No time for any actual writing right now, but I just received the paperwork for the Landfill tonnage increase and updated waste ban permits that the DEP released yesterday, and I thought I’d share it with anyone who might be interested:
Southbridge 39743 vol inc_WBCP FN pmts 02-08-12 revised.pdf
On a related note, the Southbridge Board of Health is meeting tonight at 6:30pm in the McCann Conference Room. Looks like they’re done talking Tattoos for now and Trash is back on the table.
34 minutes? I think this is a new record. Here’s the agenda for February 6, 2012 if you’re inclined to read it.
Anyone want to place bets on the out-of-towner that will be appointed to the new Economic Development Commission? Based on local custom, I’m guessing someone from Sturbridge.
My copy of this video only starts seven minutes into the meeting–if anyone is willing to provide me with a better version, please let me know!
Southbridge Town Council Meeting – January 23, 2012 from Amelia P on Vimeo.
The meeting agenda is right here.
In other news, I received a complaint from a reader last night about how this website is blocked on the free public wifi network at Town Hall:
The draconian filtering policies of the free public wifi at Town Hall are obviously well out of my control, so if this is something you take issue with, I’d advise you to take it up with the management.
Posted in Manufactured Scandal, Meeting Videos
So hey, it turns out I missed one of the documents the Mass DEP issued in December regarding the Southbridge landfill. (See last night’s entry about the “public comment” period right over here.)
Along with the provisional permit, the the Mass DEP also issued provisional “Section 61″ findings, which is basically an analysis of adverse environmental impact and covers the planned mitigation strategies to address same. The DEP is required to produce these findings persuant to MGL Chapter 30, Section 61.
This document is a surprisingly interesting read! As it turns out, there’s a whole lot of complicated engineering technology involved in creating and maintaining a mountain of garbage that weighs half a billion pounds. Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the information on the bottom of page 12:
Remember the long strange trip that was the Town Council meeting of December 19, and all the controversy surrounding Agenda item #17, the seemingly random purchase of a new street sweeper for the Department of Public Works? To think, all this time I had just assumed that Tom Daley had been a particularly good boy this year and was getting a Christmas present.
The real reason why the Town of Southbridge just bought a new Street sweeper is that the increased truck traffic bringing garbage and dirt (“intermediate daily cover”) to the landfill will generate so much dust on the roads that they will need to be swept on a regular basis. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to come right out and tell the truth? In all honesty, I probably would have supported the decision to buy a new street sweeper a if they had been up-front and honest about the reason they needed it.
I found a video on YouTube of a landfill truck route near the Casella landfill in Angelica, New York. I’d buy three new street sweepers if it meant Route 169 won’t end up looking like this:
Are we buying a sweeper for the Town of Charlton while we’re at it, or are they on their own?
So, you may well have missed it because there wasn’t much in the way of public notification, but the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection had a “public commenting period” last month when it issued the Southbridge landfill a provisional permit to expand the yearly limit to 300,000 tons of trash per year. Mr. Clark mentioned it briefly at the December 19 Town Council meeting, but I believe that was the extent of the public’s notice.
I happened to randomly hear about this through the grapevine, but only because my large professional network of hooligans and troublemakers includes an environmental attorney that my loyal readers in Rutland, VT are not terribly fond of.
I poked around on the Mass DEP’s website and found a page for Public Hearings & Comments, but there was no information listed for that provisional permit for the 300,000 tons of trash per year coming into Southbridge. I started trying to email different folks at the DEP and eventually found my way to Lynne Welsh, the Central MA Section Chief of the Solid Waste Management Program.
Ms. Welsh and I ended up speaking on the phone, and she ended up clarifying a few things for me. The Mass DEP don’t publish any sort of public notification for a public comment period for this sort of permit; they leave it to the permit holder to notify the public. (She didn’t tell me on the phone how the permitee is specifically supposed to notify the public, just that it’s not something the DEP does on their end. She followed up with a more comprehensive email, though, which I’ll post in the comments.)
The other thing I was curious about is what the process is for how the Mass DEP receives comments from the public, and what the DEP does with the comments once they’re received. Ms. Welsh informed me that she was the person to whom people could submit comments. After the comments are received, she and the other staff members of the Solid Waste Management Program office will review them, and if they come across anything they feel merits any kind of action:
wait for it, this is good…
…they would refer the issue to the Southbridge Board of Health.
The folks in Sturbridge are going to be pissed when they find out that gem. Some backstory to describe the lay of the land: Sturbridge has an elected Board of Health, while the Board of Health in Southbridge is appointed by the Town Manager. Sturbridge voters seem to favor a Board of Health that takes a strong position on regulatory oversight, while according to many local folks here in Southbridge, our Town Manager seems to have gone out well of his way this year to fill the Southbridge Board of Health with folks who will take a light touch when it comes to regulatory oversight of the landfill, appointing a fourth and fifth member to the board in violation of our Town Charter (which specifies a three member board) and pushing for the council’s removal of a sitting member of the health board despite not actually having the legal authority to do so.
So yeah, of all of the places for the buck to stop, the Southbridge Board of Health does not inspire me with an overwhelming amount of confidence.
The Sturbridge Board of Health submitted five pages of comments to the DEP, and the Sturbridge Town Administrator submitted a three page letter as well. I was particularly interested in getting my hands on Mr. Suhoski’s memo after Councilor Marcucci brought it up for discussion during Councilor’s Forum at the Town Council meeting on Monday. During Mr. Clark’s response to the coucilor’s concerns, he said that Sturbridge Town Administrator Shaun Suhoski “hadn’t been around all that long” and “didn’t know what he was talking about.” I don’t know Mr. Suhoski personally, but them sounds an awful lot like fightin’ words.
Anyhow, here are the actual provisional permit documents that the DEP issued on December 9th:
Southbridge 39743 min mod WBCP 120911
Southbridge 39743 SRDP provSec61dec0911
Southbridge 39743 cvr vol inc WBCP prov 61 120911
Southbridge 39743 vol inc min mod 120911
Later this week: liquorboarding the art gallery, and two new first-time candidates who are collecting signatures for the Spring elections.
There’s a Town Council meeting tonight. The agenda‘s a short one tonight: three business presentations, a vote to move $70k around from Sewer Retained Earnings to Wastewater Upgrades, a vote to accept Warrants for the presidential primary, and a vote to give “The Southbridge-Downtown Partnership Event” $3k from the “Grow Southbridge Fund.”
My colleague in civic media Mr. O’Brien mentioned this story last week and it got me thinking–what exactly *is* the Downtown Partnership? The Commonwealth of Massachusetts official database of corporations drew a blank, and there’s not much information about the organization on the Web either.
From my own dim memory of the last few years (mostly spent pregnant and/or nursing; I’ve been otherwise occupied!) I remember a sticker on a local bank’s door, and a request for funding from the Friends of the Library circa 2009 to contribute towards the summer concert series on the Common that is now run by the Recreation Committee.
So, aside from producing the 2009 Summer Concert series, retaining a PO box, and printing some door stickers, what has this group done? Aside from the group’s President Ron Chernisky, who are the members? Is it an official arm of the Town Government, or something else entirely? I smell a research project coming on.
Addendum: Can anyone think of a good Twitter hashtag for Southbridge politics? I was thinking I might start live-tweeting the Council meetings again, since it’s typically been taking me several days to get the meeting videos online these days. I used to use #0155doh and #0155whoa but I’m in the market for something a little less, uh, sarcastic. (Shorter would also be a bonus.) For reference, in the existing Twitter ecosphere, #mapoli and #worcpoli are Massachusetts and Worcester politics, respectively. But #southbridgepoli doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it.
Posted in Meeting Agendas, Who's in the Club?
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Town Council Meeting Minutes page on the Official Town of Southbridge Web Site has finally been brought up to date, after languishing at about six months in arrears for about as long as I’ve been following local politics. Weirdly enough, however, there are gaps: no minutes from the June 20th Council meeting this year, no minutes from the October 19 “Let’s Fire Ann Beinema Because We Feel Like Breaking The Law” meeting, no minutes from the August 6 “Let’s Meet on the DL, Out of Town on a Saturday (and refuse public input, in violation of the Charter!)” meeting, or any other Meeting of the Whole from this year. And now that I’m really looking, it seems there are meetings from June, July, and April of 2010 missing from the listing as well. How odd.
Abysmal website aside, going back and reading the minutes of this year’s meetings, I was reminded of one of the real problems in Southbridge that has deeply bothered me for years. I was quite late to the November 21 meeting, and never got around to watching the video. It turns out I missed two men speaking at Citizen’s Forum about an incredibly important issue: Mr. Pulawski and Mr. Caouette both addressed the lack of a sidewalk on the Sandersdale Road section of Route 131, between the Brookside Terrace Apartments and the Big Y shopping plaza.
I experienced this unsafe stretch of road myself one day a couple of years ago, when as a new mother I decided to take my baby daughter in her stroller to visit another young mom I knew who lived at the complex. My friend frequently pushed her son’s stroller all over town, and as a big walker myself, I didn’t think twice about walking to her place since she frequently walked to mine.
…that is, until the sandy conditions alongside the stretch of road with no sidewalk forced me to push my daughter’s stroller into the road, right in the face of oncoming traffic.
This is a stretch of road with heavy pedestrian traffic. Many people who live at that apartment complex do not drive, and traverse that stretch of road pushing baby strollers, shopping carts, and I’ve even seen a someone in a wheelchair out there once or twice. The shopping cart thing is a deal worked out between the merchants in the plaza and the apartment complex management: there is a designated area next to the office where residents are supposed to leave shopping carts, and a store employee fetches them once a week or so.
I know that this is something that people have been asking about for years, and the issue is complicated by the fact that the old railroad steel is there, and part of the land in question belongs to the state and not the town. But the fact that nobody has successfully addressed this ticking time bomb of a pedestrian safety issue? Hugely disappointing.
Mr. Clark? Members of the Council?
Senator Moore? Representative Durant?
Beuller?
I think it’s great that the town was able to use Stimulus funds to repair and replace sidewalks in relatively more affluent areas of town (mine included) and CBDG funds to fix the sidewalk situation on Henry Street. And now we’re looking at the sidewalks downtown on Main Street? Fantastic. As an avid pedestrian who frequently pushes an obnoxiously large double stroller all over town, I am always in favor of well-maintained sidewalks.
…but I’d happily live with an extra crack or two on the sidewalks in my neck of the woods if it meant we could find the funding for a safe sidewalk for all the mamas on the other end of town who push their strollers to the Big Y plaza and back. It’s bad enough that parents living at Brookside Terrace are raising their kids in a brownfield; we should at least figure out a way to muster up enough basic human decency to help them avoid getting struck by speeding cars in the process.
This past Monday’s Town Council meeting had no actual business on the agenda. It ended up being pretty eventful, despite this.
Any ideas about the “Third Strike” Roger Caouette referred to during his remarks at Citizen’s Forum?
Posted in Meeting Agendas, Meeting Videos
Happy 2012, everyone! I know there are a lot of people reading this who have a whole lot of legitimate complaints about the state of our local government, but I’m here to tell you It Could Be Worse.
You could be in Pensacola, Florida, where the Council Chair ordered police to remove a priest from a city council meeting for criticizing the council president’s use of procedural rules to limit unflattering public comment at recent council meetings:
Oh wait, I forgot, that sort of shenanigans totally happened to us this year.
Moving on, you could be in Quartzsite, Arizona, where they share Team Clark/Nikolla/Clemence’s view that only certain legally registered voters of a municipality should be allowed to run for local office, which unfortunately led to some questionable disqualifications of otherwise eligible candidates in a recent recall election. They also arrested two citizen speakers at their Town Council meetings this summer. After the arrest video went viral, the council fired the Mayor (what on Earth is their Charter like?!) put the police chief in charge of everything (can a municipality even declare Martial Law?!) and decreed that open meeting laws were suspended. Wow. Clearly this is a municipality we need to emulate by way of Special Legislation.
Of course, you could be living in one of the handful of deeply unfortunate cities in Michigan whose local government was taken away entirely and is now run by a state-appointed “emergency manager” that effectively functions as a municipal dictator. From what I’ve read, it makes gentrification a breeze! Apparently, some cities are just too poor for the privilege of a democratic process. Certainly of interest to some well-paid local professionals: it looks like the State of Michigan has several potential employment opportunities for Municipal Dictators. (Detroit’s days are numbered, you know.)
In other news, thousands of people with political opinions were knocked around, pepper sprayed, and/or shot with tear gas and rubber bullets this year for being a public nuisance in cities across America.
Welcome to 2012. My word, these sure are interesting times.
So, you’re a Massachusetts Municipality and you want to change your Charter. You’ve got a few options on the table, depending on what you want to do.
- If it’s a small change covered by existing state legislation, you might be able to write a by-law adopting a state law: towns can do this to change certain offices from elected to appointed, or to consolidate departments, or to grant their Board of Selectmen certain kinds of authority.
- You can elect a Charter Commission. This elected Charter Commission has free reign to write up any sort of Charter they like, subject to the limitations of the Home Rule Amendment of the Massachusetts Constitution and the regulations specified in Chapter 43B of the MGL. The resulting Charter is then subject to voter approval at a subsequent municipal election. (We did this in 1973, and again in 2004.)
Note: Section 10 of Chapter 43B of the MGL spells out a means to which the legislative municipalities can amend/revise Charters previously adopted as the result of a Charter Commission: it requires a 2/3 vote, approval by the Municipal Unit of the Attorney General’s office, and is limited to changes not relating in any way to the composition, mode of election or appointment, or terms of office of the legislative body, the mayor or city manager, or the board of selectmen or town manager. Changes under Section 10 are not subject to referendum or legislative approval. From what I understand, this method is almost never used because it’s so limited in scope. Generally speaking, Home Rule under Massachusetts Law is pretty limited; more on that later if anybody actually cares to hear about it. (The PDF article at the bottom of this link is a good read.)
-You can petition your legislators for Special Legislation. (This is what the current Town Council is doing.) If you can get a bill through the legislature quickly enough (before any elections happen, basically) this is a relatively easy way to get things done. A quick search of the session laws brings up 48 hits for Southbridge, although it looks like only one relates to our Charter.
I’ll have more for you later, including my thoughts on the CRC vs. Current Council controversy, and my own Home Rule Charter wish list. In the meantime, my kiddos have woken up from their naps and I’ve got a party to attend, so here’s a short list of links for further reading:
The Forms of Municipal Government/Charters page on the MA Municipal Association site has a bunch of information.
FYI, the 2nd link in that above list on the MMA site is broken. Here’s the updated link: Charting a Route for Charter Change
Form of Government from the MMA Wiki
For general background: Government of Massachusetts onWikipedia
Posted in Charter Changes
