Category Archives: Town Services

DPW’s Memorial Day sewer fix gets a thank you

Posted on May 29, 2012 | Comments Off on DPW’s Memorial Day sewer fix gets a thank you

DPW gets thanks from the Wietrecki family –

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Dear Mr. Feeney:

I am writing you this morning to commend you and your staff. You see, yesterday at the height of the commemorations in town, my wife and I discovered that the sewer line on our street, Brastow Drive, was blocked. This discovery began earlier the night before with found water in our basement utility sink. Having thought the problem was internal, we waited to deal with it until the morning. As my neighbors awoke and began their water use, the level in the sink began to raise and we became more concerned. We called a router company and their quick response showed the issue to be in the street. Being a holiday their was no way to directly reach the Sewer and Water Department, so we called the Police Station. I received a confirmation call back from the Dispatcher that your team had been notified and that they would be contacting me after the parade. As soon as the music stopped, a member of your staff was on Brastow confirming the problem. He committed to getting a jet-truck in to correct the issue and followed up to ensure everything was taken care of. My wife, daughters and I would like to thank you and your team for your service to the town. This is one of the many reasons we are happy to call Medfield home.

By the way, my daughters are especially happy, as we had Sox tickets given to us for yesterday’s game, and your prompt attention to the issue allowed us to enjoy the game (my daughter’s actually made it on the Jumbotron). Thanks again, you will have our support if ever needed.

Best regards,
Steve Wietrecki

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Posted in Town Services

MCAP grant proposal

Posted on March 1, 2012 | Comments Off on MCAP grant proposal

This morning I attended a long Medfield Care About Prevention (MCAP) meeting at Medfield High School at which Dawn Alcott, the director of the Medfield Youth Outreach office, and her team presented their plan to apply for a five year $625,000 ($125,000 a year for five years) federal grant to address substance abuse in Medfield.  The goal would be to change the community culture.

The availability of the grant monies was a recent surprise happening, and as a result the team is scrambling to get the grant application submitted within the next three weeks.  This morning the team filled the twelve required slots on the coalition mandated by the grant.  I was asked to be the representative from a “local … agency with expertise in the field of substance abuse,”  based upon my being a Medfield selectman with a twenty year history as a member of the Riverside Community Care board, including five as its president.  During my tenure with Riverside Community Care, Riverside grew from about a $36,000 per year vendor to the state using borrow state staff into a $30 m. per year community mental health center.  In the fifteen years since I left its board, Riverside has doubled in size.

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Posted in Safety, Schools, Teens, Town Services

Idea 4 of 5 – MMA annual meeting – LED streetlights

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 3 comments

LED streetlights – town owned

At the MMA’s annual convention on Friday afternoon I attended a presentation on energy saving ideas, one of which was to the effect that now is the time for towns to buy the streetlights and installing new LED streetlights, as the savings are running 20-60%.  The presenter, George Woodbury of Republic ITS (www.republicits.com) formerly worked for the DPW in Lexington.

First, the statute requires the utility to sell the town the streetlights at their net book value as carried by the utility, and the utilities have depreciated the streetlights over time such that the values are low.  One city paid $40,000 for all its streetlights.

Second, the LED fixtures are now ready for prime time:
•    the price of LED fixtures has recently dropped 50%, making it economical to install new LED streetlights.
•    With the LED streetlights up to 98% of the light generated leaves the fixture
•    light can be distributed more uniformly over large areas
•    LED’s like to operate in our cooler New England climate
•    55% energy reduction
•    adaptive controls can be installed, which will allow dimming the fixtures, and which will also read the water meters – NB, the utilities do not yet credit towns for the lower energy usages these achieve
•    grants are available from the utilities and the Public Technology Inc (PTI) – faster paybacks if used to but the lower wattage lights
•    night time visibility is actually improved by the elimination of the current hot spots generated by current streetlights
•    expect to get 150-180 lumens per watt

Third, the town would contract with a third party to provide the required maintenance.

Lastly, deciding at what time to adopt a new technology is always an issue (e.g. – do you wait for the next iteration of the cell phone or computer you need to get a better product).  Woodbury opined that the LED’s will improve 20% in  the next five years.  My question would be, how long do we want to wait to save some money?

This link gets you to George Woodbury’s contact information https://medfield02052.blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/contacts-business-cards.pdf

3 Comments

Posted in Energy Committee, Town Services, Utilities

Idea 3 of 5 – MMA annual meeting – solar

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 2 comments

Solar Energy Systems – Town owned

It makes sense for the Town of Medfield to look at the installation and ownership photovoltaic arrays to generate electrical power.  The old landfill is an ideal candidate for such an array, which would be mounted on concrete ballasts that avoid damage to the membrane that caps the site.  I saw a presentation on a solar array in Easthampton on top of its capped landfill.

Easthampton installed its solar array by using both Borerego Solar (Borregosolar.com) and Tighe & Bond engineers.  Borrego will actually finance the installation in exchange for a 20 year contract, so the town does not have to put up any money if it opts to go that route.

Figure on using 5 acres per megawatt, or 6 acres per megawatt with the infrastructure included.  Cost tends to run about $4 m. per megawatt, and is more expensive on a landfill due the the higher cost of the ballasts over poles into the ground.

Parts are warranted for 25 years, and Borrego will include a 19th year bond to cover the cost of the decommissioning, if that is what the town wants.

The town can have access to the remote monitoring, and can even set up a kiosk at a school to tie it into the curriculum.

I spoke with Dartmouth’s town administrator, who shared with me that they own five solar arrays, and that it takes only two of them to generate all the electricity that the town uses.

There are other town owned sites that would be suitable, such as behind the Wheelock School.

Here is a link to the contact information of Borrego Solar and Tighe & Bond https://medfield02052.blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/contacts-business-cards.pdf

2 Comments

Posted in Energy Committee, Town Services, Utilities

Respite care at The Center

Posted on January 4, 2012 | Comments Off on Respite care at The Center

Roberta Lynch, Director of the Council on Aging, reported to the Board of Selectmen at our meeting last night that the COA received a grant from the MetroWest Health Foundation for $32,676 to implement a respite program at The Center.  She hopes to open the program by 2/1, operating on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 AM to 3 PM, providing care to up to eight individuals, in order to assist both the care givers and the care recipients.

If the initial phase works well, and if there is both a greater need and demand, she said that she hopes to ultimately expand the service.  Preference will be given to Medfield residents.

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Posted in Council on Aging, Town Services

www.SeeClickFix.com for Medfield?

Posted on December 2, 2011 | 4 comments

I just email Ken,Bobby, Mike and Kris to again suggest that they implement SeeClickFix in town. Mike had dismissed it before out of fear that there would be crazy requests, to which I suggested that we all still use email despite getting spam.

I had first learned of SeeClickFix at a conference on using technology in government (Gov 2.0) a couple of year ago, and at that time the Boston DPW was reporting huge employee time savings from use of a similar smart phone system they implemented, because they now worked off project lists generated from resident input rather than having employees out physically canvasing the city for things that needed attention..

Crowd sourcing to make Medfield better.

4 Comments

Posted in Town Services

Thanks to the Town Employees

Posted on September 20, 2011 | Comments Off on Thanks to the Town Employees

I want to thank the town employees who did such an excellent job to put the town back together after the wide spread damage from Tropical Storm Irene.  To do so, I sent the following email today to the department heads of the Police Department, the Fire Department, and the DPW to personally thank each of their employees.

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9/20/2011  8:30AM
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Bob, Bill, and Ken,

Your departments have come in for lots of well deserved praise and appreciation for how you and your employees handled the town’s response to Hurricane Irene.  Just as NSTAR has come in for some apparently well deserved frustration.  Follow the link below to see some of both that came in to me today.

https://medfield02052.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/nstars-response-to-irene/

Please know that I was truly impressed by and thankful for the work that your employees did during Hurricane Irene – I did drive around on that Sunday afternoon and was impressed by all the activity I saw.  As I said at the last Board of Selectmen meeting, what your employees did, to respond to the multitude of problems that were created and to do the tasks to get the town back to being operational, was a sterling example of government really working for its citizens in just the way that the citizens want it to.  I think their efforts made all Medfield residents really happy to share our town’s government.  At that last selectman meeting I actually questioned whether the town should consider asking you to do even more, where you did what you did so well and have the tools to do things that many homeowners just cannot.  I proposed that perhaps the residents might want the DPW to pick up branches hauled to the curb up to a certain size.  It was a thought I had after struggling to deal with my two downed trees, but recognizing that I managed only because I do have a chainsaw and a trailer.  However, have no fear, as Mike, Ann, and Mark uniformly and roundly nixed my idea.

I look forward to learning how your proposed meetings with NSTAR will make the town’s experience with NSTAR better when we have the next storm.

Please share with your employees my sincere appreciation for their Herculean and effective work for the Town of Medfield in responding to the storm.

Best,
Pete
Osler L. Peterson, Attorney at Law
PETERSON | Law
580 Washington Street, Newton, MA 02458
66 North St, PO Box 358, Medfield, MA 02052
T 617.969.1500
T 617.969.1501 (direct)
M 508-359-9190
F 617.663.6008
osler.peterson@verizon.net
http://mysite.verizon.net/osler.peterson/
Medfield Information at: FB, https://medfield02052.wordpress.com/ & http://twitter.com/Medfield

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Posted in Safety, Town Services

Branch Pick Up

Posted on September 2, 2011 | 4 comments

Just discussed town issues with Mike Sullivan ahead of the Board of Selectmen meeting 9/6, and I suggested to him that I thought in the future that the town should pick up from the curb the tree branches that residents stack there after bad storms, such as Irene last week.  Maybe take everything up to 4″ in diameter.  The DPW did a great job with the clean up they did this past week, and they have the equipment to handle the tree trunks and limbs that most residents just do not possess.  The DPW clean up that happened was an example of government working really well for its citizens.

Mike feels it would cost the town too much to have the DPW pick up everyone’s branches, and that some would take advantage to clean out their brush piles.  I suggested that we have Ken Feeney report to the Board of Selectmen on how much it might cost to do in the future, plus I do not think we should scuttle the idea out of fear of a few bad apples taking unfair advantage – they can be spoken to individually and/or their piles just left – perhaps say we will only collect freshly fallen branches.  But the cost does need to be considered.

It is really up to residents whether they want such a service or not, as if so, they will pay for it.  We would want to know the cost before implementing it.  It is probably also  another good question to ask the residents in the town by means of the on-line polling that I asked Kristine Trierweiler to implement to ask residents about whether they want the town to pay for mailboxes damaged by the town’s plows.   Makes sense to me to ask residents whether they want the town to provide a particular service or not, then, if there is enough support for what is proposed, to consider moving forward.

I wished the town had everyone’s email address this past week so that a blast email notice could have gone out to advise of the transfer station being open every day this past week.  Having resident’s email addresses would have been one of the side benefits of the town e-newsletter I proposed, as probably most residents would to sign up for the town e-newsletter in order to stay informed, and then the town captures their email addresses to use for other important communication.

4 Comments

Posted in Information, Town Services