The Selectboard meeting of December 6 was largely focused on grants that have been granted to various organizations around town. There was also a heated discussion about the town’s proposal to annex the Brattleboro Community Justice Center and make them conditional town employees. And the town is taking out another tax anticipation loan.
During the remarks period, Greg Worden acknowledged the death of Pete Prouty, long time Reformer employee and VT State Horseshoe Champion. Pat DeAngelo recalled that he was a quiet but important part of the Clark St. community.
Spoon reported that the Store Size Cap Committee is undergoing a restructuring over in Planning, and will change its thrust from examining and limiting store size to assessing project performance according to standards tied to Act 250. Spoon said that the Selectboard has an opportunity to set the bar on this one by proposing Act 250 criteria by which to evaluate projects. On an unrelated issue, he also mentioned that the Planning Commission is going to enact a bylaws change to disallow ex officio members from making motions at meetings.
Citizen Participation is being covered elsewhere, so I’ll skip straight to the Brattleboro Community Justice Center proposal, introduced by Barb Sondag. It seems that the BCJC employees are paid out of a grant from the VT Dept. of Corrections, but the town is the grant recipient, not the BCJC. The town contracts with the BCJC for services and provides some in-kind contributions of space and utilities. Since the town has ultimate control over budgetary issues for the organization, and since (according to Barb) this is one of the IRS’s criteria for ‘what constitutes an employee’, the town has decided that it makes more sense and might be cheaper to just hire the BCJC employees as ‘limited term’ employees of the town.
Spoon asked whether or not the employees of BCJC were going to have to take a pay cut to become limited-term town employees. I was never sure what Barb was saying one this one but it went back and forth and took a long time. In the end, Steve cleared it up. He asked Barb, “Do they get benefits now?” She answered no. He then said, “Well, you can’t expect to get the same pay and benefits too.”
For her part, Pat De Angelo did not like the idea of taking on the obligation of employing the Justice Center people, and worried that the town would have to continue the program even if the funding dried up. Steve Steidle pointed out that BCJC workers’ continued employment was contingent on the continuation of grant funding. She asked that they go slow on this one and consider the ramifications. They voted 5-0 to approve the proposal.
Next was the Sarah Friedman show. Sarah is grants manager for the town of Brattleboro, and she had a number of grant-funded projects on the agenda.
The Latchis Building got $200,000 several years ago to buy the building. As a condition of the grant, they were required to ‘retain’ 40 jobs, of which 20 had to be ‘low or moderate income.’ People wondered if that meant that the Latchis was being encouraged to create low paying jobs, and they said yes and no — the idea is to hire ‘low income people’ (whatever that means) and to make sure that some of the jobs are available to ‘low income people’ and not ‘rocket scientists.’ But whatever kind of jobs they are, the Latchis has 47 of them and the grant is officially closed.
Omega Optical got $200,000 in the form of a 15-year loan to do work on the Omega and Delta Campuses. They have done the work and created 25 jobs, of which 13 are ‘low to moderate income.’ They are also planning an affordable housing development, environmentally sound and efficiently designed, including 9 affordable condo units in one area and another 40 houses in another. They promise that the houses and condos will not be reserved for Omega employees.
The Estey Organ Museum was up next, applying for a planning grant under the Preserve America grant program. Christopher Grotke talked about the group’s plans to build a museum devoted to Estey and Brattleboro, affordable housing, and creative economy business space in the old Estey Organ factory complex on Birge St. Barbara George mentioned that 11 years ago — the last time planning was done for that complex — heritage tourism hadn’t even been though up yet. The Board approved the grant application 5-0.
Finally, the town is taking out another tax anticipation loan, this time for 2,000,000 at 3.36% from TD Banknorth. There was some discussion about whether the town was over budget (they are) and by how much (about $500,000) and why (Maple St culvert, price of fuel, winter snow removal and a large, unanticipated, town-meeting-approved equipment purchase). Barb Vinci said that it was still cheaper to borrow (provided the money sat in a Sweeps account until used) than to take out a line of credit. After much discussion of miscellaneous budget items and the rate of delinquency on property taxes (under 4% at $390,000), the loan was approved by the Selectboard 5-0.
Finally, there is a vacancy on the Planning Commission. Interested persons are requested to submit their letters of interest to the town no later than 5 PM on December 29, 2005.
Disclosure: Christopher Grotke of the Estey Organ Museum is my 'partner in crime' here at iBrattleboro and in many other ventures.