Prudential Committee – Sept 22 2014 – Meeting transcripts

Present: Marge Wallace, Lauire Hadley, Fran Parks

Clerk Charlie Eager

 

Fran Parks:                  So, I’m going to call the September 22nd meeting of the Cotuit Fire District Prevention Committee to order at 5:01 PM. Will the members please state their names. You need to turn it on.

Laurie Hadley:             Laurie Hadley.

Marge Wallace:          Marge Wallace.

Fran Parks:                  Fran Parks, also treasurer Daily’s present and our clerk, Mr. Eager. I’d asked Tony to send us the treasurer’s reports via email, the monthly reports. Did anybody get one?

Mr. Daily:                    When you talk about monthly reports, are you talking about the budget?

Fran Parks:                  Yeah.

Mr. Daily:                    You didn’t get one this week?

Fran Parks:                  No.

Mr. Daily:                    Well, I look into it.

Fran Parks:                  Oh OK. Thanks.

Mr. Daily:                    Did you get one the week before?

Fran Parks:                  No.

Mr. Daily:                    He’s mailing them weekly, so the machine she got I think is set up to send as she scans, it sends, so …

Laurie Hadley:             Fax.

Mr. Daily:                    Not fax, no.

Fran Parks:                  Email?

Mr. Daily:                    The PDF’s get emailed out of the copy machine somehow. All right. I’ll be there tomorrow and I will make sure that you get one tomorrow.

Fran Parks:                  Great. Thank you.

Marge Wallace:          Excuse me, is anyone recording?

Fran Parks:                  Oh sorry. Is anybody recording?

Amy Cates:                  Amy Cates. I’m recording.

Fran Parks:                  Thank you. We have some minutes that we need to approve. They are the …

Marge Wallace:          All of the open sessions need to be approved.

Fran Parks:                  OK.

Marge Wallace:          [inaudible 03:13].

Fran Parks:                  So it’s the minutes from the 24th of August meeting, 2014 and the minutes from the September 4th meeting of 2014.

If everyone’s satisfied with the minutes, could I have a motion to accept those minutes.

Marge Wallace:          I move that we adopt the minutes as written.

Laurie Hadley:             Second.

Fran Parks:                  All those in favor. Aye.

Laurie Hadley:             Aye.

Marge Wallace:          Aye.

Fran Parks:                  I spoke with Mr. Beadreau about the contract that we have with people that use the building and not leaving it the way they found it. He said probably the best thing for us to do would be to send a letter and also keeping them on a yearly basis in terms of the contract. Sign a new contract.

Marge Wallace:          OK.

Fran Parks:                  Reinforce that they’re to leave the building the way they find it and lights off and windows closed, et cetera, et cetera.

Then if they don’t comply with that …

Marge Wallace:          I’ll draft a letter and send it to them.

Fran Parks:                  Great. Thank you. I’m meeting tomorrow meeting with a contractor for the HVAC to look over the building with him. The notifications to N Star and the gas company have been done. The exterior painting  bid have gone out to bid and we’re going to have a site visit October 2nd.

The Open Door Company , the door company has been down and he measured the front doors to put in the new hardware for the front doors. That’s hopefully going to work.

I had a quote for replacing the basement doors, putting panic bars on them and also fixing the, at the top of those exterior basement stairs are gates to prevent anybody from falling in and one of them is broken. I forgot the bid. It also included putting panic bars on these two side doors here also which are frequently left open.

Since I forgot the bid I’ll do it next time, but I think we’re looking at around, the doors is just to replace the doors themselves, which Mr. Carr felt could be done without having to replace the frame. If the frames have to be removed and re-installed, they’re in the concrete foundation, so that would be much more expensive to do that.

Landscaping, I think prior to the painting, we probably should have the shrubs around the buildings trimmed because some of them are just actually growing up the building or leaning on the building. It’s going to make it hard. Does anybody have any suggestions as to who to get a bid from? .

Marge Wallace:          I would not recommend the company of people that I use.

Fran Parks:                  OK.

Laurie Hadley:             Who does the Library  landscaping?

Fran Parks:                  No, Paul Boynton does it. I think Roger just does the snow removal.

Laurie Hadley:             OK.

Fran Parks:                  I can try Cotuit Landscaping. They did it last time when we had the basement work done.

Laurie Hadley:             OK.

Fran Parks:                  Shouldn’t be too expensive. Mr. Daily, myself, Mr. Mycock and Mr. Boudreu met last week and discussed how we were going to handle High Street, putting it on the central register and the consensus was to go with a unique designation.

They’re still working on  the wording… So that needs to be in for 30 days before we can come up with a date for, or once that’s done we can come up with a date with the land trust needs to get 50 signatures to put a warrant on that meeting.

I’m still not clear if Mr. Bodreau and the town attorney have come up with a solution for the problem for the district to hold the land, the conservation land. There seems to be some question that we may be able to do it with our enabling legislation.

Marge Wallace:          You know there’s always at least, when we get lawyers involved, there’s always at least three sides to the story.

Fran Parks:                  Absolutely. Absolutely. They’re still working on that. I hadn’t heard anything from him today. Any other questions about High Street? OK. Marge, you were going to get some information about signs for us?

Marge Wallace:          Yup. I had some time [inaudible 09:19] Raquel out, a company called Sign Post out of Marston’s Mills and he wanted as much, he did the signage for the Civic Association, so he knows exactly what we’re looking for in terms of a sign and the inserts.

He did both pieces of that. He needed some estimate for the wording because I guess you pay by the letters an all. Until this morning I had not heard from him. He said he would try to get back to me this morning, which he did by email, which you have in front of you.

The Civic signs, he said, are 36 inches he said, left to right and the height’s around 24 inches. For the signage I kind of guessed at what we might want and just said Cotuit Fire District and then I don’t know whether you want to use the word special …

Laurie Hadley:             It would have to be either regular or special.

Marge Wallace:          OK. The word meeting would be firm and special or regular would be an insert. Then the day and the date because technically it doesn’t have to be on a Wednesday. It could be any night we chose. Correct? For the meeting.

Fran Parks:                  Oh, the special meeting can be anytime.

Marge Wallace:          Right, right. So we need signs …

Fran Parks:                  But the regular meetings are definitely Wednesday at 7:30. It doesn’t have to say Wednesday. You need a date. That’s what you’ve got there, day and date.

Marge Wallace:          Right. Do we not want a day for the special? If he’s making a sign that’s an insert for the regular meeting you say it can just say the day.

Fran Parks:                  Right, because all the bylaws say Wednesday.

Marge Wallace:          I mean the date. Just the date. Right, right, but for a special we would need to say whether it’s Monday, Tuesday, whatever it is and the time might, is it always 7:30?

Fran Parks:                  Yes, it’s in the bylaws.

Marge Wallace:          For a special as well?

Fran Parks:                  For a special you can do I think anytime.

Marge Wallace:          OK, so we need an insert for the time as well. Is that right, Charlie?

Fran Parks:                  I think it’s better if we stay consistent, if we do 7:30 …

Marge Wallace:          OK, fine. We would have to remember to always do that.

Fran Parks:                  Just because people are used to it.

Marge Wallace:          Right. The next thing is to decide how many signs we want around town, I think. I would think no fewer than four. I would think. If the post office let’s us do it now, they’re letting the Civic Association back in, so I would think that they would let the Prudential Committee [inaudible 12:09] back in.

Fran Parks:                  Actually that’s church property where they’re putting it, so post office has nothing to say about it.

Marge Wallace:          Isn’t it going at the post office?

Fran Parks:                  It is, but it’s out by the, they had it out by the street.

Marge Wallace:          Oh OK.

Fran Parks:                  So that’s church property.

Marge Wallace:          I was thinking that I saw them, that’s the church. OK. I think we need them out a little ways either at the end of Main Street or the end of Putnam Avenue where CVS is so that people see it. People say they don’t all come into the village, so it’s not enough, I don’t think to come just downtown.

Laurie Hadley:             You know Marge, we could put one on every corner …

Marge Wallace:          I know.

Laurie Hadley:             … and it wouldn’t be enough.

Marge Wallace:          What I was trying to think of is where the Friends do it for the Plant, Bake and Treasure Sale. They do a dozen signs, so I know we don’t want to do that, but it depends if we order four or more it’s $200 a sign. They’re fairly substantial and I think we wouldn’t be replacing them.

Fran Parks:                  Even those metal ones that we used lasted a good long time.

Marge Wallace:          Right.

Fran Parks:                  And had they been taken care of properly, we’d probably still be using them.

Marge Wallace:          I didn’t get this information until today and a question was raised to me that this was not on the original agenda, could we vote on it.

Fran Parks:                  It’s on the agenda now. We have an amended agenda.

Marge Wallace:          I understand, but within the 48 hours. I did call the attorney general about it today and if we knew about it, if we had the information within the 48 hours it had to be on the agenda. There was no guarantee I was going here from Sign Post in time. We can vote on it.

Fran Parks:                  We can.

Marge Wallace:          Yes, we can.

Fran Parks:                  We’ll also need signs for voting to go into there, into those voting Tuesday.

Marge Wallace:          Oh OK.

Laurie Hadley:             Where it says special or regular meeting you would also have to have one that says voting.

Fran Parks:                  Voting.

Marge Wallace:          OK, and so the third is voting.

Fran Parks:                  Do we know how much the inserts cost?

Marge Wallace:          No. From reading this it sounding like that’s what this was going to cost because it said the sliding …

Fran Parks:                  I find this confusing. .

Marge Wallace:          Right, I just got this in my email.

Fran Parks:                  I understand.

Marge Wallace:          He can’t be talking about the inserts costing that.

Fran Parks:                  No, no, no.

Marge Wallace:          Right.

Fran Parks:                  . Did he give you … You probably don’t know how long it would take him to fabricate these?

Marge Wallace:          No.

Fran Parks:                  No? OK. So I think we need to know …

Marge Wallace:          What he’s talking about.

Fran Parks:                  I ‘d like a mock up.

Marge Wallace:          OK.

Fran Parks:                  Of what it looks like and …

Marge Wallace:          And total price.

Fran Parks:                  And total price. I think, aren’t the Civic Association ones single sided?

Marge Wallace:          Yes.

Fran Parks:                  They were just single sided, .

Marge Wallace:          Yes

Fran Parks:                 OK.

Marge Wallace:          I believe if you go double sided you’re just doubling the cost.

Fran Parks:                  Right,.

Marge Wallace:          You save a little bit because you don’t need a second panel.

Fran Parks:                  Right.

Marge Wallace:          But the printing is …

Fran Parks:                  OK. Can we leave that in your hands?

Marge Wallace:          Yeah.

Fran Parks:                  Then if we need to make a decision sooner than our next meeting, we can just meet for a few minutes and do that. OK.

Marge Wallace:          This is a side business for him, so he’s not always easy to get a hold of him.

Laurie Hadley:             Wasn’t it Jordan’s Signs of Hyannis that did the …

Fran Parks:                  He did that out there..

Laurie Hadley:             Did you want to talk to them?

Marge Wallace:          Who is that?

Fran Parks:                  They’re on Enterprise Road in Hyannis.

Marge Wallace:          OK.

Fran Parks:                  They used to be Jordan’s Signs. They’re pretty much straight across form where the cut through comes in from the mall.

Marge Wallace:          They’re Jordan’s Signs now. Two companies got together.

Laurie Hadley:             OK.

Fran Parks:                  I’ll email it to you. I’ve got it at home.

Marge Wallace:          That’s fine.

Fran Parks:                  Any other matters to come up?

Laurie Hadley:             I just want to remind you I will not be at there regular October meeting.

Fran Parks:                  That’s right. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, correct?

Laurie Hadley:             Somewhere in the Mediterranean, yes.

Fran Parks:                  OK. Is there any public comment?

Amy Cates:                  Amy Kates. My question is the status of the negotiations with the firefighters, the union negotiations?

Laurie Hadley:             Doesn’t that come from the Fire Department?

Fran Parks:                  Yes.

Marge Wallace:          They’re being held.

Fran Parks:                  It’s ongoing. I’ll entertain a motion. Oh, I know, I forgot one thing. I listened to the wrap up meeting that they had for the lights, the new street lights and everybody was very pleased.

The adjustments for the no-charge free period is all done. The complaint rate was less than 1%.

Marge Wallace:          Wow.

Fran Parks:                  Which is pretty good.

Marge Wallace:          Yes, that is good.

Fran Parks:                  . There’s a 10 year warranty and the payback’s going to be about six years. The operating manuals are on their way.

Then Mike sent me an email saying they’re going to fix the ones out on Putnam Avenue. There’s still one of the old lights out there. Those are the ones that were being billed to COMM.

Marge Wallace:          OK.

Fran Parks:                  OK? I’ll motion to adjourn.

Marge Wallace:          So moved.

Laurie Hadley:             Second.

Fran Parks:                  All in favor.

Laurie Hadley:             Aye.

Marge Wallace:          Aye.

Fran Parks:                  Thank you.