At the Moretown Select Board meeting on December 21, the board addressed citizen complaints, received bad news from the road crew and approved a Town Hall renovation project.
ADDRESS PROBLEM
Select board members started by discussing a Moretown resident’s address problem. Jack Barnes complained that the town changed the address of his home. “On December 5, the Moretown E-911 coordinator David Specht changed our E-911 address, which is also our mailing address, without consulting us and without notifying us of an appeal process,” said Barnes. “I remain distressed that this change was made during the pandemic.”
According to Barnes, Specht discovered the town of Moretown made a mistake 20 years ago and assigned them the wrong E-911 address. This year Specht made the change, giving the Barnes’ family home a new address despite the fact that they’ve managed with the old address for years without any problem.
The board was sympathetic to Barnes’s complaint and voted to reinstate his old address that night.
DUMP TRUCK PROBLEM
The board also received some unfortunate news that night about the town’s new dump truck. On election day, November 3, voters approved the purchase of a new dump truck not to exceed $160,000. With the approval of the voters, the town went ahead and bought a new International HV dump truck, which was supposed to be delivered by December 1 at the latest.
However, the truck still hasn’t arrived. “I don’t think we’ll see it until the new year,” said road foreman Martin Cameron. “We’re at least a week out.”
The backlog on the truck delivery is especially concerning given the rainy weather forecast for Christmas week. With the risk of rain turning to ice, it is especially important that the town has its new dump truck to line the roads with sand, especially since their current truck has a “dump issue”
“This is not great news with the upcoming rain,” said Cameron. “Rodney is defiantly limited on his sanding ability with that side dump issue.”
According to Cameron, the truck is in a shop in New York, waiting for painting and parts. “It’s extremely disappointing to be put in this situation,” said Cameron. “We’ve been extremely lucky with the weather. But we’re gonna bat zero here in the next few days and we’re gonna really feel the pinch. But we made the purchase. We’re at their mercy.”
Select board chair Tom Martin was equally frustrated at the truck delivery delay. “Maybe there’s something we can get out of them,” he said. “They haven’t held up their part of the bargain. Their part of the bargain was we would have a truck by December 1. It will be mid-January until we get this, unfortunately.”
AIR FILTRATION PROBLEM
Finally, the board voted to use leftover money from the 2020 building maintenance fund to install a new HEPA air filtration system in Moretown’s Town Hall basement where there are mold issues. The project will be done this year and cost $1,250, not a significant amount, considering no construction work has to be done to the building.
“They are installing new filtration system into the vents they already have,” said treasurer Cherilyn Brown.
Martin was eager to approve the project. “This is one step to make the basement area more usable,” he said. “We’re trying to get the library to utilize that space. We want that building to be used up and down.”
