Select Board Recap March 30, 2026

Hello Dartmouth, Cody Hadad, town administrator here.

Excited to be back to give you another update on the March 30th select board meeting. The board started the night with a celebration for long-time select board member Stanley Mickelson. Mr.

Mickelson had previously announced that he would not be running for re-election.

And so with the upcoming town election on April 7th, Mr. Mickelson's last meeting was March 30th and so a lot of previous select board members attended and members of the staff to acknowledge Mr.

Mickelson and his contributions for the town.

We wish him the very best and we're excited to have a new member on the board and hopefully continue to move Dartmouth in the right direction. Into new business, we had a public hearing for a pouring license for a winery, a new winery, Anchor Rock Vineyards, located on Bakerville Road. The license was approved by the select board. They converted an old barn into some seating.

They're going to have some outdoor seating, so really excited not only for this pouring permit, but also to have this new business in town. Seems like it's going to be great. And so we encourage our community to stay local and go out and enjoy this new business once they're open. There was an amendment to an entertainment license for a Black Bass Grill. They were requesting to move their inside entertainment

to 11:00 p.m. And then they were looking to add Wednesday and Thursday on their outside entertainment still until 10:00 p.m. The board reviewed all information that they had. There had been no disturbance calls over the last year and so that request was granted by the board. We had two recommendations for individuals to be appointed to the capital planning committee.

Great news was we had two openings on the committee and we had over 10 individuals apply to be members of the capital planning committee. Capital planning committee invited the in or gave the invite to all of those individuals to come and interview. And essentially they recommended two candidates to go forward. Maria Freda and Mark Lowell were appointed to the capital planning committee by the

select board. There was a recommendation for the Buzzards Bay Action Committee. I recommended to the board that we hold that topic because our environmental affairs director typically serves in that role. We're currently vacant with that position. So once we have a new environmental affairs director, we will appoint them likely to the to that group, Buzzards Bay Action Committee.

Under the water quality advisory committee. So this is another one. The select board had put this together several months ago. We really wanted representation from each of the town's watersheds. And so we put this out. We opened it up to residents of the community and we had an overwhelming response for applicants that were interested. 16 individuals applied to be part of this committee. And so in the select

board's discussion, initially there was only supposed to be about five members of the public, residents that were going to be on this.

And so they they were really encouraged by the interest in in the credentials of everyone who had applied.

And so they appointed all 16 members to the water quality advisory committee. If you are one of those members, we'll be reaching out to you within the next week or two to get that first meeting scheduled. So again, really excited to have interest from the community and to get the water quality advisory committee up and going. Next was the Dartmouth Middle School statement of interest. And so

there as you likely are aware, we've talked about in the next few years the Dartmouth Middle School is going to need to be addressed, the building itself. And so part of that process is to go forward to the Massachusetts School Building Authority to get accepted into their program. And by doing that, essentially we allow for reimbursement of part of the project cost. And so that kicks off with this.

The school committee voted at their meeting on March 23rd to submit that statement of interest as required under the MSBA, which is the Mass School Building Authority. The select board also needs to approve that application.

And so that's exactly what they did last night. This does not bind the town to anything. It really just gets us on the list to see if the MSBA will accept the town's application to move forward with a new middle school.

One of those options may be to make the current high school into the middle school and build a new high school. A lot of different options, which if accepted into the program through a feasibility study, the town will explore and develop the best option with MSBA support and the town support. We would then move into design phase and then essentially construction phase. We're looking probably about three years

before any shovels in the ground, best case scenario. So we'll certainly keep keep you informed on that.

We also had the Dartmouth Youth Athletics Association lease over Crapo Field. The DYAA has held that lease for the last 10 years. That expired in 2024.

They are looking for funding before town meeting from community preservation funds this year. And so we executed a one-year lease agreement. The board unanimously approved that. And then we'll go out through the procurement process to to finalize a long-term lease likely in that 10-year time frame again.

Well, that'll be throughout the next couple months, but they do have a lease that is valid for the next year. Another lease was we have a farmland lease. So the town owns a piece of land that abuts 759 Russells Mills Road, which is the town's water pollution control facility.

It's agricultural land that is farmed.

It's It's essentially a field for crops.

The lease has been to John George for a number of years. That lease also expired.

With the growing season is essentially upon us for farmers. And so we did a one-year extension that was unanimously approved by the board. And we again will will do a full procurement to get a longer term lease in effect for that property and continue to see that property farmed by hopefully a local farmer.

We had the classification and compensation study update. So myself and our human resources director, Sue Cunningham, gave an overview to the select board and the public on the compensation classification study that the town has been undertaking for the past 8 months or so. And so 145 different positions were included in this study.

Essentially all of the town with the exception of the school department. They They do theirs a little bit different. And the results came back. We were essentially in that 12 to 13% below where we should be for comparable communities. We gave an overview of of how those comparable communities were identified, the ranges for the positions and so on and so forth. At the end of the

presentation, the select board voted to adopt the study, which essentially allows us to move forward and try to bargain the results of that study with our collective bargaining groups and implementation with our non-union staff at town meeting, hopefully.

Health insurance was I think the biggest win of the night for the select board and really the community as a whole. You are if you've been involved with local government at all here in Dartmouth, you know for some time health insurance has been a challenge. And the health insurance that we offer to our employees, it's really good health insurance, but it it really comes at a significant cost. And and

that has really been a barrier for the town in providing a higher contribution rate compared to our comparable communities.

So we we had a lot of exploration throughout the last 6 months or so in reviewing options for health insurance.

And I'm excited to share that we found another joint purchasing group, which is who we buy buy our health insurance through, who collectively over the next year will save our employees and the town $2 million. And so that that is a huge savings for our employees that the town is select board voted to pass on to our employees and become more competitive. Our contribution for our high deductible plans now goes up to

75%, which is really right right in line with our comparable communities. And so this is great. All of our unions as of this morning have ratified the agreement and we are going to move forward with this. So a huge win for the town. We heard what our employees were saying. We heard what our members of the community were saying. This has been touched on at town meeting.

This has been a concern and and we are making great progress with it. So I'm very thankful to the board and all of our staff for making this happen. There was the director of budget and finance contract. So Gary Carreiro is our director of budget and finance. He's served in that role for a number of years now. His contract was a three-year contract that expired in February of this year. So we wanted to renew Mr.

Carreiro's contract. We did so unanimously with the board's approval last night. Mr. Carreiro has been a valuable asset to the community not just serving as the director of budget and finance. He also serves as our treasurer, overseeing the budget process in conjunction with the town administrator. And during the interim period of the no permanent town administrator, Mr.

Carreiro helped to steer the ship serving as interim town administrator.

So really excited to have him on board for the next 3 years as that contract was approved by the board.

And then we had the second hands goods junk dealer permit. This is an ecoATM where if you're if you're not familiar, it's essentially one of those places where you can trade in your old electronic devices, cell phones, tablets, music players. This one's located at Shaw's.

And essentially you you turn it into this machine and they give you a credit value that you get and you can take with you.

So pretty standard. They're just a little bit late in getting this in.

So the select board did approve that last night. We also went over articles that we anticipate for the June 2026 town meeting. I'm going to go touch on those quickly. But we also closed the town meeting warrant. So no more petitioned articles from our residents. Petitioned articles closed as of the March 30th select board meeting.

The the upcoming town meeting looks like a lot of items that are your normal, you know, typical housekeeping items I call them.

That's our community preservation act budget. CPA has five articles this year, five different projects. We'll be doing a town meeting warrant overview in the near future and we'll get into detail on each of these.

We obviously have the annual operating budget. We have a capital plan, salaries of elected officials, sewer and septic betterments, authorization to borrow. We've talked about needing to go to some borrowing for a couple of projects. The two that you'll see on the warrant this year are in our water enterprise fund and sewer enterprise fund. We fund all of our enterprise funds in the annual

Some zoning article the planning board is putting forward through the site plan review process. We have a snow removal bylaw update, a new tree bylaw, and then we have a couple citizens petitions that will also be addressed.

So, with that, I appreciate you tuning in. Our next select board meeting is going to be April 13th, in which the board will undergo a reorganization as we will have a new member. Just as one last final thing I'd like to touch upon, our local election is April 7th. I encourage you to get involved, go out and vote. We we have a a really unique year where we have four candidates running for the select board,

which is just great that we have an interest from our community. And so, I encourage you to go out and vote and I'll let your voice be heard. And on April 13th, we'll reconvene as a new board. Thank you.