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Date: 1/29/2020
LONGMEADOW – The Longmeadow Select Board met for a regularly scheduled meeting on Jan. 21 in conjunction with the planning board to approve a new member to the planning board, to interview candidates for the town’s new Senior Housing Task Force and to discuss policy updates for the select board, town manager and financial policies.
The meeting opened with a brief joint session with the Longmeadow Planning Board to approve Josh Levine as a new member of the planning board after his interview at the Jan. 6 meeting, which both boards unanimously approved.
After the joint session the select board dove into the interviews for the new Senior Housing Task Force by taking two applicants up at a time to question them. The first two candidates to take the floor were Eleanor Cress and Gerry Nolet.
Cress explained that her experience working at Emerson Manor would make her a good fit on the task force. She said, “I’ve been involved with that housing since 1975 and we’re approaching 40 years of being completely built and rented out. We started with 78 units, there’s now 99 units and 100 people living there. I think my experience is something I can really bring to the town.”
When board member Richard Foster asked Nolet if he would be able to stick with an extensive task force that could be working for a year he said, “I have time to put into the system an I’m fully aware that it is a task is a bottomless pit to a certain extent, but I’d like to give it a shot.”
After Nolet and Cress finished their quick interviews, Mark Pohlman and David Leslie took the floor. Leslie, who works at Glenmeadow, said he has experience seeing what other issues seniors have to deal with, even outside of housing. “I’ve worked in senior living for 23 years now and I’ve seen some of things faced by the older adults in the community,” he said, “There’s a lot more to it than just housing, the vast majority of seniors want to stay in their homes and want to figure out how to do that.”
Pohlman explained that one of his issues in finding new housing for seniors is to avoid any environmental problems. “My other concern is that any new housing wouldn’t affect any environmental concerns, and I would hope we can find a way to do this without adding any gasolines to buildings,” he said.
The final two candidates for the night, Richard Brooslin and Russ Cobbs, both of whom have been Longmeadow residents for over 40 years, then took the floor to explain why they were interested in joining the task force. Cobbs explained that his experience working with people and his time in Longmeadow would be a benefit to the task force. He said, “I think I have longevity on my side. I don’t have a lot of knowledge about plots of lands and vacancies, but I’m a very quick learner and I think I can communicate well with others on the committee.”
Brooslin explained that his experience on boards and committees in the town made him an ideal candidate for the position. “I served five terms on the school committee over 15 years, and I was the chairman five times. I bring a certain amount of experience dealing with committees, boards, and issues,” he said.
After the interview wrapped up, Town Manager Lyn Simmons gave her usual report for the meeting. She announced that the town received the Government Finance Officers Association Distinguished Budget Presentation award. “This is the fifth consecutive year the town has received this prestigious award,” she said, “There’s certain benchmarks that have to be hit to receive this award which includes using the budget as a policy document, financial plan, operations plan, and as a communications device.”
After Simmons’ report, the board moved to the next order of business to review updates to the town’s financial policies, to include OPEB Funding, the Stormwater Enterprise Fund, the Sewer Enterprise Fund and the Water Enterprise Fund. Select Board Member Mark Gold voiced his concern about the updates before seeing the actual budget for the year in July. “I’m worried that we’re setting ourselves up to violate a brand new policy if we approve this now not knowing what the budget brings. We haven’t finalized the 2021 budget,” he said.
Town Treasurer Paul Pasterczyck responded and said, “We’re probably going to be violating it whether or not we change it, but we’re more likely to hit this new target than the former one.”
Foster then chimed in to express his concern over the OPEB Fund. “We’re either gonna support this thing as a board or forget about it,” he said, “It’s growing astronomically, the tooth fairy’s not gonna bail us out for it, we’re not gonna pay for that, we’ll be off the board before the pendulum swings and somebody else is going to have to pay for it.”
As a result of the discussion the board decided to delay the vote on the OPEB funding until its Feb. 3 meeting. The board then quickly approved the remaining three policy updates.
Following the discussion about the financial policy changes, the select board moved into a discussion with Simmons about changes to the select board and town manager policies suggested by the Charter Review Committee ahead of the annual Town Meeting. Most of the changes to the policies were simple wording clarifications.
One of the policies updated was to make it so that any changes required to the town manager position required a super majority of four votes from the select board.
The board then continued the policy update discussion by moving into the select board policies, including updates to liquor license violations, which the board unanimously approved. Some of the other policies included striking the appendix to the town website policy and removing the former town manager’s contact information from the website to make it so the town did not have to consistently update and change contact information on the website.
“With staff turnover you’d have to update this every time someone left or joined town employment,” Simmons said.
The select board quickly approved each of the different policy updates and Select Board Chair Marie Angelides said she was glad to be getting this work out of the way now. “I’m glad we’re getting through the policies and the charter even though it’s just housework,” she said, “I’m really thankful we’re starting to shepherd these things through.”
The final order of business at the meeting was to discuss the water issue in town. Simmons said that while there are issues in Springfield the town cannot resolve, there are other ways Longmeadow can make its own improvements. She said, “We know that there are things we can do on the town side, so we’ve hired Mott MacDonald to analyze any issues on the town side before we spend any money on infrastructure.”
The Longmeadow Select Board will next meet on Feb. 3 for more Senior Housing Task Force interviews, further Charter discussion and more.