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Date: 10/28/2020
HAMPDEN – Hampden conducted its Special Town Meeting on Oct. 26 at Thornton W. Burgess Middle School. The meeting was originally scheduled for Oct. 5, but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting was set up with socially distanced seating, available hand sanitizer and a list of attendees to allow for contact tracing should the need arise.
Advisory Board Co-Chair Carol Fitgerald informed the residents who had gathered that the town’s stabilization account, which acts as a savings account for the town, contained just under $1.1 million, while the free cash account had $435,670 of funds left over from fiscal year 2019 (FY19). She cautioned voters that Hampden has many big-ticket expenses scheduled in the coming years.
There were 11 articles to consider and all were passed.
Several articles did not require borrowing or raising the money through taxes. Article 7 used $47,500 of available funds to pay for improvements to the Hampden Fire Station, in which safety concerns have recently been identified.
Article 8 will reduce the town’s short term debt by $190,000 in available funds. Town Treasurer Richard Patullo explained that there were several large projects approved last year that required the town to borrow $565,000 and this pays down about a third of that. Similarly, Article 10 repaid $175,000 of money, previously spent at town meetings, to the stabilization account to protect the town’s long-term financial solvency.
Article 11 served to reduce the tax rate with $70,670 of available funds. This reduction helped to ensure that the tax rate increase for FY21 would remain under the 2.5 percent threshold.
A couple of articles did require the town to raise and appropriate or borrow funds. With Article 1, the town approved the purchase of a new police cruiser using $25,000 from the police department’s off-duty account, which does not affect the tax rate, and another $25,000 to be raised and appropriated, which will affect taxes.
Article 9 raises $20,000 for the reserve fund.
Article 2 requires the town to raise and appropriate $100,000 to finish removal of dangerous or dead trees on town property. Tree Warden Dana Pixley had conducted an audit of trees in the summer of 2019, that found approximate 400 of them needed to be removed for safety as they would threaten property of emergency access were they to fall in a storm. This is that second of two $100,000 appropriations for the project, the first was approved at the Annual Town Meeting in June.
The rest of the articles did not require funding as they were changes to existing bylaws of policies, such as the removal from the books of the solar moratorium that expired in October 2019.
A bylaw was adopted that governs the operation of an emergency medical technician (EMT) base. This cleared up a discrepancy in the town’s laws created by the town’s contract with Action Ambulance, which began operating in town on June 1. The bylaw regulates parking, signage and vehicle maintenance.
The maintenance portion was questioned by resident Phil Dugan, who opined that the inability to add fluids to the Ambulances seemed overly restrictive. Jack Matthews of the Planning Board explained that the sort of maintenance Dugan was referring to was allowed and the details had been agreed upon by the company and the town.
Article 6 granted the Select Board the power to negotiate a pay-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) agreement with the owners of a large-scale ground-mounted solar array at the rear of Somers Road. A PILOT agreement estimates the amount of property taxes that would be paid over of a period of time, in this case 20 years, and breaks it up into even payments over that time. This allows for a steady income for the town and a known cost for the business.