Special Town Meeting

Edgecomb voters call for study

Tue, 11/19/2013 - 8:45am

    Edgecomb will get fresh answers to some of its sewer questions.

    In a 15-6, secret ballot vote on November 18, residents gave the go-ahead for a new engineering study. They barred the study from including any look at an existing pumping station a homeowners' association owns.

    Voters said they were not interested in taking over that station and did not want to pay to inspect it.

    “My taxes are high enough already. I don't want to pay any more if we don't need to,” resident Dave Boucher said.

    Monday's special town meeting vote narrowed the study's focus. The engineering firm of Woodard and Curran will figure what a pumping station would cost, and will look at how to dole out the approximately 31,000 gallons a day remaining in the town's sewer allowance to send across the Sheepscot River to Wiscasset, selectmen said.

    Voters agreed to spend up to $25,000 in tax increment financing money on the study. A similar one was done in 2008, but townspeople have said they want up-to-date information to go on, Selectman Stuart Smith said.

    At the meeting's outset, resident Jarryl Larson argued that the question seeking the study wasn't specific enough, about what the study would entail. That information should have been posted along with the meeting's warrant, she said.

    “I don't know what I'm voting on,” Larson said.

    The meeting's moderator, Boothbay Harbor attorney Chip Griffin, said he wasn't there to act as legal counsel and would not advise residents on the issue Larson had raised.

    The details of warrant items sometimes get explained at the town meeting, instead of on the warrant, town officials said.

    Following the vote, Griffin, a longtime moderator, complimented residents on their decorum. He told them he had never seen a town meeting where people focused as carefully and spoke as respectfully to one another as they had.

    In another vote Monday night, residents agreed to spend $6,856 from surplus, to cover additional interest on the town’s road reconstruction loan. The 3.2 percent interest rate was higher than the rate projected when voters agreed to the loan last May, Selectmen’s Chairman Jack Sarmanian said.