Pay raises for town workers, a long-planned affordable housing project and a temporary moratorium on recreational marijuana sales are all issues for Edgartown voters to consider when they convene for a special town meeting Tuesday night.
The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at the Old Whaling Church. Longtime moderator Philip J. Norton Jr. will preside. There are nine articles on the warrant. A quorum of 187 voters is needed.
Front and center on the short warrant is a set of pay hikes for town employees stemming from a compensation and classification study commissioned by the personnel board last year. The study by the Edward J. Collins Center for Public management was completed in more than one Vineyard town. In Edgartown, the study recommended a series of changes in titles and salary grades as well as an updated employment policy handbook that conforms to state and federal requirements.
The pay raise plan was intended to come before voters at the annual town meeting in April but was not ready in time to make the warrant, town administrator Pamela Dolby said this week. If voters approve, the raises will be retroactive to July 1 of this year (the start of the fiscal year) and will cost the town $217,698. The money will come from free cash.
In other business Tuesday, voters will be asked to give the selectmen authority to eventually grant a long-term lease to a still-unnamed housing developer for nine acres of town-owned land on Meshacket Road. The town affordable housing committee has been working for a number of years on a plan to create 32 units of mixed rental and ownership housing on the site, located near the former town landfill (now capped and vacant land). Housing committee chairman Mark Hess said this week that public meetings have been held and drawings developed for the project, which aims to provide more family and workforce housing.
“It’s taken a lot of planning to get it right, but we’ve finally arrived at a plan that everybody is agreeable on,” he said. He added that the time delay may in the end be a benefit, because “the blueprint for little projects like this have come a long way in the last four or five years.”
Two bylaw changes are aimed at helping the town get a handle on upcoming recreational marijuana sales, soon to be legal in Massachusetts. One asks voters to approve a one-year moratorium on the sale of recreational cannabis, to allow the town time to develop regulations. Similar moratoriums are being considered in towns around the region. A second article would create a town bylaw prohibiting public consumption of marijuana, with provisions for enforcement and civil fines for violators ($100).
Voters will also be asked to approve a handful of small expenditures, including:
• $6,000 for the parks department expense account;
• $11,000 to replace three decks at the Edgartown police department;
• $14,000 to reimburse the reserve fund for monies used when the town server crashed in July;
• $18,066 for a variety of unpaid bills from the prior fiscal year.
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