Update: Friday, Dec. 13
The Board of Health met this morning to discuss one agenda item — Transfer Station sticker fees. On Tuesday, BOH members Dr. Tom Massaro and Helaine Hazlett voted to increase sticker fees from $80 and $25 for each additional household car to $125 and $35 for each additional car.
Massaro said he had received pushback from residents about the increase. On Friday, the BOH took a revote and landed on the following fees: $100 and $40 for each additional car.
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The town received only one general contractor bid for the Transfer Station renvoation project — and it was twice as expensive as expected, according to Public Health Director Andrew Petty.
“We did not have a good bid for the Transfer Station,” Petty said at a Dec. 10 Board of Health meeting. “We had estimates from our architect and we used an estimating firm. The estimated cost for the project was $1,171,000 for the pit renovations, new scale house and site work.”
The bid from contractor DeIulis Brothers of Lynn came in at $2.3 million.
Petty said some work cannot be delayed any further.
“We need to move forward with certain aspects of the project,” Petty said. “We have a new compactor sitting on site and we need to install that in the last week of January and first week of February. We will not be taking commercial trash at that time.”
The cost of installing the compactor is about $93,000.
Also at the meeting, the board approved $27,469 for two, prefabricated buildings to be placed at the Transfer Station — a control booth for the compactor and a transaction hut. With the transaction hut, the Transfer Station will be moving to license plate reader cameras, replacing the current facilities sticker system.
“We want our customers to be able to go online and purchase facility stickers,” Petty said.
Once the transaction hut and control booth are in place, the Transfer Station will implement its new traffic flow pattern, which will have residents entering along Green Street and exiting at Beacon Street.
According to Petty, there is still $1.5 million available in approved Transfer Station project funds. He said the board will meet in January to decide whether to ask Town Meeting this May to approve another $800,000 to afford the contractor’s $2.3 million bid. Petty will also meet with the contractor to better understand why its bid was so much higher than expected.
Other Transfer Station tasks that still need to be done include: moving the scale, doing sitework where the trailer sits and repairing the roof of the compactor building.
$25K for feasibility study
The board also approved $25,000 for a new feasibility study to look at whether the Transfer Station can accept construction and demolition material.
“It could potentially be a revenue source for the town,” Petty said.
