Sunday, July 27, 2008

Board of Health

There was a dust-up last week when the Board of Health did a title 5 examination at the Egremont Inn. (In case you haven't heard, Steve and Karen are selling the Egremont Inn.) Things apparently were said that shouldn't have been said, and the Board of Health folks were quite upset, so much so that they formally complained to the Selectboard.

I wasn't there, so I don't know what happened or was said. But I'm a bit surprised that the Board of Health folks were shocked and dismayed - shocked and dismayed! - that anyone could blow up at them. Title 5 has cost Egremont property owners many millions of dollars, and it's the Board of Health that enforces it. Do they expect a property owner to receive the news that he or she is going to have to spend $20,000 to $80,000 (or more) with a big smile and a thank you?

Title 5 may be necessary in the eastern part of the state, but it's just a millstone out here. Apart from a drinking water problem in and around the north village, I'm not aware of any real water quality problem in town, at least not one that couldn't be solved by means a lot less expensive than a fully compliant title 5 system. But "clean water" has become a religious principle for many people - at least until they're the ones who have to spend all that dough.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Calendar Confusion

Most people know there are 52 weeks plus one day in a year (two days in leap years). But apparently not the folks at town hall in Egremont.

Each year we vote at town meeting to pay specified salaries for town positions. Say we vote to pay $52,000 for the town jester. If we pay the jester weekly, we shouldn't automatically pay $1,000 a week. Every seventh year or so (actually fewer because of leap years), there will be 53, not 52, paydays, so we'd end up paying $53,000, not $52,000.

How can you deal with this problem? The easiest way is to look at a calendar for the upcoming fiscal year, count the number of paydays, and divide the annual salary by that number. But what if you fail to do that, and find at the end of the year that there's one last payday and you've already paid out the whole annual salary? In Egremont, you just go ahead and overpay people (probably illegally) and then try to deal with the problem in the next year. Do you think our selectmen approve of doing that? You can probably guess.
Edifice Complex

I've previously posted warnings about the town's big spenders and their tactics to get expensive buildings (such as a library) built, whether townspeople want them or not. No matter how often or how strongly townspeople express their opposition, the big spenders don't give up.

Most recently, a meeting was held among the selectmen, the library committee, the finance committee and other groups to discuss a "master plan" for the town hall property. The meeting was to determine where a new police station, a new library and other structures should go. There wasn't much discussion about whether we NEED these things, but rather just where they'd go, as if it had already been decided to build them.

I'll post more info on this subject as time goes by. For now, let me just say that it seems the big spenders have put the cart before the horse: We should decide what we want to do about the police department before we build a police station, and we should decide what we want to do about the library before we build a library. That's especially true since consolidation of services among several towns is the most likely future development, including consolidation of school districts, fire protection, police coverage and libraries.

It's not hard to identify the big spenders, and I'll not name names just yet. But it's very disturbing to hear one of our selectmen say publicly - not once but twice - that both the library and the police station are "affordable" because we're about to pay off existing debt so will have money to spend on other things. Is that the kind of attitude you want on our selectboard? God forbid we should just reduce taxes!

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Prospect Lake Boat Access

Well, I was wrong. Thanks to the efforts of town officials, especially Mary Brazie and Bruce Cumsky, the state folks came back pretty promptly and fixed the new boat ramp. They put in steps down toward the "canal" and, I think, dredged out the canal enough so a canoe or flat bottomed boat can now actually be launched and get to the lake. Good job, folks!

But there's still some bad news. They installed a big ugly sign board that has 9 warning signs on it: no swimming, no littering, no unleashed pets, no jet skis and no overnight parking each get a sign; cartop boats only; and some others. The most puzzling one says that anyone in a canoe or kayak must wear a flotation device, but only between September 15 and May 15. Isn't that backwards?

So now townspeople finally have boat access to Prospect Lake, but not swimming access. For swimming, you still have to park on the road and avoid the cars whizzing by. Parking in the new boat access lot and walking down the road to where you can get into the lake, whether or not you'd want to, and whether or not that's safe, is prohibited (at least theoretically): The lot warning signs specifically say it's only for cartop boat launching, not for parking and walking down the road. And a young man with a 3 year old told me recently the Egremont police told him not to park on the road. The officer must have thought he was supposed to park in the lot, but he didn't have a boat, he just wanted to go swimming. Looks like the police and the town need to get together and decide what's what.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Wetlands Mania

I live in a development on the west side of Prospect Lake. My neighbors and I have to maintain our own private roads, Lakeside Drive and Second Street. They run perpendicular to the hill that slopes down to the lake on that side, so we have constant problems with washouts, etc., and have to engineer ways to get water down the hill through culverts and ditches so the roads don't become dangerous or impassable.

At one particularly troublesome spot, water goes under a road via a culvert, then through a ditch down to a culvert under Lakeside, through that culvert and then on to the lake. The ditch between the two roads is on the line between two lots, each privately owned by different owners.

The problem is that the culvert under Second Street can't handle all the water when it rains really hard, or when the snow melts in the spring, or in snow/ice situations. So water flows over the road, often creating dangerous conditions, especially in winter, and water backs up on the uphill side of Second Street, causing a mess and jeopardizing a nearby well. The situation could be fixed by putting in a larger culvert under Second Street. But that would necessitate enlarging the ditch that goes down to Lakeside, so the consent and participation of the two owners of the lots (between which the ditch runs) would be necessary.

At our property owners meeting this July, we were going to vote to put in the larger culvert because one of the lot owners volunteered to enlarge the ditch if we would pay to rent the equipment required to do that, which we were ready to do. Sounds like a good, fair, neighborly way to handle a real safety problem, right?

Not so fast. There are "wetlands" close by. (I put it in quotes because ordinary human beings wouldn't think they were wetlands.) Replacing the culvert and enlarging the ditch would require filing a "Notice of Intent" with the Conservation Commission and the state DEP, and, with respect to enlarging the ditch, the filings could only be done by the property owner who volunteered to do the work. And the filings and related costs would be greater than the cost of renting the equipment and would probably double or triple the cost of the whole project, and would likely result in an "Order of Conditions" that would likely involve even more costs. And one of the conditions would likely be that replacement "wetlands" would have to be created covering an area equal to the area of the "wetlands" destroyed, meaning some nearby property owner would have to volunteer to have part of his property dedicated to being a "wetland".

Not surprisingly, no one volunteered. And not surprisingly, the ditch-enlarging volunteer changed his mind about the whole thing in a New York second. So a rational solution to a serious safety problem fell apart and was abandoned in another New York second. I would describe the reaction of the people at the meeting as one of stunned silence.

I think this is insane. Water is going to go down the hill to the lake no matter what is done or is not done. And washouts and ice on a road are real problems requiring real solutions. The people who think this grandiose, self-imposed, no-exceptions scheme for "protecting our wetlands" should be rigorously enforced even if it results in injuries to automobiles and people need to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Fat chance.

Any wetlands defenders out there? Post a response.

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Prospect Lake

For a long time, many of us have been urging the town to provide public access to Prospect Lake. To use the lake, you had to park right on Prospect Lake Road, then unload your boat, children, etc., with cars whizzing by. It was an accident waiting to happen.

So we were happy when the state announced a couple of years ago that they were going to create boat access (and maybe swimming access) from a vacant lot the state had acquired years ago, a lot that's not on the lake itself but on the major stream that feeds it (known to locals as the "canal"), about 300 feet or so to the west of the old dangerous access point on Prospect Lake Road. And, lo and behold, crews showed up in early summer to do the job. They cleared the lot, put in a "driveway", created a parking area, and built a long wooden ramp down to the canal so folks could take their boats down the ramp and launch them into the canal. But, for reasons only explicable to bureaucrats, they stopped the ramp short of the canal. To launch a boat, you'd have to carry your boat through a lot of muck and then somehow get into it.

It's a joke. Go look at it if you don't believe me. Lord knows how much taxpayer money was spent on a project that is totally useless. If folks use it at all, they'll just park their cars there and then walk 300 feet to the old spot to get into the lake. That won't significantly reduce the danger to pedestrians, so even that objective hasn't been achieved (and maybe even made worse).

What to do? Complaining to the state isn't going to accomplish anything. I think the town should just take the bull by the horns and finish the job by actually building a ramp into the canal. That probably violates all kinds of laws, so town hall probably won't do it. Who'd like to volunteer to help me do it at night on the sly?

Another lake subject: Friends of Prospect Lake arranged for another treatment of the weeds a few weeks ago, and it was very successful. I know there are people in town who don't like treating the lake with chemicals, but the ones used don't hurt anything except weeds, and providing public recreation is more important than appeasing what seems to be some people's unwarranted paranoia.