By Lisa Loomis
Tempers flared at the Waitsfield Select Board meeting this week with board members shaking their fingers at each other, trading insults and threatening bodily harm as well as "taking it outside."
The board's regular meeting on October 13 devolved into a shouting match shortly after it started when board member Sal Spinosa asked that agenda item number 7 be postponed until the board's October 27 meeting.
That agenda item involves work the town did to repair the Bridge Street Marketplace parking lot. Spinosa wanted the board to wait until board chair Paul Hartshorn was present to discuss the item as a courtesy.
After Tropical Storm Irene, Waitsfield used that parking lot as a staging and access area for heavy equipment to access the Mad River and remove gravel that was hauled away in large trucks, damaging the parking lot in the process. At that time the town promised to return it to its previous condition, if not improve it.
The work did not get done and this summer the select board revisited the issue and used town gravel and a private contractor to fix the parking lot. But that fix was not sufficient, according to marketplace property owner and select board member Chris Pierson.
"Paul said that the parking lot issue was going to come up and he wanted to bring someone to the meeting to provide input," Spinosa said.
"That person emailed and said he doesn't want to get involved," board member Scott Kingsbury said.
"It's a matter of courtesy until our chair returns. He has strong views on this," Spinosa said.
"If we put this off this won't happen until next year. The next two weeks are the window to get stuff done. I'd rather do it this fall than put it off another year," Kingsbury said.
"So you don't want to wait until Paul gets back?" Spinosa asked.
"Shall we play his views? I have copies of the videos of the October 10, 2011, meeting where this was discussed. And you, Sal, provided the wording for the motion Paul made and then you seconded it. So what's the problem? It's not a question for this board, it's something that was already determined by you and Paul," Pierson said.
"You're very confused," Spinosa said.
"No, you're confused. You don't even remember what you said," Pierson responded.
"It's about integrity, Sal," he added.
"You have a view. Paul has a view. I'm trying to learn. I'm not a parking lot expert," added Spinosa.
"Oh, so you're not an expert now? You were an expert when you made the motion or understood it enough to word the motion, and now you're not?" Pierson asked.
"What are you talking about?" Spinosa said.
"Let me play it for you," said Pierson, offering his iPhone to Spinosa, who shoved it back across the table stating, "I don't want your phone."
"It's you," Pierson said.
"Will you stop yelling at me?" Spinosa said.
"Stop pointing your finger at me or I'll snap it off," Pierson responded.
"Go ahead, do that. I'd like to see you make that effort. I don't know who you think you are," Spinosa said.
"I don't know who you think you are," Pierson said.
Board member and acting chair Logan Cooke pled for civility, asking several times for board members to keep it civil. Undeterred, Pierson and Spinosa continued their sparring.
"You're tangling with the wrong person buddy," Spinosa said.
"That's hysterical," Pierson said.
Kingsbury tried to bring the board back to task, stating, "We haven't determined if the town's promise has been fulfilled."
"Have you walked over there and looked?" Pierson asked.
"I have. I'm not parking lot guy. You aren't either. It doesn't matter. The question is whether people who know such things can advise the board and your tantrums don't advise anybody. Smile all you want. I'll wipe that off your face one of these days," Spinosa said to Pierson.
"Bring it. Let's go outside. This really isn't a discussion for this table. We can have it outside," Pierson said.
"I'm happy to have that discussion," Spinosa said.
"Let's do it now," Pierson responded.
"You represent the public. Are you serious? Do you really think this is the manner in which you should represent the public? You can point your finger at me, it doesn't bother me. I'm an adult," Spinosa replied.
Spinosa made a motion to have the agenda item postponed and Cooke seconded. During further discussion on this motion the board considered whether or not the town's original promise to fix the parking post-Irene had been fulfilled. Kingsbury said it had not been fulfilled and Spinosa said that board chair Paul Hartshorn thought that it had.
Spinosa said that he wanted more information about the board's original intent so that an informed decision could be made.
"What would we get between now and October 27 that will add to this discussion? This has been going on all summer. We have no information," Kingsbury said.
"We had work done. Charlie Goodman had information. I'm not trying to make a problem here," Spinosa said.
"What you're talking about is smoke and mirrors," Pierson said.
"Do you really have to talk like that? If you represent the voice of the people back there, they need a new voice," Spinosa responded.
"This town needs new voices," Pierson said.
The board voted 3-1 against Spinosa's motion to postpone and later in the meeting the board took up Article 7. For that discussion Pierson recused himself as a select board member but did participate as a property owner.
Cooke said he had abstained from the board's vote this summer to hire a contractor to spread the gravel because he wasn't happy with the details in the motion about how much work would be done.
"We were paying for service on the parking lot and they weren't really defined. Saying you need to grade something is not enough," Cooke said.
Kingsbury said that it was not appropriate that the contractor hired to do the work, (Charlie Goodman) did not contact the property owners before showing up.
"I was kind of disappointed that there was no communication," Kingsbury said, noting that the people at the Madsonian, which also received gravel and grading, had been contacted.
"Did he understand the town's obligation to the property owners?" Kingsbury asked.
"He graded the Madsonian, front to back, soup to nuts, the whole area was graded. Not much grading was done at the Bridge Street Marketplace. The whole Madsonian got graded and the marketplace has the potholes filled," he continued.
"This is subject to a lot of interpretation and everybody interprets it differently. There isn't one design model for this," Spinosa said.
Pierson referred the board to the letter Goodman wrote to the board after completing the work wherein he wrote that the material was hard as rock and the only thing he could do was make dust.
"A motion that was worded by Sal in 2011 recognized, based on the testimony provided by Charlie Hosford and supported by Rodney Jones, that the parking lot needed to be graded and top coated, the entire thing because, as they outlined, they recognized the damage that had occurred. The board recognized that if the damage was done by the town working on private property, it should be corrected," Pierson said.
Hosford is the former chair of the Waitsfield Select Board and Rodney Jones is the town road foreman.
"The ball was dropped. We made a promise three years ago to these people. We dropped this ball and we're either going to make it right, right now, or let it go another year," Kingsbury said.
"I watched those trucks take the gravel out. It was destructive work. They were heavily loaded and dumping a lot of water. In the summer that parking lot is a dustbowl. To me that isn't what was described in the original motion. I don't think we're done. We need to give a specific scope to someone to do specific work," Cooke said.
"It sounds like it wasn't a good parking lot before. What do we need to bring this up to? We made a measurement and came up with a need for 86 yards, put it out there and then we determined that we were going to grade it. And now you're unhappy with the quantity as well as the grading?" Spinosa asked Pierson.
"In the back corner, where the trucks were coming out of the river, there were massive potholes caused by the turning of the trucks. After the work that was done for riverbank stabilization, there was tree shredding. All that mulch got spread in the woods. The parking lot was never set up to properly drain after Irene. Gravel had been brought in to fill the temporary road into the river. The gravel was left there for the streambank stabilization project. That blocked water from flowing, water floated the bark mulch, which settled into the potholes. Charlie Goodman dumped the gravel on top of the bark mulched potholes," Pierson explained.
"I walked down and saw gravel on bark mulch. The only thing he did to correct drainage was to put a ditch across the parking lot. He did work on the corner between the septic system and the river. The rest of the parking lot got left untouched. The original motion was to redress everywhere that the trucks traveled. That leaves from the potholes to Bridge Street and up around the other side and all the way out to 100 that should have been addressed. If wording of the motion had been followed, that's what should have been done. After Charlie did work for Madsonian they had two driveways and a parking lot and I got this tiny little spot redone. And I had this huge parking lot that got destroyed," Pierson continued.
Kingsbury suggested that what the lot needed now about three loads of gravel at 14 yards a load and to be graded with a bulldozer. Pierson agreed that was the right amount of gravel.
"There's a lot of discussion here that Goodman didn't do the job the way it should have been done. There's discussion about a bulldozer being used. Now the thinking is that in light of the hardpan we need a bulldozer to scrape it up. That might work. I don't know. That's why I asked you guys to let this thing go until Paul can be here and we can get Charlie Goodman in here and you can ask him those things directly," Spinosa said.
Kingsbury said he was not interested in hashing this out anymore.
"I make a motion that we hire Kingsbury Construction to go down there with 3 loads of gravel and a dozer to get the work done," he said.
Cooke asked to amend the motion to require that Pierson and another member of the Bridge Street Marketplace association certify that the work completes the town's obligation.
"You don't want to hear from any other sources? I need more info. I'd like to hear from these other sources. I don't know enough about this," Spinosa said.
"You knew enough to make the motion originally," Pierson said.
If we're going to take this as our responsibility and I'm not sure we should have done that. It was kind of an act of benevolence, after Irene, but we did. To take responsibility for damage, we need to reverse the gravel. I'm not sure about the type of gravel, not that concerned about the cost. After Irene, we put roll-offs out there and paid for them to get rid of flood debris. It was a good thing. We knew that trucks tore up the parking lot and it was a good thing. And now it has turned into this," Spinosa said.
"Exactly, let's end it. This is an embarrassment. I want this done," Kingsbury said.
"I can't support this," Spinosa said. "I'm not backing away from the promise this board made. I think there's a better way and an informed way to make a decision," he continued.
Capels questioned why Kingsbury's motion specified that the work would be done by Kingsbury Construction or whether it should be put out to bid.
"Is the gravel to be provided by the town or the contractor? Are there other contractors who have bulldozers and how was it that Kingsbury Construction got selected?" Capels asked.
"Can we instruct Valerie to find the best price?" Cooke asked.
"What do you want to do, find out if one contractor is $80 an hour and the other is $85? The only reason I picked Kingsbury Construction is that they did culvert work for us this summer. Let's support a local business. Do we want to support a contractor who has been giving us good prices on big jobs?" Kingsbury countered.
After further discussion of the timing of the work and whether it could be put off or not, Pierson and Spinosa returned to arguing over whether or not Spinosa's 2011 wording for the motion indicated an understanding of what had to be done.
After further back and forth, the question was called. Cooke and Kingsbury voted in favor of Kingsbury's motion, and Spinosa voted against it. Pierson did not vote.
Ironically after spending so much time discussing the issue that night, that vote was not valid because it requires a majority of board members (three out of five) to take action, not a majority of those present and voting.
"So what you've proposed is going to happen," Cooke said to Spinosa.
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