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Date: 9/7/2021
WILLIAMSBURG – During a Special Town Meeting on Aug. 31, residents of Williamsburg voted to approve four warrant articles, including funds for water and sewer fees, funds for the Depot Road culvert project and funds for repairs to the HVAC system at the Anne T. Dunphy school.
Article 1 was a request to transfer $1,927 from the Water Enterprise Fund to pay Howard Laboratories for a bill that came in after the end of fiscal year 2021 and residents quickly approved the article with little discussion.
Article 2 was a request to transfer $34,779 from the Sewer Enterprise Fund to pay the FY21 sewer service cost assessment to Northampton and Water and Sewer Commissioner Jim Hyslip spoke to the article.
“This is part of a surcharge we are being charged by Northampton for our high sewer loadings going into their wastewater treatment plant. A lot of extra waste is going down the drains from here in town and they are continuing to monitor that while we continue to exceed limits,” he said.
To address the surcharge, Hyslip said the town is raising the sewer rate and the Highway Department is investigating where the high sewer loadings are coming from.
“We are raising our rates for the sewer to start addressing this, at the same time we are going to great lengths to test in the town. Dan Banister and his crew have been out weekly testing the different zones to isolate where the high loadings are coming from. We have also looked at the different commercial establishments in town,” he said.
After being asked about why Northampton had blocked an attempt to hire an engineer to investigate the high loads, Hyslip said the city told Tighe and Bond it would be a conflict of interest for them to get involved.
“The Water and Sewer Commission as you know is run mainly by non-professionals, when we started recognizing this problem a couple years ago, we reached out to Tighe and Bond who had done a large inflow and infiltration study here in town, so we immediately turned to them to get control of these loadings,” he said. They approached the city to double check, and they told them it is a conflict of interest and cannot help us.”
Hyslip recommended that residents avoid flushing baby wipes or other paper products and to not use the garbage disposals in their sinks to help address the high loadings.
Residents voted to approve article 2 with one person voting against it.
Article 3 was a request to transfer $217,292 from the town’s stabilization account to cover the shortfall for the construction of the Depot Road culvert project and Town Administrator Nick Caccamo spoke to the motion.
“The low bid was $491,000 and one of the bids actually exceeded half a million dollars, so we are asking for this transfer in part because the town has a MassWorks grant for $350,000 and this transfer will allow us to cover the shortfall which includes the total cost of the culvert, engineering fees and a 10 percent addition to give us a little breathing room,” he said.
When asked if the road could be closed for the winter if the project is not completed in time, Caccamo said that was the worst-case scenario but is possible because of the lead time for construction for the culvert.
“The question of closing the road is a worst-case scenario and not something we are aiming to do; it is just a possibility. Maxymillian brought to our attention that given the late bid and the process of the construction season, timelines are off, and no one was expecting the lead time on the construction of the culvert to be eight weeks,” he said.
Voters unanimously approved the funds transfer for the Depot Road culvert project.
The meeting’s final article was a request for $81,292 from the town’s stabilization account to cover the costs for repairs to the HVAC system at the Anne T. Dunphy school and principal Stacey Jenkins spoke to the motion.
“When the building was built, there were some issues with installation, including three air handling units which were installed on the concrete pads when they should have been raised. There was also some insulation installed incorrectly in the kitchen wing, so ice built up during the construction. The contractor’s fix was to shovel the ice down onto our compressors and when the ice melted it built up under the compressing units,” she said.
Jenkins added that many of the system’s problems over the past six years can be attributed to the flaws in installation.
“The contractor’s raised the units but in the past six years we have been chasing issues in these units and it all can be attributed to the initial damage that the units had during that time, over the past six years we spent over $90,000 repairing all kinds of issues,” she said,
Residents unanimously approved the transfer for the repairs to the HVAC system.
For both Articles 3 and 4, Caccamo said the town was fully planning to put money from free cash into stabilization at the Annual Town Meeting in June 2022.
“Between these two appropriations it is a fair chip away at that and we acknowledge that is not an ideal solution, but we are looking for the most expedient process to get the money to cover these two projects in articles 3 and 4. The Board of Selectmen will come back with an article at the Annual Town Meeting June with a free cash appropriation equal to or in excess of tonight’s transfers,” he said.