BOS Votes on ARPA Premium Pay Amounts for First Responders and Town Staff
At their meeting on Monday, November 14, three members of the Board of Selectmen (Vice Chair Rick Ward and Selectman Barbara Anderson were not present) went into Executive Session to determine the amounts of one-time premium pay bonuses to be offered to some town employees out of the town's American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allotment. After convening for approximately twenty minutes, the Board returned from Executive Session. Board Chair Audrey LaBrie announced that the Board had agreed to offer $750 to Town Hall, Beals Memorial Library and Council on Aging staff, $1,000 to Department of Public Works staff and $2,000 to dispatcher, Fire and Police staff. "The Town Manager will be reaching out to all of the unions and individuals through their departments," Ms. LaBrie said.
There was no Board discussion in the public part of the meeting, and no response or questions from the public in attendance. The Executive Session, which, as is customary, was placed at the very end of the agenda, was taken out of order, and was held about 14 minutes after the regular meeting opened. Following the Board's return from Executive Session, the regular meeting continued, although with an unusual number of motions to take various agenda items out of order, for reasons left unexplained.
Town Manager Justin Sultzbach gave the Courier some more details about the decision. He explained that the Board created "a tiered system where basically they created three categories. So there's Town Hall employees, Council on Aging employees and library employees are in the first tier at $750. The second tier is DPW at $1,000. And the third tier is anyone who would fall within the first responder category, so Police, Fire, dispatch at $2,000."
The eligibility of other town staff besides first responders was a new addition to the discussion which was first brought before the Board of Selectmen on April 25, 2022 by Dr. Maureen Ward. (See "BOS Hears Appeal for Winchendon First Responders to Receive Pandemic Premium Pay from ARPA Funds" in the May 12-19 2022 edition of The Winchendon Courier.)
"Part of the argument, I think, was the added workload [for all these employees] that came on through the pandemic, which I don't dispute," Mr. Sultzbach said. "Obviously anybody that's within the first responder category was probably a little closer to it, especially during the peak days." To qualify for the payments, the staff person would need to have been employed before June 15, 2021 when Massachusetts Governor Charles Baker lifted the emergency declaration for the pandemic, and be currently employed by the town. "So it's basically employees that, not that it hasn't been any less serious in the past year, but it's a different animal than the days when people were hoarding toilet paper."
Mr. Sultzbach said they had to consider "the added workload that came from that in terms of everybody in town, just doing their standard job, but then also the work on top of [that]. Even things like Don O'Neil having to get everybody set up to work remotely. Folks in our accounting department, how to process CARES [Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act] and ARPA funds and things like that, that was stacked on top of their normal day to day activity. So that's how we're justifying that. So it ended up coming out to 21 employees in that first category, 12 employees in the second being DPW, and 53 in the first responder category. The total not-to-exceed figure for that is $133,750."
Some town employees have voluntarily waived their payments, Mr. Sultzbach said. "While the gesture from the town is appreciated, I have waived the payment for myself. As has our Police Chief [Daniel Wolski], Fire Chief [Tom Smith], DPW Director [Brian Croteau], [Beals Memorial] Library Director [Manuel King] and Council on Aging Director [Sheila Bettro]." Mr. Sultzbach said all of them "felt that we had an obligation as community leaders to acknowledge that while it was serious, it was a big burden on our employees, that we had an obligation as leaders of the community to rise to that occasion that we don't expect additional payment for that."
It's taken a few months to reach a decision on Dr. Ward's proposal. Mr. Sultzbach explained, "The other important piece to highlight is, what changed between April and now? And the big question was in April, we have about a million dollars left in ARPA funding, what are some of our other needs before we started doling this out? A big one was trying to back into the number that we would want to set aside for the replacement of that water pipe.* Now that we've gone through Special Town Meeting, we've kind of softly committed to setting aside half a million for that purpose from ARPA funds. We knew comfortably that the remainder, we had a little more flexibility on."
* To review the discussion around the water main, see "Voters Will Face Tough Questions at Fall STM on October 24", under Article 6, in the October 13-20 2022 edition of The Winchendon Courier.
Town Boards Hear Initial Pitch for 1,400-Acre Solar Campus in East Winchendon
On Monday, November 14, Evan Turner of Aries Power Systems LLC appeared before the Board of Selectmen to give a presentation on a proposed solar installation in East Winchendon which will occupy some 1,400 acres of privately owned, currently forested land. As proposed, the solar "campus" will include multiple large arrays built wherever the land is not wetland, spread over the entire area, and comprising approximately 900 acres. Mr. Turner gave the same presentation to a joint meeting of the Planning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals on Wednesday, November 16. Although Mr. Turner has met informally with the Chairs of all three Boards and the Town Manager, Justin Sultzbach, Mr. Sultzbach told the Courier that there have been no official communications from Mr. Turner's company.
Mr. Turner explained that "big projects like this, and hopefully most projects but especially something of this potential scale, is not something I want people to hear about through the grapevine." There are still "two big question marks" which will impact the final dimensions of the solar campus: the exact delineation of wetlands and wetlands buffer zones, which still needs to be done, and the interconnection to the utility grid. The project will take as much as five years to complete. "Solar does not move fast at this scale," Mr. Turner said.
Displaying a schematic of the proposed campus on a Google satellite map of the town (see below), Mr. Turner said that the property is currently held by Conservation Forestry LLC, a private equity firm and subdivision of Conservation Resources. (Both are registered in Delaware with an office at 8 Center Street, Exeter, New Hampshire.) Most of the campus area is in Winchendon but there is an area across the town line in Ashburnham, near Sunset Lake. The property will be sold to another owner in the future.
"I am a one trick pony, Evan Turner, one guy and I focus on early stage development," Mr. Turner said. "What I like to do is bring in a heavyweight owner/operator/partner to do the development with me, who will, instead of me selling a property and a project to them later, as typical in solar development, I'd have someone start, someone else does the development, someone constructs, someone owns it, it might get sold a couple times, flipped, I like to bring in the permanent owner/operator up front. I tend to find that has a more consistent product because they'll be at my hip the whole time. When we make promises the people who own it are going to be the ones making those promises. You may have seen in the solar industry at the scale Massachusetts typically works, that a lot of times those promises get lost in the mail, lost in the wash between owners, and that's not an ideal circumstance. So the partner is not determined, finalized, yet but I think in a month it will be and I'll be excited to introduce them to you, but otherwise the plan will be the same thing."
As far as the scale of the project, Mr. Turner said that the completed campus will be larger than all the existing solar arrays in town combined. "That is a more natural size for solar," he said. "The 25 to 50 acre projects you've seen are very much a creation of Massachusetts's solar incentive program." Solar projects work to fill up the capacity of the power lines as a group. This project would include upgrading the power substation in East Winchendon or possibly building their own new substation.
In response to a question, Mr. Turner explained that on the schematic, the orange areas are estimated wetlands area which would be left treed, as is. The blue area will be the solar arrays. It's very unlikely that less wetlands will be identified than shown on the map; usually a lot more are found. North Ashburnham Road, which is where the new water main from Ashburnham will run, is along the boundary of the property and will probably be upgraded, as it is currently a gravel and dirt road, "basically a logging road," although it's a public way. This would be one example of this project and the town's interests overlapping for mutual benefit.
"Hopefully we've got an engaged partnership where the things that are important to you, I can consider as I make the plan, and I don't have the plan finalized yet because I'd like some of your input over time," Mr. Turner said. "Whether that's using potentially some town properties to help orchestrate power line runs, because it may be very much worth it if I could lease that from the town and of course, you would decide how I could and would cross it, and if so, all the way to, do you leave your corridors for wildlife and mixed use, leave trails for X, Y and Z."
Mr. Turner explained more about the benefits of a larger installation--for example, the availability of clean economical power might be attractive to "energy centric" businesses who would then want to locate in Winchendon. "There are businesses that are very energy hungry, that are financially advantaged by being near solar arrays where I can sell them energy straight out of the array instead of going through a network," Mr. Turner said, although he did not give any specific examples of what sorts of businesses these might be.
Mr. Turner clarified that the town would not be responsible for any costs of determining where the wetlands are located. He said there should be "a very large delineation effort this upcoming summer." He admitted that some of the sketched out areas might not be used because there wouldn't be a way to avoid disturbing wetland buffer zones, but in New England, this is inevitable. It is "rare to impossible," he said, to end up with more than 55 or 60 percent of a property buildable.
Asked why he picked this area, Mr. Turner said, "large isolated tracts of land with interconnection to the grid capability." With small scale solar, he said, to get them close enough to power lines you end up near houses "right across someone's back yard."
Everywhere in New England is trees, Mr. Turner said. "If it's not a farm that's conserved or where you were born working, it's houses, roads, water, buildings, there's no magical open fields that are just unused but not conserved. But it's about visibility. You don't want to change the nature of the day to day of an area of town. We've got to go find isolated tracts of land that are dry enough, correct slopes, that kind of stuff."
Department of Public Works Director Brian Croteau rose to say that the current electrical substation on 140 is undersized, and that was one reason for the power "blips" that plagued residents this past summer. "So this would be working to correct that, if that substation was upgraded, and that's where this project on the map in the blue, that's where this would plug in. So this would fix an ongoing issue that we currently have now."
Mr. Turner explained at some length how the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities designed connection capacity for solar into the system. Winchendon has significant available capacity, another reason for choosing this area for a big project. If a large project isn't built, small installations will continue to connect to the local grid until the capacity is filled. The town also has the potential to realize revenue. "The solar industry is very good at providing diverse and diffuse benefits. You build the array here and then everyone gets a little cleaner power. You guys get some tax money, but it's not a ton," he said. "So when I look at this big kind of stuff, I'm trying to find ways to make it better for the host community in addition to other folks, so you're keeping the revenue here when possible, is a priority for me. Because I think it's great if customers all across Massachusetts can buy this power, but I mean, I've got to offer them a discount to buy clean solar power. And that's kind of how the SMART program [Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target] works for community solar. I'd rather try to keep that revenue here."
Mr. Turner said that in other towns he's worked with, such as Sandwich and Falmouth, he's worked closely with the local town manager who served as a "point person" for the Select Board in those towns. The Board agreed with this model, and that Mr. Sultzbach should be the main "point person" for the project going forward.
Mr. Turner's entire presentation may be viewed on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5_WsTPE7bk, beginning at 51:45 on the video.
Some of the parcels the project will utilize are designated in the Assessor's database as owned by Winchendon Forest LLC, evidently an entity associated with Conservation Forestry LLC as it has the same Exeter, NH post office box. The parcels were sold by Winch Timberlands LLC in 2012.
Click on image to see larger view
Schematic of the proposed solar "campus" in East Winchendon
Image copright Aries Power Systems LLC
Click on image to see larger view
Schematic with more detailed town map overlaid to show locations of town landmarks
Image copright Aries Power Systems LLC
