Mystery of the missing traffic study.

I have said once before and I will say it again. The CLD traffic study, which was a paid study in 2001 and focused specifically on Downtown traffic patterns states that by putting in a connector road from Manning St to Rollins is basically useless!

Now, I know that the proponents of this have said that there is no traffic study, and that they have gone to town hall to ask and were told there was none.

Well as Gomer once said "surprise, surprise, surprise. Not only am I looking at this study as I write, I will let you, The Derry citizens see this via a link on this blog. ( see the link section on the right side.) *note that this could take some time to download as it is 22 pages long

It is important that you see this for yourself, without any bias whatsoever and to then come to your own conclusions.

After, you give it a read- Answer these questions

1) Should the town of Derry spend 10-15K on a new traffic study
2) Should the town of Derry spend 80K to connect Manning St to Rollins

Results of this weeks poll 5/25

I have heard back from some of you about the weekly ( or so ) poll. And so I will post the results so that there can be a record to go back to. The question was

Q: Do you support spending 1.5M to make private roads public?

Only 1 person said yes

The clear majority said NO at 20 votes

and 1 was unsure

Thanks to all who participated and although this is definitely not scientific it will make the issue all the more interesting when it comes up to the council.

Update on Retirement issues

The new newsletter from LGC came in and reported some success on the two bills facing the Senate this week. HB653 and HB876 passed with amendments. HB 876 deals with a study commission bill while HB 653 deals with the issue of funding methodology which places investments into the pension fund until it is at 85% instead of siphoning monies into a special account. It also places a local government management rep onto the Board of Trustees ( this is an important step ) and provided a one-time 2.5% cola for retirees.
Thanks goes out to Senator Letourneau and his colleagues for the unanimous vote and for listening to concerns from everyone.
As is stated in the newsletter, these are not easy issues to deal with and everyone knows that we all must work together to fix these issues.

Taxpayer Alert!

What you are about to read should act as a taxpayers warning! If you choose to ignore this warning, I would recommend you hide your wallets, pocketbooks, bank accounts or anything else of value. THIS IS NOT A TEST!

On Friday afternoon, I had received by e-mail, my weekly copy of a newsletter from the Local Goverment Center. Derry is a member of this organization and they keep track of bills that come before the House and Senate on many issues facing municipalities. " a watchdog group that puts the towns and cities best interests foward"

This weeks the headlines were about the retirement funding issues facing all of us and the system that needs to be fixed. In this issue it had been reported that the Senate has been bombarded by the "alliance" ( Police and Fire Unions ) which put the brakes on a earlier compramise between the Alliance and the working group to help fix a big problem in the system.
Apparently the Alliance did not like where this was heading and have requested some changes which according to the LGC would end up costing cities and towns MORE money than was originally planned.
When the Senate decided to wait a week to get additional information- again according to LGC the Senate was bombarded by the special interests groups to put some heavy pressure on our Senators.
The LGC issues a strong warning to all to call thier senators and to make sure that there is some give and take with any solutions that come out of revamping the retirement funding plans.
And so I decided to call Senator Letourneau to voice my concern for the Derry taxpayers. I spoke to him briefly and he had to go and couldn't talk any longer, however he did say he would keep me informed as to what comes out of it.
Quite frankly, I don't want to learn what gets done after the fact or before I know how certain amendments will effect the Derry taxpayers. And so I decided to e-mail and call Councilor Coyle ( who was acting chairman because Mr Bulkley was out of state) and requested that he call a special meeting, invite the Senator to the meeting, ask the questions about the admendments and what they will mean for us and to do so before the Senate meets next Thursday.
Councilor Coyle said he would call and e-mail the Senator to find out about the amendments.
The next day, I picked up the Union Leader and read a front page article about the happinings on this retirement plan and it basically brought up the same points LGC stated in the newsletter. At this time, I had not heard back from Councilor Coyle and so I e-mailed my fellow councilors and asked them if they were as concerned as I about this issue. And that I ( according to town charter ) would call a special meeting ( need two additional councilors to call special meeting)if anyone else wanted to. Bev was the only person to respond as of this post!
I did get back an e-mail from Councilor Coyle who said he did not think this was important enough to call a special meeting, that councilor Bulkley would be back Sunday and that at that time if 3 or more councilors wanted a meeting they could call one to order.
My problem with that is that we would need 48 hours to post a public notice, and that it would not give us time before the Senate meets Thurs 5/24.
So will Derry taxpayers have a voice on Thursday? Stay tuned.
Did i think it was important enough to the taxpayers of this town to get some answers? Yes! Why other councilors did not think it important enough? I don't know.

Budget wrap up FY08

Well folks, another budget is finalized and completed for the next fiscal year. This was my 4Th budget series and it tied in with the hiring of our next town administrator- More on that subject a little later.

At this final budget hearing, councilors could bring up anything, any line item they wanted to discuss. All the work we have done previously brought the tax increase up to adding an additional .20 Cents which was .03 cents UNDER the maximum allowed under the tax cap of .23 cents. Lets recap. Town side tax rate is $7.50 and this year the council could add up to a total of $7.73 MAX.

Councilor Fairbanks started by asking the fire dept to cut $50,000 from anywhere in the budget the chief wanted with the stipulation that it could not effect services, however she did not offer any specifics. Why she singled out the fire dept and why she choose $50K is unknown and no explanation was offered.
"watch me pull a rabbit out of the hat"
"but that trick never works"
"this time for sure".......
In a 4-3 vote it passed with Fairbanks Coyle Carney Metts voting to make the cut.

Then Janet wanted to replace capital reserve fund money with the money being raised via taxation for a new ( future ) recreation building with 55k earmarked for senior center. The full number $100k was not to be raised by taxation in this years budget
Vote was 6-1 with Bulkley the only no vote.

That was basically it for determining budget coming in at adding 16 cents to the tax rate instead of 20. A savings of .04 cents per 1000.

Final Vote on overall budget 5-2 Budget Approved with Chirichiello and Carney voting NO.
Carney's reasoning- I don't know and haven't had a chance to ask he's reasoning
For me- We didn't cut enough. I think we could of cut an additional 145K and in fact I offered by motion to cut this money but didn't get the votes in an earlier workshop.
I think we should of cut $80K Manning St and $45K sidewalks near upper room.
And at that the time i brought up these cuts I said we needed to make sure we had money for additional vet credits and look at elderly exemptions. I was told there would be plenty of time for that. Didn't happen. This is why I voted NO. My first time doing so.

Next we voted 5-2 to bring in Gary Stenhouse as our next administrator.
Coyle and Fairbanks voting NO. They liked none of the people we interviewed and wanted to keep looking. Interesting...

I will admit that Gary was not my first choice, but i found myself trying to separate whether i personally could click with the next administrator or not and I had to focus on what was best for the town and not whether i had the warm and fuzzies over any candidate. Gary has great experience and a wealth of knowledge. he has worked running Rochester and they had about 30K people. I will let his professionalism and experience speak for themselves.

I'm hoping on welcoming Gary to Derry and look forward to working with him on making Derry a great place to be.

What are your thoughts on the Budget process???

Give Back the Taxpayers Money!

It was reported that the now defunct East Derry fire departments' Chief Nadeau lost his appeal in superior court a couple of days ago. You may all remember the "sweetheart deal" he received after he lined up a job in Massachusetts and then conveniently got "let go" to the tune of about $90,000 of hard earned taxpayers dollars. The problem was that he was not entitled to that money.
But in a backroom deal, he was somehow placed above the taxpayers best interests and given the money as a token of appreciation of leading the charge in a very costly battle in which the East Derry fire dept sued the town many times over and wasted thousands of dollars in frivolous lawsuits.

That's now history, however we can not completely close the books until we get the money back from Nadeau.

Give him credit, he tried to hold onto the money for as long as he could by stalling via the court system. ( gee i couldn't imagine that ) but Justice has prevailed and he lost his last two cases.

Now it's time for the Town Council to make a statement and go after this money and give it back to The Taxpayers where it belongs

Private to Public Roads=$$$

Last Mondays nights meeting was on one and only one topic. Private roads. This issue has a very long history in Derry and not all solutions or problems are the same. Each Private road is unique and has its own interesting history. I think it is safe to say that all of these roads that we spoke about started out as Private roads meaning that none of them stared as a class V or public road at the beginning.

The arguments vary about how or why citizens on these roads want or do not want these roads to become public and we heard of some at the meeting on Monday night. I will not go into whether or not the arguments are wrong, right or something else here only because we will be further discussing these issues and of course I will keep an open mind and dive into each road issue on a more detailed history.
This post is just to get some comments from the citizens on their views and specifically this blog is to let all know that any private road we accept as public from here on in WILL cost the taxpayers additional hard to find tax dollars.

We did receive a list of roads and a dollar amount of roughly 1.5Million dollars to get these roads to minimum standards and we still have not seen what the annual up keep costs will calculate out to.

Everyone knows that we have tough numbers to crunch even before we spend $1 on these road issues. To spend more is not going to be an easy task.

What are your thoughts on Private road issues in Derry??

Town Council Meeting 5/1

Town council meeting went fairly quickly last evening and at times got a little heated. At the beginning of the meeting it was reported that the annual "trash pick-up" day was successful. Lots of volunteers picked up litter along side roadways through-out the town.

As a side note- Community for a better Derry had done a great job co-ordinating a pick-up party for the Windham road area. My understanding is that about 50 Bags of trash were collected along with tires and other large trash items. Kudos to that group for getting people together for a better Derry.

We ( council) postponed a public hearing on restricting public parking along A and B street until May 15th. Anyone wishing to speak on those issues can come and discuss them at that time.

Then Council Chair Bulkley made an announcement that basically chastised Councilor Coyle for making accusations in the press about violating the charter by our acting town administrator and the fire chief by signing a contract without council knowledge. The chairman said he thought Coyle owed an apology to them both since according to towns attorney NO violation had taken place and everything was done properly.

Councilor Coyle said he was sticking to what he had said and refused to apologize. He then blamed the fire chief by saying that he knew all along that the contract should of been reviewed before it was signed by the council.

The meeting went back and forth on this issue and Councilor Carney had said that he had asked that we bring this issue up at a separate meeting and to agendize the issue. The chairman said he would.

I had said in the past that what was done was done and next time it should be at least reviewed by the chairman. I did not see this as a big issue and that I was ready to move onto bigger and better things. Then the press needed to take Kevin and his comments about being "sandbagged", as a front page story with all the negative comments ( you know the ones that sell papers).

Come on now- Does Kevin think that the Acting town admin and the fire chief DO NOT have the best interest of Derry here? Maybe he thinks he knows better then they, I don't know his reasons here.

All I can say is now we have to have a future meeting to discuss an issue that will be nothing but pure politics and I'm sure that meeting will have plenty of bashing and unnecessary waste of everyone time. I mean, the contract is signed- It is legal and was done legally so what can come out of this future meeting? We will not be changing a thing here.( just another bash party for some. )

Now I'm not saying Kevin is wrong by saying maybe councilors should of reviewed this contract and chime in however the way that he blew this way out of proportion is uncalled for in my opinion. What is yours???