the landfill. Disposal area maintenance supplies. One of the largest things that we’re dealing with for the disposal area maintenance supplies is rodent control. Spend about $10,000 annually on rodent control.

49:15 Obviously, we take it very seriously. We do not want to negatively impact the surrounding areas. We use A1. We are very up-to-date with making sure that they’re setting traps, that we’re changing things out. We use bait stations, we use instant kill traps, and we use birth control at this point. We try to be as environmentally friendly as possible. The pest material that we do use is a vitamin D, so it’s a vitamin D overload. Again, we have to do pest control, but we’re trying to be as environmentally friendly as possible.

49:59 Unleaded gas, that’s for the two trucks that are unleaded. Diesel fuel, again, we go through quite a bit of diesel fuel between the loader, the roll-off truck that’s doing all the hauling, and the backhoe. Tires and wheels. The $10,000 for tires and wheels doesn’t even cover the cost to replace the tires on the loader, but this is the number that we kind of carry to try to average things out. Mm-hmm. Obviously, oil and grease. We do oil changes at the town garage. We do need to go through quite a bit of grease to keep everything well lubricated. Safety equipment. That can be gates. We do have to have some safety equipment. Like those rails by the residential

50:46 recycling area. A lot of times those get hit, and we have to fix those. We had an AED up there. Cardiac arrest. We did. Let me see where that is, because I need to add that back into my scale house. Okay. Yeah.

51:06 And let me see about how many we have. Only one for, yeah. Well, and- One for Jen … yeah. So in a perfect world, there should be one in the main scale house, and there should be one in the back transaction booth.

51:22 So let me look at that. Generally, I work with the fire department about getting those and making sure everybody’s trained on those. They’re up to date. Yeah, exactly. Uniforms. Providing uniforms for the employees. Again, when you’re dealing with trash, you really shouldn’t be going home in those clothes. In the new scale house, there are new lockers for all the employees, which is nice. Curbside recycling bins. So part of the new program is that we will be buying bins for every household. We’ll be buying a trash and a recycling bin for every household. The 8,000, so we no longer need to cover the curbside recycling bins in the main budget. Those will be paid out.

52:08 We’re financing the bins over five years. We will be spending just over $210,000 a year to finance those bins. We’ll come back and talk about that.

52:21 License and permits. Some small license and permits.

52:29 So your total cost for your salaries and the expenditures is $3,215,611. Again, please remember, there’s two million-plus that is coming out for the fee. So I just need to always continue to point to that. Mm-hmm. These final numbers, we have a landfill that has been closed. We need to do quarterly inspections, quarterly monitoring, all required by Mass DEP. That $90,000, and we need to do some other maintenance, that’s where the majority of the funds go to, engineering costs and testing costs. The $24,600 is to deal with some of the

53:14 additional costs associated with the yard waste, is really where we see a lot of potential. Again, some of the big things that can happen that can really cause some overrides or budgetary issues for us, large storm events, flooding events. Anytime you have a large storm event that produces a lot of downed trees in town, we get all the material. We have to deal with that. If you have a large flooding event, so a large flooding event could be a really wet spring. We have high groundwater. The majority of homes in town all have sump pumps in our basements. If we have power outages and we have flooding in homes, people need to get rid of a lot of material. That will end up with us. This is kind of where we can cover some of those costs.

54:02 And again, depending on the numbers and stuff like that, you can also use the waste revolving account a little bit to deal with some of this. But that $24,000 really is to deal with some of the additional grinding and the removal of that material for that. So that’s a total of 114,600. Questions?

54:23 I need a vote from the board, to approve. I don’t know. You need to do it in two parts. So that 3,215,611 and then the 114,600. Motion to approve the 3,215,611. Second. Moving forward. It’s unanimously approved. So you got to do that all now though. Then motion to approve the 114,600. Second.

54:57 Okay. All those in favor? Yes. Unanimously approved. Is this a good time to pause for- Yeah. Let me just go over one last thing before I open up for questions. There’s one more sheet that shows the waste revolving account, where there’s a couple of yellow highlights on it.

55:22 So this is some basic waste costs. So you can see that we take in approximately 11,000 tons annually. We look at it as 6,370, we call it 6,500. We look at it 4,630 for commercial, we call that 4,500. That’s $608,000. That’s to cover the cost of disposed commercial material. Then you go down below that, the revolving account requests. We lease the loader, and the annual lease payment is $46,077. The 40,000- 26,000. Yeah. Thank you, 26,000. You see the stipend for myself. You see the salary for

56:08 the assistant director of the waste department. You see the salary for the, it’s a general laborer. So he’s the guy that’s walking around in the recycling area. He works Tuesday through Saturday. He’s helping everybody out. He’s cleaning things up. If the guy in the booth who runs the LPR camera system, if he’s on vacation or out sick, this person goes in the booth and does all, like is able, they’re cross-trained, so they can do those things. He’s also the face of the pictures on the weekly. Yes. Mm-hmm. Correct. The 19,605, that is for our part-time person that does all our sticker sales. Sticker sales used to occur at three different locations.

56:54 It used to occur up at the transfer station, or actually two different locations, up at the transfer station and at the treasurer’s office. That’s where they were sold. Now they’re all done out of my office, and so we brought that in. It’s a tremendous amount of work. We have a part-time person that’s kind of in charge of that. We all have to help them. There’s busy times. Every application needs to be reviewed and approved, and there’s a lot of questions that come with it. Overtime. That overtime is for that general laborer. Curbside bins, that’s where you’re seeing that number, the 210,600. The total of those is 458,983.51. The total of that, you will see the whole packet

57:42 for

57:46 waste revolving. Mm-hmm. I’m sorry, Andrew, what was the curbside bins? $210,600. What is that for? So that’s for all the bins that are going to the 8,000 homes for your trash, your 65-gallon trash bin, and your 95-gallon recycling bin. But it’s only to ten, wasn’t it? Yes. So five years. Five years. Yeah. It’s a lease. Yeah.

58:13 Bin should last 10 years, but we’re paying it off in five.

58:20 The waste revolving account. Every year, I put a number together and make a request to the Board of Selectmen for what we feel that we’ll need to use the waste revolving account. So those numbers total $1,067,598, approximately. Expenditably for the cost of solid waste and other disposal. Recycling. Lease payment of the John Deere backhoe. Employee costs, transfer station upgrades, and repairs. And expenditures from the revolving funds are not to exceed the one million. So I put that together. This is kind of the history. That front page is the history, and there’s all the letters from the last five years are in there too.

59:08 So people can take. This is the history starting from FY22 to FY26. You’ll see the beginning balance, you’ll see your revenue, you’ll see expense. Again, I had submitted a letter. The expense can’t exceed what the letter states. You’ll see an ending balance. During this time, we were trying to do additional work on the transfer station. We were chasing numbers, and we kept being behind. So we put a project together, put it out to bid. It would be over budget. We couldn’t move forward with the project. Come back to the drawing board. All right. What can we do? Should we take things out? Can we do things slightly different? All right, let’s try this again. Let’s allocate additional sums of money from the

59:56 waste revolving account. Let’s try this again. Nope, fail again. Let’s try it again. So we built it up, and that’s why it got built up so high into that two million. But we’re expending close to two million. We have the potential to spend close to $2 million with all our costs associated with the transfer station operations and the construction. And so that’s the quick history of that. Mm-hmm. So with that, you can definitely go audience. I want to make a comment. If there’s any doubt that Andrew knows the business, he has been working for virtually the whole year, not only to understand the numbers he’s presented today,

1:00:43 but the interesting thing was he’s been able to define the bids, the proposals out there for the contractors who are going to have our contractor next yearAnd when he talked about knowing how much trash the schools use, we weren’t able to do that before, right? And there was good luck somewhere that for the first time, I think, that we don’t have to go to the lowest bidder. Oh, yeah. That’s part of that- This means that- … solution … Andrew, you’ve had this for what? Two months now. Yeah. Andrew is negotiating from the knowledge that you can see he has.

1:01:29 He’s been negotiating with the three major contractors

1:01:35 that are out there. So I don’t know that you’re going to get a consumer’s report anywhere, but we’re going to get the best possible deal out there in this marketplace because of all the time that has been spent on this. And it’s really important. The town is in a funk because of the fiscal 27, but they need to know that there is certainly one place that has run the town services like a very good business. And Andrew has done it very, very well. I think we’re in unanimous agreement. Yeah. No,

1:02:20 I was excited, highlighting, if you didn’t listen to all of it, the things that excited me was the fact that Republic agreed to take half their stuff, and we dispose of it at a discounted rate. That’s huge. Freeing up 2,000 tons a year is huge in my mind. That’s going to help out with so much commercial construction and demo, which has been an issue in the past that’s been brought up. It solves a lot of it, and it gets us on track for being that place in the area that can handle it. And increase revenue, help us finish the transfer station construction. Yeah. Those two are huge to me. Yeah, and I just wanted to point out a couple little things. So we talked about the revenues coming into the transfer station, that over,

1:03:07 we’re talking

1:03:10 $751,000. And if you look at, and Tom and I went through this yesterday with FinCom, and again, I had to add in the curbside costs. So if you take out the curbside costs, so if you take that 3,215,611 and you take out the 2,186,000, you’re about $1.1 million. Again, if you take out the $150,000 for the schools in the town, you’re about nine. The cost to run the transfer station is about $150,000. That’s what it’s costing the town. Mm-hmm. It’s pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Public comment.

1:03:56 Again, we always talk about trying to make that, doing our best, trying to increase revenues, trying to do our part to deal with some of these town issues. Yeah. No. Treating it as a business and a utility. Commercial is business. Yeah. And the town, the utility part of town, the lower side helps the town.

1:04:19 I’ve got a few things. I completely concur. He’s done a fabulous job. I don’t think you’ve been sleeping. One of the problems that I see, as someone who comes regularly and talks to people around town, quite frankly, you guys don’t do a good enough job publicizing what the heck it is you really do. The trash stack helped a lot because people saw what goes on up there. That was a good thing. But to give you a little bit of history, back in the 1960s when I first started to use the dump up there with the dump truck and things, we used to just back up to the embankment, dump anything that would burn, brush, demo, and Gary Brennan would set it on fire, any metal and porcelain would go over in

1:05:07 another spot. Did that for years. And then when we got to the point where we could take and use the compactor, when it was back in its hayday, only Marblehead people could use it, and you had to either show that you were a resident, have an account, or if you were an out-of-town contractor, for instance, you had to let them know what the permit was, and it’s all coming from 122 Main Street or something like that. It really was a service only for the town. Yeah. It worked out really well. And at some point, we switched over to doing other things for other people to come. And quite frankly, I imagine none of you have ever gone over to Pinto, which is a place in Phoebe that you can get rid of cars, metal, demo, anything you want.

1:05:54 During our downtime, I had to take a load over there. It took me close to an hour to get there because of traffic, 45 minutes or so to get back. Had to wait in line two hours to dump. Totally ridiculous. Mm-hmm. Totally ridiculous. I’m at the end of contracting now. I don’t really do much, but it’s such a blessing and a handy thing for us to have the ability to do it. I think what we need to do is think of a way. Right now we’re paying $320 a ton if I go up there to get- Yeah … stuff. I have no problem with that. I’d be happy if it was less, but I have no problem with what it is. But I don’t think that I, as a person in Marblehead, should pay the same thing as somebody coming in from out of

1:06:41 town to dump. Okay. So either we’ve got to figure out a way to charge them more per ton, and maybe there’s got to be an allowance to say, okay, I’ve got a permit. I’m doing this for 22 Main Street, and it’s a resident’s rubbish. I can understand that. But perhaps they have to pay a fee similar to what we do for the 100 bucks for the plate reader type thing. Something like that to help justify. I definitely thought about that, Steven. I think that’s something that I always think to explore once you finish the pit structure, once you get a new swap shed Once you get the sorting floor, then you start exploring all those things. And that’s how I view it, personally. Coming up with these extra 2,000 tons or whatever it was that you said-

1:07:27 Mm-hmm … we’re going to get thousands, not thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars out of this. Yeah. And it could be beneficial to the whole town. Correct. Mm-hmm. I’m definitely in favor of that, and I think you’re going in the right direction. A lot of people truly have no idea what it is. Somebody’s got to get better publicity, let them know where our money’s been spent. I think I might have mentioned that in front of you. I heard you that, so I will work on that. The town of Brewster. Yes. Brewster. I understand. He’s been a little busy. That’s not the area that I… Not all of it, though. Maybe throw eggs at houses. No. Nothing- Never. When they pick up the leaves and grass, do they take that up and dump it out back at the transfer station? Yes. Okay, so that’s not going to really change.

1:08:13 No. No. That’s a good service- Yeah … probably. The hard thing is, I got all the different numbers and stuff like that. So, if we were really concerned about the cost per household, you could pull that out, but at the $96,000 for the year, for- It’s nothing … it’s nothing. So it’s hard to say not to include that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It’s like it’s $7 a household. And it have one big truck rather than- Yeah … 100 little trucks. So, we’re trying to think both environmentally and- Efficiently … you also mentioned that there’s going to be public hearings on the trash contract. Yes. You didn’t say when. So not the trash contract for the fee. Okay. That is going to be the last week in April. Okay. So it needs to occur before town meeting

1:09:01 so people know exactly what the fee is going to be before they get their bill. Yeah. So that way, there’ll be an educated attendee and voter. And some of the figures that you gave there is sort of a guesstimate because we don’t truly have a budget set that the selectmen have approved that we can use. Mm-hmm. Some of this won’t be decided until town meeting, basically. Right. Okay, done. Overall, you’re doing a great job, okay. No complaints. I’m glad I don’t have- Any other comments?

1:09:35 Um. Do you want? Oh. Go ahead. No, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you standing. You go. Okay.

1:09:42 I just want to know, I negotiated eight years ago for the municipal employees when we had our own trash collection trucks, and I was told the reason why we had to go and delete it was because it was a lot cheaper to privatize it. Okay. Most cities and towns around here have done it. There’s still, I believe, Melrose or Malden, one of the- Yeah, and I don’t even think they are doing theirs anymore either. Oh, okay. I used to see the trucks going up and down Route One. So what my question is, I did a little investigation work over the last couple of weeks, and I met with three communities on the North Shore, and I learned some things. Beverly doesn’t have a transfer station.

1:10:29 Swampscott doesn’t have a transfer station.

1:10:33 Danvers has land that there’s a transfer station on, but it’s privately run. A lot of things we’re paying for in this town, you’re talking about hiring another person, another clerical help. I’m interested right now. I’m just digesting this and looking into this. This is all new to everyone. I’m not going to be able to digest this before town meeting this year. This is not a decision I’m going to make really, really quick. What I think should be done this year is that it should stay on the tax rate, and then there may be wait till you have a five-member board, have a whole year to look at it. I’m very happy with the makeup of the board now,

1:11:19 that’s on here for the health purposes, but the two newer people on the board don’t have much,

1:11:32 I don’t want to say they don’t have much knowledge, but I think they concentrate more on the health issues than the waste issues. And we’re relying on him, and I’m not saying he’s not doing a good job. There’s no question he’s doing a good job. But I’m just really, really surprised that the town, when they’re talking about getting employees, that we’re making another monopoly. We’re going to have to hire more and more town employees. We have to pay pensions, we have to pay sick time. But when I heard all this saying it’s cheaper for these private companies to run, and I’ve even had discussions with him about going back, and he goes, “Oh, no, the cost of the equipment and the town employees and everything like that.” And after talking to these other communities, I can see why no one’s doing it.

1:12:20 But as a taxpayer in this town, I’ve lived here all my life. I spent a lot of money up that dump to cap it and put all this equipment in. And now as a taxpayer, I’m being asked to either pay $250 to pay my trash or $120 to buy a sticker that I’ve already invested a lot of money up there on my tax bill the last several years. I don’t think it’s fair to the existing taxpayers. The other thing is this town’s talking about it going green and everything, and now we’re talking about bringing traffic from out of town to come to Marblehead, and then we’re going to be burning all these diesel. Buy more trailers to bring stuff to Marblehead

1:13:05 than cart it out and do more pollution. We’re going to be using more electricity. We’re talking about going green. The electric light has a program to reduce, and this thing here is going to be increasing electric usage up thereAnd I’m not against all this stuff, but I think we need to look back. I’m not aware, I can’t find anyone that’s running in Massachusetts, too many municipalities running a transfer station. The other thing that I was surprised, the three board of healths I went to, the three towns I went to, the board of health isn’t running the trash. The public works and the engineering department’s running the trash. The public health is doing what

1:13:51 the two doctors are doing, and the trash is being done through the highway division, department of public works, or engineering department. And I was surprised over in Beverly, they pay every three months. In one place they pay on their water bill, another place they pay on their sewer bill. Swampscott used to charge a fee, doesn’t charge a fee at all right now for trash. I thought they were charging a fee, because my sister used to live over there and pay a fee. But some of these communities had a 13-year contract that’s getting ready to expire. But what I’m just saying to you, I’m not against this stuff,

1:14:36 but I think we need to investigate, and I’m just a little concerned this enterprise funding and stuff that I’m going to have a smaller override. I’m willing to support an override if it’s within reason. I already told them I don’t want to supersize all the override. I think the town, in different ways, they got to look at different things. And I’m just saying, and I know a lot of older people who saw. But I’m just curious, I know neighbors that go to Florida for six months. So they have to pay the total fee because other towns don’t do that. But we can’t solve everything tonight. Right. But the goal was to try to get as much of the factual information out. And the board of health and the

1:15:24 director will do what the town needs. It’s up to the town to tell us what’s the right way to go. You don’t think that we should do the fees next year, Ro? No, I’ll support a $2 million dollar over. I want more time to digest this. And maybe he can answer the questions. Are the communities on the North Shore running

1:15:49 and doing the dump and running them themselves, these transfer stations? Because I can’t find them. There’s not a lot of communities that are doing it. Nothing against, but I didn’t know that until the last board meeting. There’s not a lot of transfer stations around anymore. Yeah. And I can go to ones out of town and pay a fee, too. They’re open.

1:16:10 So, when he had an issue with his, and everything like that. But like I say, there’s some good- It is the town of Marblehead. Yeah. There’s some good parts of this and bad parts of it. But I’m a little– I know someone that passed on this week. Now the daughter’s going to have a $20,000 income coming in and is not going to be able to afford to live here anymore. And doesn’t qualify, is 60 years old. So, like I say, I know he’s done a good job and everything like this, but I’m just not going to rubber stamp it. I’m going to be up at town meeting. I’m going to be asking some questions. But like I say, I would rather support leaving it on the tax

1:16:58 rate. I’m not really in favor right now hiring any more town employees. And I think we should look at another way that this can be done in-house, because these other towns, what I was told, and I do have to thank the other towns, because I’ve dealt with a lot of people in this town, and I was really surprised the amount of time they spoke with me and sat down with me and gave me the courtesy. And then they added things and you should see how some of… I can’t say anything bad about these three communities. Yeah. Other people. Let me answer a couple of those real quick. So like I said, my goal is to give back to the town once it’s complete. I mean that. So it’s, you know.

1:17:45 I’ve heard that before, Tom, but that’s- Well, it’s not complete yet . So what can I do? You got to wait till it is. You could be here and then two years later, someone else come. Hey, that’s true. But my thought is that if I set it on that path and I keep saying over and over again, that it’ll stay that way. Whoever takes my spot, whatever, will know. As far as going green, there’s only so many transfer stations around, but actually, part of the whole C and D thing collection is going green. Because that’s being recycled. So if we increase our capacity for C and D, which part of this does, that is going in the direction of going green. I agree with you, I want it to be part of the tax base. Obviously, it’s not our decision. We didn’t kick it out. So it’s, you know.

1:18:32 Well, that’s just a proposal. Yeah. No, so I hope it will stay in there. And then, as far as seasonal people, I don’t think there’s a real way to do that. When you have a firm number, if you were privately contracting with just, I don’t know, someone that you can subscribe to out of town, then you can kind of negotiate it, but when it’s on a whole town basis, I think it’s basically all or nothing. So it’s- And I do know, what I heard earlier, we could opt out, but now I’m learning something else tonight. I don’t know if I heard it right. That either I have to opt out, which I already told you, I don’t put trash out every week. Yeah. So I’ll opt out. But do I still have to pay a fee? I’ll still have to buy a sticker?

1:19:19 Yes. No, I’m saying I don’t bring normally trash to Marblehead. So, if you’re opting out You’re choosing to use the transfer station. Or do nothing. Regulately. Or do nothing. If you’re not going to use the transfer station, you don’t need to pay. Yeah. Oh, fine. Yeah. Fine. Any other questions or comments? Yes. I just have one question. It might be very silly, but I’ve been asked about it multiple times. If people decide to opt out of picking up their trash, or if they continue to get their trash picked up and they want a dump sticker for the beach pass, will there be a discount because they won’t be like- Not yet, because they’re still- Okay … connected. That is a goal later, too, is to have

1:20:08 them separated. That has to be done at town meeting. Right. So right now, it all goes in the general fund. It’s not like it goes into the waste revolving. Some comes back, but it’s not there yet. But I’d like to see it go there. Where they’re separated, then we can control our costs, and set up the fee appropriately. Really control them. And then the park and rec can do the same. Yeah. That makes sense. Thank you. Dr. Kruger, did you have a- No, I was just thinking that we talk about people who are seasonal. Those types of people who can do that usually have a fair amount of income. The $260 is not going to be anything for them. Mm-hmm. That’s a cup of coffee a week, or whatever. A day. In a week.

1:20:54 A week. A week? A cup of coffee a week. Yeah. Yeah. Where are you getting your coffee? Starbucks. Where else are you getting it? I’ve never had coffee. I can’t comment on that. I don’t know the cost. Well, one thing that Al mentioned, that extra tonnage we’re talking about, that’s just because you negotiated for them to take their last load of the day- Correct … not to our transfer station. So we’re still going to have basically the same number of trailers- That one- … going out of town. That’s the double bonus, it’s that you save money on the- Buying a couple more trailers and what. So we’re looking to have four trailers. Doesn’t mean they’re all going to be leaving the town. No. Yeah. Now they have to go back and forth and back and forth. Okay. So one would be dedicated to C and D, so it might not fill the first day, but it would get detached, and then-

1:21:41 For demo. But yeah. And did you just look in to see if, like the state has a lot of private haulers on like bringing salt and stuff like that. It’s all part of the bid. Okay. No, but I’m saying if you have, like you’re making people work mandatory, you don’t want to burn people out and have people go. I don’t trust. No, what I’m wondering is, we have contractors come in and take… We did have when we couldn’t handle it ourselves. But they had private contractors come in. I don’t know if it’s cheaper or not, but they don’t pay the state. They don’t get the benefits that the state people would get. Yeah. It’s just working that Saturday, and so you’re interacting with the public. You couldn’t have a contractor to do that work. Got to have the right answer.

1:22:26 No, I’m talking about when it’s the trailers themselves on going in and out of- That’s all part of the contract. Okay. That’s all bid out and stuff like that. I can’t change that amount. Oh, I see. Is there anyone online who might have comments? That’ll be us. All right. Go right ahead, Lee. Hi, guys. Just want to confirm a couple of the numbers that I heard and ask a couple super quick questions. I’ve heard in the community that a town meeting vote is required to start a new fee, like the trash fee. Is that inaccurate? Yeah. So we have legal written opinion. So the board already has authorization to set fees for the transfer station. So they can do the same thing for curbside

1:23:14 collection. Okay, cool. It’s not arbitrary, though. I heard at the select board meeting where they’re like, “Well, this town does this, and this town does this and this.” No, it’s a calculation. And so it’s never going to be us being like, well, the town to the town, like as you saw on the sheet, or you didn’t see. Yes. And you had a couple based on how many opt out. That’s what it’s going to be. Right. So it’s a whole number divided by a variable, and we don’t know what that variable is, so all you can give is ranges. Right. So anyone at the select board meeting that was like, “Oh, it’s 150 here, 350 here,” it ain’t going to be that way. Right. Got it. Okay, cool. Thank you. And just to confirm one of those numbers, 280 a year with 3% opt out. Did I understand that or hear that correctly? A guesstimate right now.

1:24:01 I think that was five. Yeah, let me just…

1:24:08 287.70 for a 5% opt out. 287 for 5% opt out. Okay, cool. 281.77 for 3. Oh, okay. Okay, great. And then just confirming again, what you guys voted on tonight unanimously, the budget for waste is 3.2 million? Double check.

1:24:34 3.1. 3.215611 for the waste budget? That’s correct, yep. Okay, and the health one is 339,320? 339,320, that’s correct. Okay. And what was the 114,600? So the 114 is the landfill maintenance and monitoring. Landfill maintenance. And that’s separate? That’s separate, that’s correct. And that’s 114 six. That’s correct. Okay. And so you had said, sorry, just really quick, but the health budget was 4% over last year’s FY 26. Yeah, and that’s due to that senior clerk that came in at a higher step than regular. Got it. So yeah. Okay. And then what about the waste budget? What is that? I don’t have the percentage.

1:25:20 Is it a little over, a lot over, under, same? I don’t have the percentage. The biggest factor is that you have a new trash collection contract- Right … that would drive it higher. Yeah. OkayOkay. Very good. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it. Oh, also, Andrew, I emailed you, but could you email me some of the paperwork, some of the documents, the materials that you shared tonight? I can put them on our website and share them. About 50%. That might help with what Steve was saying about, or I don’t know who was saying it, about transparency and more people understanding the incredible amount of work that goes into coming up with these budgets. Yeah, you’ll see these documents continuing on. Again, these are all estimates for curbside trash- Right … and stuff like that, but you’ll continue to see these numbers.

1:26:07 I’m so busy right now, I can’t even read emails. Can you just forward them my way? He can still- So there you go. I forget. Yeah, I’m happy. I think I CC’d all of you guys, so if anyone can send me those, that’d be great. Yep. And then I can, like I said, I can post them on our website. Sounds good.

1:26:25 Thank you, guys. All right. Let’s go back quickly to the regular agenda.

1:26:35 And I didn’t bring PowerPoint. I’m going to go very quickly.

1:26:43 For the KAN program, this week we are beginning our focus groups. Remember, we finished the survey. The survey told us some things about the town, and we then wanted to go into smaller groups, get people in different age groups, and ask detailed questions, allow them to go deeper into those issues. So those focus groups are beginning this week. They will continue till April 7th. The focus groups, none of us will know anything about the focus groups. Well, I asked one person to sign up. I don’t know if that happened, but we know nothing about it.

1:27:28 These are all done by our colleagues and partners from UMass Boston, so the people in the focus groups can say what is on their mind without a concern about their neighbors knowing about it, okay? When we get that, the last one I think is April 7th, then we’ll begin to put all of that material together, and at some point, we’ll send out the final report, and we’ll have an open meeting to discuss what this means for the future of the town from a health and wellness perspective. Okay? So KAN is moving forward.

1:28:14 We’ve been very lucky. We have a great leadership council of about 10 people that have really been generous with their time, and helped direct both the survey and now the focus groups. Second, we are having a meeting with the district attorney on the 14th of April. The district attorney’s office, and the conversations will primarily be around

1:28:44 social hosting and substance use in underage individuals. But the DA is the DA and will answer any question probably in his purview. He would like to have the questions in advance, so anyone that has a question, you can send it to his office, or you can send it through us and ask him, and we’ll make sure he has it before he gets here so he will have answers. Then

1:29:23 the charter committee is sort of winding down. We are finishing up… I’m under charter committee. We are finishing up on draft B, and we’ve changed a little bit of the style of the way the charter committee is written. And so the charter committee has asked the board to review what are small changes. But I need to hear from my colleagues. Basically what we’ve tried to do in the charter committee now that everyone understands the charter would ultimately go to town meeting. The select board obviously has to approve it, then it goes to the

1:30:10 legislature. Once it gets approved by the legislature, it becomes state law. So if you want to change the charter, you have to change the state law. So we have to go all the way through back to legislature. So when the select board really sort of understood that,

1:30:29 they wanted some changes made so that we can remain as flexible as possible to be, in effect, self-governing. So our board has been asked to look at the changes. Did anybody have any problems? No. Unless I missed something, it looked pretty… We eliminated the word department. Yeah. That’s, by and large, the biggest one. Yeah. I didn’t see anything else of like- Somehow, one of our colleagues felt very strongly about that, and we went back. We say now that we are responsible for the waste and public health services of the town. We don’t say departments. But okay. So I can pass it on to the charter committee that the board of health is comfortable with the wording.

1:31:15 Did you see it at all? I’ll reread it again, but yeah. Yeah, I need a little bit more time to read it. Can we- Okay. Sure … approve it next week? We meet,

1:31:25 I think it’s the 12th, but in 10 days or something like that. Okay. Yeah.Okay. Finally, last meeting, I mentioned that we had found a grant RFP that we wanted to explore. But we explored it a little further, or a lot further, and we came up with the idea, one of the things that CALM has clearly told us is the town is quite concerned about substance use in adolescents. And anything we can do to make our young people safer, we ought to do. Again, you know my bias, I’m a pediatrician.

1:32:12 So we have come up with the idea, we’re going to apply for a grant just to look, no spending any money, no town money whatsoever, just to look at how we might have a youth center in this town. We have a center for seniors, but we don’t have a center for young people. Unless you drive by Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts about 3:00 in the afternoon. But it’s probably not the healthiest conversation at that time. So if we had a

1:32:51 youth center, the kids could get some role model links, some good mentoring. They’d be active and probably be positive. We don’t know if it’s positive, but

1:33:06 one of the members of the CALM leadership group is Brian Flynn from the Y. So I went to Brian, and Brian said they’re doing exactly that in Beverly right now, that the Beverly equivalent of our Y is working with Beverly to put a town youth area in Beverly. So we are about 90% of the way through a proposal that we are asking for $100,000 over two years to study whether it’s possible to

1:33:53 find a place and a strategy that we could do that. Okay? So no expense, nothing out of town, no commitment whatsoever, but it’s certainly one of the things that I’m willing to work on. And the Y has been terrific. We’ve talked to Parks and Rec. I’m going to talk to the senior center tomorrow.

1:34:20 I think the police chief is writing a draft supporting it. The schools know about it. I see it as just an upbeat way of thinking that tomorrow will be better than today, and I think that’s the way government should be looking as much as it possibly can. So, unless there are real important questions, those are quick updates, and we’ll talk more about everything further. Okay. All right. Yeah, I think it’s fantastic to look for a teen center in town, and I’ll talk to the JCC to see if they want to get involved. But I think that Eveleth site would be great.

1:35:07 Yeah. That’s been talked about at the Marblehead master plan thing, with the Park and Rec especially, is the Eveleth school they’ve been eyeballing it. Wonderful. So, yeah. But if we get the money, we would try to get consultants who– I think the question to answer, and this is one of the few things that I’ve taken away from long-term business school teaching, plan ahead. Mm-hmm. What do the wellness and health-promoting activities of the town in 2030 or 2035 look like? It doesn’t matter where we are today. We’ve got to pay for what we’ve got right now.

1:35:53 But if we have a strategic plan that’s out there that says this is possible, at least we know what’s then. Or if it says, we can’t find enough space in the town, and you can’t afford it. But we will have done the forward-thinking, and I think this is the way we see our job. Okay? Okay. Now, excuse me. I’ll run through the bills quickly. We had Amazon Capital Services for other disposal, $137.05. AT&T for Internet access, $65.98. Black Earth Compost for residential food composting, $2,554.88. Bonsai Logic for the license plate reader,

1:36:38 $2,601.70. Carlton Electric for the electrical work at the transfer station, $8,255. Cleaning service for the wellness fair, $225. Home Depot for just disposal maintenance there and supplies, $415.77. Marblehead Counseling Center for psychological counseling, $5,914.76. Marblehead Light Department for electricity, $2,549.24. Marblehead Water and Sewer, $87.50.

1:37:13 Picket Fences for fence building and repair, $800. Republic Service Trash Collection, 84,775. RMG Enterprises, they recycle the monitors, $423.28. Sanofi Pasteur. Right? Pasteur Santa Fe Pasture. Okay. It’s French. I see. Yeah. You know that. I took Spanish. $1,346.82. Stericycle for the sharps collection, $712.75. T-Mobile for telephone, $33.06. United Construction for the repair and maintenance of non-highway vehicles, $1,689.82. Utech for the mattress recycling, $2,162.

1:38:00 Verizon for internet access, $124.47. Waste Management for recycling fees, $2,365.84. Waste Management of Massachusetts for trash disposal, $650,456.71. And WB Mason for office supplies, $704.96. We’re just moving. So I had added curbside barrels for the ones that we’re financing. We’ve talked about these a lot. So to understand it better, the company that’s doing them wants us all to uniformly… There’s a 95, there’s a 65, and then we’re not doing it yet, but it’s 35, right? Right. Okay. So the 95 is the recycling, 65 is trash.

1:38:46 They want the whole town to see if they can make that work. Yes. So- They have a lot of experience with this, and they say the majority of people stick with that. Yeah. So the 95, I know sounds big, but it has the exact same footprint at the bottom- Yeah … as the 65-gallon bin. Yeah. So having grown up in the historic district and lived there even as an adult, I know it’s going to be a problem for some people. So what I had talked to Andrew about a little bit is, this contract would start in July. No, so the barrels will be rolled out in June. The barrels will be? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. But you can use the barrels, but the official contract wouldn’t start till July. Correct. Yep. So you could technically still use your old barrels-

1:39:34 Yep … from all of June until the start of the contract. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah. So- Yeah … what we would like you to do is to try it out. Yeah. So my concern mainly is that some houses, I can think of like, I always picture there’s one house on Hooper Street that has literally no backyard. And so, it’s just attached to the houses next to it, so they don’t have a place to put anywhere. And I know because I used to walk my dog there, that I’d see the woman bring her trash out to the town truck. Some people they’re going to look at it and be like, “I have no place to bring this,” or, “to put this.” So I’m hoping that we can get the barrels out. If we have to prioritize areas to get them to, we start with the historic district, because some people are just going to come

1:40:19 up here and say, “I have nowhere to put that 95 barrel. I can’t even take it home.” And then we would just hold it and be like, “Okay, we just need to wait six weeks, and then we can get you a 35.” But so just a couple little things with that. Yeah. So you get one 65 and one 95. Yeah. If you choose to trade them out, you don’t get two 35s to get your 65. You only get one or the other. Okay. Again, they want you to try this out and see if it works. Yeah. But yes. You could potentially say, “All right, I have no need for this. Can I go down a size?” And stuff like that. Yeah. And so after that trial period, yes, we’ll be able to exchange some barrels out. And there are plenty of houses in the historic district that can handle

1:41:06 it, but there’s going to be a select few that can’t. And so I think, if we prioritize that area, it gives them a little lead time on the six weeks where they can try to- Yeah. Yeah. They- And again, with the new regulation, you have to put your trash out in a barrel, and all recycling has to be in the barrel. Mm-hmm. There’s no longer allowed, even though we will continue collection in the downtown district using toter tippers and stuff like that, all material has to be in the container. Hmm. So for trash, it has to be bagged, it can’t be loose, and placed in your bin. For the recycling, yes, it can be loose, but your boxes must be broken down. There’s nothing allowed outside of your barrels.

1:41:55 It will not be picked up. Mm-hmm. We will be issuing fines. Yeah. So does that make sense to you guys for trying to give the historic district a little lead time to… They’re going to have the hardest time. Some of the houses there are going to have the hardest time. And if say they felt the 95 was too big, could they buy their own 65? No, they cannot. No. No. It’s not allowed. Everything has a barcode, and we know the barcode goes to your house. Wow. We are having to put together a whole– I have a whole Excel sheet of every household in Marblehead, and that will get tagged with the barcode associated with your house. So if there’s a large wind event and you’re like, “My barrel’s missing,” and I find a barrel down the street, I can scan it and be like, “Oh, this is Mrs.

1:42:42 Smith’s barrel over here.” Mm-hmm. Can they change out the 95 to a 65? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Again, you have to wait that six weeks, and we’ll start to make adjustments. Okay. Yeah. We do believe that people will- But we’re going to allow two barrels per house, one for recycling- One for trash and one for recycling, and that is it. Mm-hmm.

1:43:02 And it- And you’re not allowed to change that … changes out per year? No. No. Once you switch, that’s it. Yeah. You’re going to have that barrel for the next 5 or next 10 years. Because if they go out and buy their own and it’s not- No, it’s not. Right. It will not be picked up. So all these are all stamped with our emblems on it. They’re all our barrels. The public will know to only pick up these barrels. And

1:43:30 do you have something in place for people with their existing barrels? What’s the plan for that? So existing barrels would need to be brought to the transfer station for disposal. Okay. And we’ll have-A bin just for those? Yeah. Okay. Again, we’re going to have to- And residents would have to do that on their own. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and they’ll have to have a transfer station sticker. Okay. Yeah. Sure. Or they can recycle it, give it to someone else that’s still picking it up the old way. Yeah. No, that’s- You can keep it for storage. Keep it, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. So, yeah. Again, these are heavy-duty barrels. Yeah. They have wheels on it. They have a lid that’s attached, so you’re not going to be losing lids. Again, we leave our barrels outside. I don’t have a cover on them.

1:44:17 Mm-hmm. They just sit in the corner of our driveway up against the house. Yeah. I don’t need to do anything different to them. No, I have this exact setup in Salem. It works fine. Yeah. But there’s just some houses- Yeah … just don’t have places to put the- Right … taller ones even. I know my mom’s going to be p**d because she has her little shed, and it’s going to be too tall, the 95, but- She’s not the only one. Yeah. No, my mom’s going to suffer too, guys. So it’s … Okay. We’re moving to the community clinician of the year. Should I– Oh. Oh, hold on. When you put it into the barrels, there’s less rubbish blowing around. I see it at my places in Lynn. Yes. Yeah. Huge difference. Yeah. Definitely. So that’s a plus. That was a huge piece to it to say, “No.” We would get phone calls, “Hey, my recycling’s out, it’s blowing down the street.

1:45:04 When are you guys going to be here?” It’s not our responsibility. Again, we’re a coastal community trying to keep the plastics out of the environment. This was a big decision. I’ll say, I don’t know if Steve knows this too, because I’ve noticed in Salem, I keep hearing people say that they get stuck behind those trucks and it takes longer. I don’t think it takes longer. All right, Steve, I’m not crazy? So- Well, it does on North Street. I mean- Yes … but the same as manual people, kind of. I don’t see it taking much longer, but I don’t know. I heard people say that a lot, and I was like, “Okay.” I think they just notice it more. Maybe, yeah. If I see a truck, I take a side street. Yeah, we all do. But, yeah. So, yeah. And just a plug for composting, especially those who opt out and want to be

1:45:49 bringing up their trash to the transfer station. It’d be a lot less trash, less smelly. Compost is good for the Earth.

1:45:59 So I’ll move on to the health news. So an exciting development occurred this past week in vaccine policy and public health. In a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics against RFK Jr, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, cannot proceed under the recent changes imposed at the federal level. So this judge reversed all the actions taken by the committee since the summer of last year, which included ending the universal Hep B recommendations and the reduction of recommended vaccines from 17 to 11. So that was essentially held for now. So as a reminder, ACIP is the advisory board to the

1:46:45 CDC and plays a critical role in determining vaccine recommendations and access nationwide. And historically, ACIP has operated with transparency and with rigorous data review, and a willingness to adapt recommendations as new evidence emerges. But this last June, the expert panel was completely removed and replaced with members who, in many cases, lacked relevant expertise. And subsequent meetings that they had limited input from CDC scientists and included concerns about vaccine safety- … that weren’t based in data. And in this ruling, the judge noted that only 6 of the 15 members had meaningful vaccine expertise, despite even ACIP’s charter

1:47:34 requiring experience of vaccine safety, and knowledge of vaccine science. So they also noted concern about the rapid appointment process over two days of reappointing new ACIP members. So the ruling is temporary while the case proceeds through the courts, but for now, ACIP cannot move forward with any planned meetings. And there’s still uncertainty about future vaccine recommendations, but hopeful that this decision restores some trust in the vaccine process. But more work is clearly needed. So a few other things I wanted to highlight. Measles update. So, so far in 2026, there have been about 1,500 measles cases

1:48:21 in the US. Last year, there were 2,285, so we’re on track to surpass that total. Ninety-four percent of cases are from exposure in the US, not from international travel, and three-quarters of cases are from kids and adolescents under age 19. So current hotspots are in Utah, Texas, South Carolina, and Florida. So, for those interested who want to see if they’re planning travel and want to make sure they’re vaccinated before they go, I found this Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has this helpful measles tracker where you can go online and see where the hotspots are, how many cases are there. Mm-hmm. So there was a recent meningitis outbreak at the

1:49:06 University of Kent in England. There were 29 confirmed cases, and sadly, two students have died. In response, 5,000 individuals have received the MenB vaccine. Currently, ACIP recommends, in the US, young adults and adolescents aged 16 to 23 get vaccinated based on shared clinical decision-making, but the preferred age is 16 to 18. This is when we typically get kids vaccinated before they leave for college. Just a plug to talk to your doctor around those ages. And thenThe other thing I’ve been asked a lot about by patients is polio, especially with any upcoming travel happening. So, the CDC has issued travel guidance in new countries,

1:49:54 not only in Africa and South Asia and the Middle East, but also some UK countries, Poland– or UK, Poland, and Germany. But cases are continuing to increase as there are declining vaccination rates. So currently, it’s recommended that if you’re planning to travel to any of these sites, you can consider a one-time booster of polio, even if you have been fully vaccinated. And then just the end on the respiratory illness update, so COVID-19 rates are declining, which is a beautiful thing. Influenza is still moderate in most areas, but it is declining, and RSV continues to circulate at a high level, so important to get vaccinated for RSV. And then,

1:50:40 yeah, that’s all I have. Nora, it’s increasing. Oh. Hand washing, very important. Norovirus.

1:50:52 Are there any public comments about the three board member reports?

1:50:59 Are there any from the outside? Just a little clarification. After July 1st, presuming the town does not pick up the fee for the rubbish, the rubbish company will not pick up your rubbish unless you use one of these containers. How is that going to affect all the churches downtown and the commercial places? I know you had talked about it in the past, but I didn’t seem to have it in my notes. So right now we’re concentrating on the residents. Yes, I appreciate that. Yeah. We’re looking to potentially allow a service for– It’s approximately 165 businesses in the downtown area.

1:51:44 Okay. We’re potentially looking to offer them service as well. So there would be a monthly fee for your trash and recycling collection for those businesses. It’s going to be important to publicize that ahead of time that, hey, July 1st you’re on your own. Yes. Well, you have to get a barrel. They’re not picking it up if you don’t have your new barrel. No, but I don’t want to be walking downtown like they do all the time with- Correct. They have to like- With their rubbish … get it. Yeah Because they, “Oh, we didn’t know.” I think you’re going to see a few. Yeah. So the people- People are going to come back to the bar … the businesses that we were not able to handle because of volume and frequency of pickup are any food service business. The other businesses that would be unable to handle are churches,

1:52:31 synagogues, and stuff like that. Again, most of them have food service associated with them, and they need more frequency pickup. Yeah. But yeah, we’re trying to get the numbers right, but yes, we want to try to help serve the businesses downtown as well. Okay. So just- Yeah … might be nice if the press mentions that to people at- Yeah … come July 1st. Come July 1st. Curbside collection for residents is only single family, two family, three family, and four family. You will know if you’re on the list when we deliver bins in June. So we are putting the list together. We have essentially completed that. So we’ve gone through every address to use the assessing codes associated with that, but also looking at

1:53:16 condos, and if it’s a four-unit or below, we still have to service them for curbside collection. So we’re going to give all the bins regardless before anyone opts out? Yes. Yeah. So it’s an opt-out. Okay. So it’s not an opt-in. Right. If they- You deliver it to my house and I don’t want it? Yes. I’d rather not have it. But I can’t, so I can’t get- I got it in my driveway. I understand, but you can call us and I’ll- You take care of it for me. Yeah. We can figure out the other way. I can’t figure out the opt-in. I would be inundated with too much information. So it would have to be taken away if they opt out. Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. But we can handle that part. Yeah. Yeah. Would there be a way for people to sign up online to opt out? I don’t know.

1:54:02 There will be, yes, eventually. Like, in the near future, yes. Yeah. But again, we have to get through a couple of things. It’s kind of good though that you have the barrels dropped off because then people that were like, “Oh, I didn’t know any of this is happening.” Kind of hard to ignore a giant trash barrel dropped off at your house. Yes. And be like, “Now you know.” Right. So yeah, the month of June you would be able to start to opt out. Does it have to be billed quarterly? Can we do monthly? You’d get 8,000 bills a month. Yeah, I know. Everybody does it four times a year, and it goes on the- Everybody does it quarterly … water and sewer bill. I believe we do. No one else is hired. They’re doing it with the help they have. Right. So the reason why we’re not doing ours with the water and sewer is that it’s

1:54:48 an enterprise fund, and so it does not use outside funds, so it would be very complicated because I’m a different service. I’m not part of their enterprise fund. Yes. Salem, for me, does it monthly, and it’s extremely annoying. Mm. So… We get it twice a year. I wish. Twice a year? Yeah. Again, we can talk about that during the public hearing and how it’s going to be billed and stuff like that. So yes, you can definitely talk. There’s some things to work out. People got to understand that. Because it might be, maybe you think everyone has money in this town to pay the 250 or 260 all at once. For some people, it’s a hardship. Right, and that’s why- I’m 60 years old … we do it. I see. You know, not everyone,

1:55:33 you know. It’s rich on houses here, but there’s a lot of people that don’t have much. So transfer station, making great progress with the project up there. Scale house is complete. Some minor punch work items inside. Very minor at this point. Majority of the work is still for the site work. We have approximately two weeks of site work to go. That’s installing curbing, rough gradingSome drainage work, some capping of water and sewer line.

1:56:04 So there’s two posts at the front of the compactor building that connect to the concrete. Those need to be rehabbed and then rebuilt into the concrete. I have a change order that we need to do for that work of $22,284, and I need approvals please. Yeah, motion to approve. Second. All in favor? We’re good. Aye. And that- Unanimous approval. What’s the plan to make that scale stick out? Oh, so the plan to make that scale stick out. So the plan is to paint the scale itself red. Okay. And then, so on the side you’ll see the concrete. Yeah. Is to paint two yellow lines that go out straight. Yeah. So, it would run along the side of the scale and then out

1:56:52 straight so you can line up with the scale. Perfect. Like you’re monitoring your car. Yeah. Your car. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly like that. When you’re pulling onto the scale, you need to remember that the scale attendee has to get your weight. Right now they’re using the buzzer. Those traffic lights will be operational shortly. So you’ll be looking to the traffic light to say… It’ll be red until she’s got your first, or we have your first weight, and then it’ll go green. You’ll back up, it’ll turn red again. So when you pull forward, you have to sit there until it goes green, and then you can pull forward to pay. And then you’re waiting for another light so you can merge into traffic. So you think the remainder of this portion of the project will be done in two weeks, or you think there’s two weeks of work?

1:57:37 No, it’s two weeks- Yeah … worth of work. Yeah. Obviously, the biggest thing that we’re waiting for is paving. Yeah. Paving plans don’t technically open until middle of April, so they are trying to get a little bit of a jump start on site work right now with some drainage work that’s not affecting the commercial area. They were doing some saw cutting today for asphalt and stuff like that. But yeah, there’s going to be a two-week period where you’re going to be doing the steel work, some other site work, the curbing, and so we will have another shutdown period of approximately two weeks. Okay. Yeah. The other piece that we’re taking a look at is ledge. So again, we had estimated that you would run into approximately 50 cubic

1:58:23 yards of ledge up there. The contractors run into 51.55. We’re just going back and forth about the true cost associated with that. Once that finalized… So at the 51.55 cubic yards, the cost of that work is $48,251. We have to just review some of that work and also review the disposal of it. Mm-hmm. So that’s where we’re starting, but I’m reviewing this currently with the contractor, and kind of reviewing how they came to the number and stuff. This was expected, though, at the beginning. So are you saying the 40 is the difference, or? No, that’s the number that’s expected, but it’s not part of… We knew, we had anticipated that we were going to run into 50 cubic yards.

1:59:09 Yeah. This is the cost of that 50 cubic yards. Okay. Didn’t we hear about this before? I talked a little bit about it, but- We haven’t voted on it. No, you have not voted on it. The last thing for the work of- Are we voting on it today, or you- No … need to know? Yeah, I just continue to bring it up to you so you guys are aware of this. The last piece is for additional civil engineering. Because of that concrete structure with the building, some other site works, we really wanted to make sure with the grading, that we’re really good with the grading up there. We had proposed a little bit of a cut. We’re trying to reduce some of that cut as much as possible to really have a flat area when you’re pulling onto that scale. We’re going to place a dumpster next to the scale to help out when we have a C&D trailer, and some people might have a little bit of

1:59:58 MSW. There’s going to be potentially a 15 or a 20-yard dumpster next to that so we can handle some of that on an easy basis- Mm-hmm … to continue with flow and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. So we’re always trying to come up with these extra ideas. So the additional cost for some of the civil engineering, and we believe there’s going to be one additional site visit that’s going to be needed, is $4,500 for civil engineering. So I need a vote to increase civil engineering by $4,500. Motion to increase civil engineering by $4,500. Second. All in favor of the motion? Motion passes unanimously. But no, it’s doing really well up there.

2:00:43 Obviously, I’m really looking forward to paving and striping and stuff like that. I’m looking forward to the process. I’m looking forward to the future and what the potential is up there. Mm-hmm. So I think it ended up really good. Again, we still have some additional work up there, re-cladding that compactor building, and then a swap sheet at some point. Mm-hmm.

2:01:07 Yeah. I have refunds. We had an individual that needs to get a refund on a sticker. So this is for Stephanie Poulet, and she lives at 100 Pleasant Street, and she needs a refund of $100 for a sticker. So I need the board to vote that. She just didn’t like the transfer station? She didn’t need to use it. No. Yeah.

2:01:30 Yeah, you have to vote on refunds. Okay. Motion to refund. Second. All in favor? Sure. Motion passes unanimously. You might regret it, Stephanie. You’re going to miss that place. And then moving on from that, my public health nurse is retiring at the end of April. I’ve worked with her the whole time I have been here, essentially. We’ve worked through a lot of difficult situations. We worked together during COVID. I will truly, truly miss her. She’s one of the greatest public health nurses out there. She’s always very open to everybody, always looking to help. She gives a vaccination like nobody else. It doesn’t hurt at all. You won’t even notice that there’s a needle in your arm. So I will truly miss Tracy. With that, I have

2:02:17 an updated job description that I provided to all of you for the public health nurse position. And this is just for the public health nurses, we use a general job description in the area. It really covers all our different things. But I just wanted to share this with you. Again, she’s a grade seven in the admin scale. That is roughly the weekly pay. I just have to check in with HR about that. But this is the job description that will get updated and posted. Okay. And that’s everything I have. All right. Sorry, I jumped ahead. It’s all right. No, this is all the way planned it.

2:02:59 That’s it. Any outside comments for- No outside comments … outside comments, anything before we move to adjourn? I just want to mention that Tracy lady, I’ve dealt with her several times, very people friendly. So I hope we get someone at that caliber that can relate to the public. Yeah. Filling public health nurse jobs is extremely challenging. You’re fighting hospital jobs, nursing there. You’re fighting school nurses. So I hope we have good luck with replacing her. It’s going to be impossible to replace Tracy, but I look forward to the next person that we hire. All right. A motion to adjourn is probably in order. Motion to adjourn.

2:03:46 All in favor, aye. Yeah. Standing vote of adjournment. Excellent. Thank you for the appropriate