[00:00:00] Hi all, this is your town manager Alex Torpy here with your post town meeting and June update. I hope you're staying cool this week, at least the week that I'm recording this, and that everybody is enjoying the spring and early summer. So we've got a lot to cover in this month's update. And that includes updates from the May and June select board meetings, which will include some quick updates on several public hearings to accept some unanticipated grant funds, the select board organizational meeting and planning the fiscal year 25 rates and fees Allen street placemaking pilot, several ordinance updates related to traffic, parking and more several board and committee appointments accepting a number of donations and various business including approving minutes, banner requests and things such as that.
[00:00:51] And just a reminder that you can find the videos and the minutes for all the select board meetings and the Friday mailings, which is the packet that contains all of the information that goes out to the board
[email protected]. dot this episode will also include an update from my June Monthly report, all of those I've made a little bit easier to find if you go to the town manager page on our website.
[00:01:16] And that monthly report included some updates on upcoming events on Allen street and the Allen street placemaking pilot, some human resources updates, current entering and exiting employees vacancies, new fire chief, some trainings and more budget and finance updates, including an update, an audit update, housing, redevelopment and planning, including updates on some proposed rfeis for housing and parking, which is an exciting kind of medium term initiative transportation and mobility, including some summer construction projects downtown Hanover, some college and town updates, and a few other kind of miscellaneous updates from Junction Arts media about waste, stream trash and recycling, and recently attending the Municipal Management association annual conference. So let's jump into the May and June select board meeting updates. So we accepted a few different unanticipated grant funds, which includes $90,000 for the Visions housing project. Half of that money we've proposed to reinvest back into visions for rooftop solar, and the other half to put towards workforce housing at Minkbrook and Greensboro Road.
[00:02:30] We also accepted $100,000 from InvestNh and that will be used towards doing a complete and much needed rewrite of our entire zoning code. Between that $100,000 grant and the $50,000 that we put in the budget for FY 25, we feel pretty good about being able to actually complete the entire update to our zoning code, which is decades out of date with an entirely new and easier to read and kind of more modernized, clearer, better organized zoning code, so it's a lot of work from the planning side of things. We also received $9,700 for training for firefighters at our fire department.
[00:03:10] The select board also reorganized over the two meetings in Mayenne, and the reorganization, of course, is the annual meeting where new officers are chosen and committee assignments are made. There is also some discussion of more to come about, some sort of roles and responsibilities of select board members, and formalizing some of the processes with more clear reporting out from committees and things like that. So I'm sure there'll be more discussion about that at future meetings. I'm not going to read through all the committee assignments so you can find those online, but we do have new officers on the board, and so that's Carrie Callahan as chair, Joanna Whitcomb as vice chair, and Jarrett Burke as secretary.
[00:03:49] The board will be discussing more about the board itself and kind of processes. Like I just mentioned in the workshop and retreat, that staff are recommending that we put in place for all boards and committees on an annual basis, and we're gonna be bringing those recommendations to the select board on the July 14 meeting next. We discussed a little bit about the fiscal year 25 rates and fees. So every year we have to set our rates and fees. That's the portion of our revenue that we raise that does not come from taxes and is tied to the cost providing the services. So those are building permits, parking costs, things of that nature. You can find a memo from Ellen Bullion, our finance director, in the links below, and that describes some of the changes this year, which are mostly small and mostly keeping things more up to date. Some of those rates had not been updated in many, many years, which shifts some of those costs unintentionally onto the taxpayers at large.
[00:04:46] We also did update this year that the parklet fees that were adopted in 2021 were never put into the rate and fee schedule properly, so those have been added, with some of those the application fee going to the planning department and the parking revenue going to the parking division.
[00:05:05] Though we went through all the select board questions in the last meeting, the rates and fees and a number of other ordinances will have their official public hearings and vote on the July 1 meeting. We had a handful of appointments, including appointing our public works director and our sustainable Hanover co chair as members and alternates to the Community Power Coalition on behalf of Hanover.
[00:05:28] Also, we appointed Ben Steele to sustainable Hanover, Matt Stover to the planning board, Nancy Carter to the planning board, and Beth Eisenhart to the planning board. So thank you all of those folks for all of your time volunteering.
[00:05:42] Each month we usually receive a number of donations and so I would like to thank a handful of folks for making donations in this past month.
[00:05:53] So one was from the Hanover Garden Club and Kay, Sandra Anderson and Reeve C. Williams to the Aetna Library in memory of PD Bernie. So we thank you, thank you, thanks everybody for that.
[00:06:09] Parks and rec receive donations from a number of different individuals for a memorial bench at Pine Nose Cemetery in memory of the longtime volunteer and sustainable Hanover champion, Marjorie Rogowski. Aetna Library received a couple of donations from AK and BB Bernie in memory of PD Bernie, and a donation from Jerry and Pat Balcom.
[00:06:40] The Aetna library also received a donation from the New Hampshire Humanities Council, and the Hanover Parks and Rec Department received donations from the Berne foundation to support the 4 July so again, thank you to everybody.
[00:06:55] So we did various other business which I don't tend to summarize here in the podcast updates, but you can find all of everything, agendas, minutes and videos and supporting documentation in the links in this show notes and on our
[email protected] dot.
[00:07:12] We also discussed the Allen street placemaking pilot and a bunch of ordinances, and I'm going to attempt to summarize that here in just a moment when I get into my monthly report.
[00:07:24] So let's switch over to my monthly town manager report. And just again, I did start organizing those so a little easier to find online and you can find all of them on the town manager page on the website.
[00:07:42] So first, what I'm going to do before I kind of go into the full report is I'm going to give a little bit of a rundown of a number of different updates related to Allen street parking and traffic. I did write a four page memo that details all this out. I'm going to try and run through it quickly. So if you do have more questions, again, there's links in the show notes to all the supporting documentation. So in this memo were just some updates about rates and fees, which I've already covered here a little bit.
[00:08:11] And next is the Allen street ordinance. So we've talked about this in a number of select board meetings, and this is what will enable us to do the two month Allen street placemaking pilot this summer, where Allen street would be closed to vehicles and open to people between Main street and the entrance to the parking lot behind Town hall.
[00:08:32] So the general highlights of the ordinance are as follows. So it codifies the two month pilot and establishes Hanover Parks and Rec as overseeing various regulations and enforcement for a bunch of different elements of how we're going to run the placemaking pilot this summer.
[00:08:52] It also provides outdoor dining options for three establishments on Allen street and some regulations and costs to set that up. It provides vendor spots that are rentable by any downtown business. It allows nonprofit and community groups to use Allen street for public events such as the Prouty that's going to be doing some really cool stuff and a couple other organizations. It provides public spaces for outdoor seating, outdoor activities, outdoor games and a bunch of other stuff. It also provides for the block party event at the end of July. It allows non amplified busking as long as it's not a disruption or blocking any access to streets or stores, and just kind of puts in place various administrative and kind of regulatory insurance requirements, things like that. And it also commits the town to communication and data collection on the various impacts to traffic and parking, and kind of feedback from stakeholders on Allen street and the public at large. So that's all in one new ordinance that will be a temporary ordinance that allows the two month pilot to take place. There are three other ordinances that are sort of related to all of these that are also being updated and for a vote on July 1. And so that's ordinance number six about parking, ordinance number 33, the nose ordinance, and ordinance number 41, the parklet ordinance. So there's a couple things that I'll highlight that are part of the changes from all of those ordinances. So one is a bunch of new free 15 minutes short term parking spaces. So many years ago, the town hired consultants that looked at parking utilization around the downtown. One of the suggestions that was made, but not really put in place was making more higher turnover, shorter term parking spaces closest to businesses. So for example, on Allen street, all those parking spaces have been 2 hours, which means that people often are sort of parked there for a longer period of time, which doesn't allow people to do the quick drop off pickup that a lot of businesses on Allen street and elsewhere in the downtown need. So in meeting with our parking division, we looked at a couple different options and we all agreed that the best thing to do would be to convert back some of these spaces to short term spaces. However, enforcing payments for 15 minutes can be a little challenging. Depending on if you have cell phone service or not in the downtown, or if you have change or what you're going to pick up from a business or drop into town hall. It can be a little difficult to spend five minutes paying for parking if you're only parking for five minutes. So the recommendation from all the staff was to make these free spaces. There's a small couple thousand dollar revenue loss throughout the year, but it's not something that any of us are worried about from a budget perspective. So that total revenue loss is probably around five to seven, $8,000 in the year.
[00:11:30] And so this will convert all the parking spaces on Allen street back to, they were, short term spaces at one point in time, back to short term 15 minutes spaces. It also creates two meter spaces on Main street, sort of near the parklet in front of belocos that will be free 15 minutes short term parking, and one right on the other side of the street with the parklet next to Luz. So we'll have three free 15 minutes parking spaces on Main street as well to allow that quicker pickup and drop off. Because those things outlive the two month Allen street pilot. That's why they're being done in the separate ordinance. Another parking related update is doing a refresh in the names of a lot of the parking lots. So some of the parking lots have been playing a little bit of a game about who can figure out why certain parking lots are named certain things.
[00:12:16] No one that I've asked on staff or select board or any officials are totally sure why the lot off of Maplestreet is called the Marshall lot, though, if you do know, we'd love to hear from you. And so we are changing. And in this memo, I do have a list of all of the lot name changes. Basically, it's just to make them consistent so that each lot name contains the following three elements. One is a landmark that they're close to either a street name or an easily recognizable building. The second is whether it's a permitted lot or a public lot. And the other is whether it is a lot or a deck. So between those three things, for example, the martial lot would become the Maple street public lot. Make it a little bit clearer when people are looking for parking, where the lot is, and whether that is a lot that they can go park in, whether it's available or whether it's permitted.
[00:13:09] We're also adding a whole bunch of new delivery zones and regulations.
[00:13:14] Large truck deliveries have become increasingly challenging in a lot of areas, you know, over the last decade, but it's a real challenge in downtown Hanover. And if you've been around town around ten or 11:00 as you get into that lunchtime, late morning and early lunch where there's a lot of delivery trucks and the kind of lunch traffic, it can be really a mess back there. And so there's a couple different changes that we've proposed and look like we'll be moving forward. One is adding a new truck delivery zone behind the bank of America right off of Maple street. There is plenty of length and width there to accommodate a full tractor trailer delivery zone. So that will be appropriately signed and painted. The other is to paint the existing delivery zone that's behind town hall in that parking lot. The problem is that if one car parks in that spot, even for a few minutes, and that's the few minutes that a truck is coming by, they then can't park in that spot. And they kind of park on a sidewalk or somewhere else in the way. So we do want to keep cars out of those areas and make it clearer that these are just for delivery vehicles. We're also going to be painting and resigning the existing loading delivery zone on Allen street. And we're going to be adding a temporary delivery zone in front of samosa man.
[00:14:26] Right in that entrance to the parking lot off of Allen street. Because the parking will be only one way out of the parking lot through the two month pilot. So we do hope that those are going to make things a little bit better back there. Like a lot of these different ideas, it's important to sort of recognize that, especially with parking, especially in a town like Hanover, the job is never done right. You don't just make a decision and then you never have to think about it again. We're constantly, and we should be constantly getting feedback, editing and changing what we're doing based on what's actually happening kind of in the real world around us. So that's certainly my expectation and the staff's expectation is that we should be doing more review of these things on a regular basis and just keep making tweaks that keep improving things in the long term. And I'll get a little bit more back to that when we talk about the medium and long term plans, where there are some committees and boards that staff are recommending to the select board that we create so that we can have better, more inclusive, more public and transparent spaces to discuss three different things, one of which is parking, the other of which is housing and redevelopment, and the other is recreation. So we'd like to create committees for each of those three areas in addition to the advisory committee for the downtown. These are all really important kind of policy and program areas in town. And there's actually nowhere for people to go to really have good conversations about those topics where staff and officials and residents and business owners and other stakeholders can get together, talk about things, start to figure ideas out and then make proposals back to the select board to change policy, which is really how most communities sort of do that. And of course we have that in other areas such as sustainability.
[00:16:08] Okay, so we are going to defer a few things that I mentioned this memo, which is more business wayfinding and parking gateway signage. We've gotten a lot of feedback from business owners that it's really hard to find what businesses where. If you look really closely, there are a couple signs around the downtown, but they were not made to be updated, as in they are one solid piece of material. So when a business leaves or when a new business comes on, it's actually pretty difficult. You have to order an entire new sign face.
[00:16:36] They're really small text, they're not really in people's eye line, but we wanted to wait on replacing those. Even. Do we do have some ARPA money set aside for it to see what kind of feedback we get from some of the signage that we're creating for the Allen street placemaking pilot. So again, just another opportunity to experiment a little bit, collect some feedback and then make some longer term decisions. So we think we can do some much better looking and welcoming signs around Hanover and around downtown Hanover that welcome people to the downtown. And that point using more consistent and standardized colors and illustrations, which resources are in what direction and really help people find some of that stuff.
[00:17:17] The other thing that we are doing is adding a lot of new parking signs to the downtown. So one of the pieces of feedback that we got is that people can't really find where parking lots are and that most people don't, that may visit Hanover, don't actually know we have a parking garage. So we agree with that. And when Staffrock walked around and looked at all the different intersections, there really was a lack of parking signs and a couple of them were so faded you actually couldn't see them anymore. So we have a whole bunch of new parking signs that are, you'll recognize them as the sort of green pea with an arrow. And that's just going to help people that are visiting town get to a parking lot quicker, which is going to be especially helpful. While Allen street is closed, make sure people that are looking for businesses on Allen street know exactly where to go to find parking.
[00:18:03] Next is we talked about what were the former fleet deck lot, which is also called the SM 63 lot, which is the parking deck, that upper level of the parking deck behind town hall, and that we tried on a trial basis to change towards 10 hours. Our parking division feels relatively confident that that ten hour change did help improve the parking in the other spaces by moving a number of, especially employees who work for downtown businesses, out of the two three hour spots that they were feeding all day into a ten hour spot, they have noticed a decline in tickets and booting. And of course, most of the people who work in parking, they basically know everybody's car by sight and by license plate at this point, because they're out there all day, every day. So they do think about eight to ten cars are now in that ten hour deck, which opens up a little bit of space for people that are doing the two or three hour parking. So I'm not sure if that's 100% success or that we have enough data to say that at this point, but I certainly trust their expertise because they're out there every day talking to people and looking at what's actually happening. Next is some changes about the parking lot behind Umplebee's. And what the parking division has proposed is basically moving a whole bunch of business employee permit spots down to that side of town on South street, possibly in the garage, but more likely in that parking lot, moving a bunch of permit spaces there, which might open up a bunch more visitor spaces right behind town hall. The next is an ordinance about sidewalk vending, which is the parklet ordinance. So that ordinance was put in place in, I believe, 2021. It does need to be updated. It had a sort of anticipated three year life, and so we do need to sort of collect some feedback about how that went. And there's probably a few process changes that myself and Rob Houseman and our public works and a couple others might suggest. But basically what we wanted to do in the short term and really in the medium term is open up sidewalk vending for all businesses. Now, a bunch of businesses already sort of do this, but it's actually not technically allowed. It's not something we really strongly enforce unless it is blocking things. However, we really should be treating these things kind of more properly by putting the right policy in place. And so we do have a sidewalk vending ordinance or an update to that that Rob Houseman, our planning director, has prepared. And what that basically does is create an application and regulatory process, similar to the parklets for any business that fronts on any street and has enough space to put anything outside without blocking AdA access on the sidewalk. So it's a really nice benefit for all businesses, and it kind of starts to push us more in the direction of wider sidewalks in the long term and more outdoor vending. So that's a lot of different updates. Those things all relate to parking, to Allen street, to the pilot, and to a couple things about trying to reorganize and improve how parking and traffic works around the downtown. So moving on to my monthly report. So of course, the big event coming up is the Allen street placemaking pilot. This is between June 26 and August 26. Allen street between Main street and the parking lot entrance will be closed to vehicles and open to people. If you want to learn a little bit more about what's happening on Allen street, you can head to hanovernh.org allenstreet. But this project really ties into two different chapters in the master plan, one about creating more pedestrian and bike friendly access, and the other about creating more public gathering spaces. And it also meets a similar goal the select board set last year. This is also feedback that came from business owners and stakeholders in our downtown meetings that I started two years ago to get feedback from businesses about what the town could do better to help support the downtown. And one of them was more public community spaces. So throughout the two months, there's going to be a whole bunch of stuff happening on Allen street, concerts, live music, nonprofits having events, games, activities, outdoor dining, all sorts of stuff. There's a calendar of existing events that is on that website I just mentioned. And if you'd like to join us for the kickoff, there is an ice cream social on Wednesday the 26th at 430 from 430 to 06:00 p.m. so head down to Allen street. There's gonna be a bunch of new signage and information about what is happening on Allen street. And we do have some QR codes for surveys.
[00:22:34] We'd really like people's feedback about how things are going, what you'd like to see less of, what you'd like to see more of. So that's really exciting. And a huge shout out to our parks and rec department for taking on the really big task, even with some ongoing staffing shortages to really make this happen. So they've done a really fantastic job with this and we're really excited about all the support from business owners. There are some concerns that folks have expressed about impact to parking. Will people be able to find businesses and things like that? And we are measuring as much as we can, collecting data on traffic patterns. We have surveys that have gone out to all the businesses, the owners and the renters on Allen street starting about a month ago, and we are communicating with all of those stakeholders on every two week schedule, making sure that we are totally open with lines of communication, answering people's questions and sort of walking people through this pilot. And again, the idea of any pilot is to try something, see what happens, take some insight from that and use that to make decisions in the future. So next, moving on to some HR updates. Since our last report, we have had two new employees leave employment and three start. So I'd like to welcome Nina as our community nurse Jordan to dispatching at Hanover police and married to human resources. We do have 13 open listings, I believe for twelve positions right now. And that's just a reminder to the select board that I put in my report and to the public. And that's almost a 10% vacancy rate of our benefits eligible positions that are vacant. Some of these have been vacant for the entire time that I've been here. We have a number of new openings at our police department and public works and we are still facing some significant staffing challenges that if you've listened to the podcast you've heard me talk about before, but it is contributing to increased overtime, increased burnout. And now that we have our second HR position, we're going to be doing a little bit more work to understand and support the wellness of our employees. Next is after a very rigorous application process that involved a comprehensive MRI assessment center and that saw more than two dozen applications with highly competitive candidates from a number of different states. We've appointed our acting chief and deputy chief, Mike Gilbert as our Hanover fire department's fire chief. So congratulations to Mike. We had multiple rounds of interviews in this assessment center which resulted in two finalists who scored. Both scored exceptionally well in the assessment. So we congratulate Mike for the well earned leadership role. And we're going to be announcing a deputy chief appointment in the coming month. And the posting of that just closed yesterday. So we look forward to a new chapter of senior leadership at Hanover Fire that is going to help continue the department's really high level of service to the community.
[00:25:17] Next is an update on some trainings though some departments have done a really good job doing some specialized trainings in certain areas. You know, hand over fire is a good example that does a lot of very specific trainings. There's a lot of town wide trainings that have fallen really far behind. And so there's some trainings that we should be doing that we should be doing on an annual basis and that we haven't done in four or five years or more. So we work with Primex, which is our risk insurance pool that most towns in New Hampshire use. There's going to be some times when we're doing a training that is going to result in some town buildings being closed for two to 4 hours to allow our staff to do these trainings that again will be happening on or should be happening on an annual basis. Going forward, we'll do our best to notify post well ahead of time any of those closings that might happen, so people can plan around that. But it's really important to make sure that we have our staff go through some of these trainings and wanted to give a hat tip to Norm Bernaysh, our assessing director. Norm recently spoke at the Northeast association of Assessing Officials conference where he represented Hanover and the state of New Hampshire in a session about similarities and differences in assessing through different states in the northeast.
[00:26:30] Next is, and I'll just say I love when staff are out and representing the town in these sorts of fashions. A lot of us go to conferences and workshops as time allows to learn from others and to share what we're working on. It's nice, we have a lot of experts with a lot of experience working for the town and it's really nice to see them going out to other communities, sharing that with them. Okay, next is budget and finance update. So for rates and fees, you can just see the memo in the prior discussion about it. Then I'll also read out an update, an audit update from Ellen that she provided for this June report. And so if you want to read this, you can of course, head online. So the FY 23 audit update, there's still two questionnaires that need to be completed and the date that she has for that is June 28.
[00:27:22] All the other information requests are completed and she is beginning to get the legal confirmations from the auditors out, which takes a little bit of time for them to get back to us.
[00:27:38] And so there's a couple more steps there and some updates from her on the FY 23 audit. As you know, if you've been listening to this, we are trying to catch up. We only recently completed the FY 22 audit, which raised some very significant concerns about the town's past accounting practices. FY 24 audit and this is the one where Ellen and I are hoping that we're going to kind of be more up to date in the audit itself as far as changes to policies and programs.
[00:28:11] That will be the first audit that we were both here full time for.
[00:28:16] So we did receive initial documentation requests. There's some audit work that will be beginning in July, and then the on site audit work is scheduled right now for the week of September 9. So hopefully we can keep up on that. And then she also gave a couple quick updates on our fixed asset reconciliation project. We do have a new FTE that is starting in the finance office that was born of some of these areas where the town really fell behind over the years. And when asked by the finance committee on select board on what we needed to get out ahead of this and to keep things more up to date in the future, it was an easy answer, which is that like many departments in town, for the amount of work they do, the finance office is hugely understaffed, especially considering how many paper processes we still enter all of our timesheets into our finance system by hand from paper, for example, even if departments keep track, even if several departments do keep track of them electronically. But everything on the backend gets entered in manually. And so that new FTE that we're just finishing interviews on is going to be a huge help. That is an accounting analyst position.
[00:29:26] Okay. Moving right along to housing, redevelopment and planning.
[00:29:30] The only major update here that I had was, well, actually, sorry, I had a couple updates here. So one is about rfeis and that is a request for expressions of interest.
[00:29:41] So like an RFP request for proposals, an RFEI is sort of an earlier stage process which is less formal, less detailed, basically saying to any potential respondents, we have some ideas about things. We'd like to see what you all think. So the town has a new master plan. We've updated our zoning over two different years, including this past town meeting, for example, raising the height requirements in the downtown to fit a 55ft. We would like to put out a request out to the world, to anybody, developers, any groups out there that are interested in proposing something that meets the community's goals. And so this might include increasing access to parking. It might include creating residential units, some of which are more affordable, that allow people to be in the downtown and walk to a bus stop without having to drive.
[00:30:33] There's a whole bunch of things that could, that could be part of that. And it's a common tool, basically. We don't really have the staff capacity to sort of brainstorm to that degree. And it signals to potential developers that Hanover is interested, that the community has updated the zoning to help some of these projects pencil out a little bit better. It's tough because the cost of construction right now, as we all know, is so expensive. But the RFeis is a really easy process. Minimal staff time, no financial commitment other than the sort of small amount of time and, you know, printing and filing things.
[00:31:08] But there's no commitment at all. And the two locations that we had discussed so far putting out there, one was the formerly called Marshall street lot, and the other is the parking garage that we own and that those two are potentially interesting spots to see what people would like to propose redevelopment related the next is the master plan, which, as you all hopefully know, has been adopted by the planning board.
[00:31:36] And the implementation chapter, chapter eleven is being finalized. And then I'm going to do an interview here on the podcast with our planning staff and officials to talk a little bit about what implementation of the master plan means. So basically, we've set all these really great high level goals. What do we do next?
[00:31:53] All right, next, moving on to transportation. Just an update that by July 1, I'm going to provide a list of construction projects that our public works is working on, and that in an update that Dartmouth will be providing a website with detailed information about the decarbonization, construction work, timelines, maps, detours and things. That's going to be a pretty major disruption for a very good cause. And we did ask, and we will link to that on our website so that people know how to get around town. Moving on a bit, downtown Hanover, we have discussed, and this will probably be proposed at the July 14 meeting that per RSA three 2120 and the vote taken at town meeting in 2004, that the select board needs to appoint an advisory committee to sort of take these conversations to the next step that's required by statute. Next is the college and town update, which is really exciting, which is that we have been working, our it department and Dartmouth's it department department have been working together on planning out the beginning of a high speed, free public Wi Fi network in the downtown that would cover areas in stores, on sidewalks, in the road, etcetera. We all know that cell phone service can be a little challenging. That is not something we have a lot of control over on the town side, though we certainly have tried with only really minimal luck. However, providing Wi Fi is something we can do, and Dartmouth has been a truly excellent partner in those discussions because we are going to be building a lot off of their existing fiber backbone in the downtown. So that is a major, major, major cost savings for Hanover taxpayers. In the next couple of months, we'll have a little bit more about that, and I am hoping that we will get the first few nodes of this so it's not going to cover the whole downtown, but just the first phase of this rolled out this summer so people can start using it. Next is a couple other kind of miscellaneous updates, although regrettably I've had to decline to continue many of the board memberships my predecessor was on, just for time constraint reasons. I have tried to stay as involved, though not as active as I'd like with a couple of them. One of them is Junction Arts media, formerly CaTV. So I'm on the programming committee and working on finding ways to sort of represent the civic and governing side of what programming a jam could do to help bolster transparency and civic engagement in the upper valley. If you've ever had any thoughts about that, I mentioned this to the select board last week. If anybody has any ideas, things that jam could do to help make government more accessible, getting involved more accessible to people, anything like that, please feel free to reach out and I will throw some of those ideas out on that committee. Next is we have a facility analysis RFP that is currently posted on the town website with a due date of June 26. That is the project that we've talked about in the budget process this year that is really important to do as the town has not done any sort of comprehensive facility evaluation, which means we do not know what costs we are already committed to by being in the buildings that we are in. We have a bunch of old buildings, some of which have some significant deferred maintenance problems, and we saw kind of an issue rise this year between Howe and the town where there was an important upgrade or piece of maintenance kind of needed, depending on how you look at it, and that that had never really made it into the capital plan in past year. So we really want to clean up how that process works and understand what the cost of maintaining or upgrading our existing buildings already is. Next is trash, waste and recycling. So we mentioned this during the budget process that Hanover spends $300,000 a year on doing free curbside single stream recycling for some number of residents. Not everybody, more than a small number, but not everyone in town uses that. That's $300,000. It means that we spend more than $600 per ton on zero sort single stream recycling. And of course, the sad thing is that most of us, I think know in 2024 is that most zero sort single stream recycling is actually not recycled. It is put into a landfill or incinerated, the vast majority of it largely due to contamination. That is largely due to plastics being in there, that it sounds like many industries new actually could never be recycled. So there's a lot of problems with how we think about waste and recycling in the US. And with our new sustainability coordinator coming on, I've started to work with vital communities and a couple other towns such as Lebanon and Hartford, Vermont, on doing a more regional approach.
[00:36:18] In our conversations with casella, or with other waste haulers, or in just thinking about how we handle trash recycling and especially food waste, which I think is one of the biggest opportunities.
[00:36:29] Next is unfortunate news, which is the Gordon DeWitt tree removal. This is just an FYI because of how public this tree is, but this is the tree on the corner, right on the green on wheelock. We did have a tree analysis done.
[00:36:44] There's been a lot of work done on that tree over the years to try and keep it from being a safety risk. And from Brian Beatty's risk assessment, here's what they said. The overall risk rating for the subject tree is high. The likelihood of failure of large limbs in this tree contacting human targets under normally expected conditions is high, and the consequences of such impacts would be severe. So obviously this is a super sensitive issue because it is such a busy spot. So that tree has to come down and will be coming down as soon as it can be scheduled, as a large branch did break off recently and fortunately nobody was hurt, but that easily could have not been the case. So we're going to look at replanting, we're going to look at maybe even looking into relocating some trees and putting that in a location that will ensure that trees long term survival. Last update is that last week I attended the annual Municipal Management association of New Hampshire annual conference. That was in Hampton, New Hampshire. So that was my first time down the Seacoast in New Hampshire. Brought back some memories of the Jersey Shore and there was a couple really great sessions. Just in addition to seeing people and talking about things that we're all working on and providing emotional support for some of the challenges in these jobs. There was a couple really cool sessions, such as collective bargaining with an eye towards employee retention, employment contracts with town employees, busting burnout, mis mitigation, and bouncing back. That was done by a licensed psychologist and that was super interesting and just part of kind of some of the deepening challenge with mental health and wellness of a lot of people who work in the public sector. And then also an interesting session called we've always done it that way is over. What is next? So that is my update for the months of May and June. Of course, like always, if you have any questions about it, you can please feel free to reach out to me. If you like this episode, please feel free to share it with a friend in the community so that everybody can stay up to date on what is happening in town. So appreciate you staying informed and engaged, and I will talk to you all soon. Hope to see you on Allen street this summer.
