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Date: 4/14/2020
SOUTHWICK – The Southwick Select Board met for two brief meetings in three days via conference call to discuss COVID-19 and to postpone the annual Town Meeting to June 16 along with its regular slate of business.
Both meetings featured a bevy of items in regards to COVID-19, starting with a vote at the April 7 meeting to allow the fire department to enter a memorandum with other local departments for a designated location to quarantine first responders that become infected with the virus.
Fire Chief Russ Anderson said, “It’s kind of an insurance policy to make sure we have a place to send them smaller deal cases and then should you have somebody get infected we’d have another place to send them. It would be two weeks to a month that we would need to do this.”
The board unanimously approved the motion to allow the town’s Fire and Police departments to join in the memorandum.
The next action item at the meeting was to accelerate the process of bringing the town’s second ambulance up to the Advanced Life Support services level.
Specifically, the department would be moving the program forward by acquiring a monitor for the second ambulance.
“One of the things I’d like to explore is moving that timetable up. We have some other residual money for equipment that we could use for the smaller things, but the big item is the $40,000 monitor,” Anderson said.
He then suggested that the town could enter into a lease with money the department had received from a donation from a family in town. Ultimately the Board accepted a motion to allow Chief Anderson to look into a three-year lease for the monitor.
The first orders of business at the April 9 meeting were to formally vote to approve the postponement of the annual Town Meeting to June 16 and to approve an emergency waiver of any procurement regulations that may need to be suspended related specifically to the COVID-19 response. The board unanimously approved both motions.
One of the issues ahead of the Town Meeting was the fact that the Planning Board has not been meeting enough to get the necessary documents in on time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Board member Joe Deedy said, “They’re gonna have to start meeting, as much as they are tech-savvy or not tech-savvy, whatever the issue is. The Planning Board is going to have to get up to speed, we still move on and things have to get done.”
Select Board Vice Chair Doug Moglin then brought up the fact that other towns have been offering low interest loans to support small business during the COVID-19 outbreak and asked if that was something they should be looking into.
Karl Stinehart then explained that he had already looked into the issue and said, “When the funds flow into the state they can be available to be administered to local smaller towns called non-entitlement communities so we have registered that as our number one priority for the use of those potential funds if we do get any.”